Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep128: Salary Negotiation: Are you doing it right and what you must know.

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello everyone and welcome back to another day, another live stream. And today I have a very, very special episode for you. And we are going to talk all about salary negotiation.

This is one of my passion topics aside from surviving in the corporate world as well as interviewing, which is something that I've been doing quite a lot of and doing a lot of the one interview coaching sessions. And naturally, the topic around salary negotiation would pop up because that is sort of like the final stage before you get the official job offer, sign off, and then kudos and really getting into the corporate world in your new job, new journey, new adventure, and so forth. So salary negotiation, I think, is one of those things that a lot of people do not realize. It takes a lot of skill to be able to negotiate your salary well. And one of the biggest mistakes that I personally have made in my career is that

I did not negotiate my salary at the beginning. And what then happens is that a lot of people also don't realize is salary is a multiplier effect, right? So if you start at a very low pay, and I unfortunately started at a very low pay, if you start at a very low pay, what's then going to happen is that each time when you move to a different role, usually what HR does is that they take your salary at your existing company and then what they'll do is that they will then add on a percentage. And therefore, if your base pay is low,

what's then going to happen is that whatever that percentage is going to be, it's still based on that low pay. So over time, you may end up losing up more money. So basically, you're leaving a lot of money on the table and you do not even realize it. And it actually becomes more and more difficult to catch up to the pay if you kind of set the foundation or rather set the base salary at the beginning of your career a little bit off. So you may find yourself getting into situations or probably a lot more frustrations of being unable to get paid the number that you truly deserve for the roles

and responsibilities that you are doing later on in your career and the problem really lies in the early days of your salary negotiation of just accepting whatever number that is so I can tell you that this is absolutely true because it has also it has happened to me and it really took me quite a while to be able to to catch up to whatever number and even I think when I left the corporate world I still I was still underpaid compared to my peers and a lot of it kind of came from the early days in my career where you know I did not learn how to negotiate and that was a big big big big lesson and therefore over the years I got better at negotiating I got better at selling my value I got better at ensuring that I perform really well to get a really good performance rating at the end of any performance year. I got a lot better at also selling myself

to make sure I get promoted every single year. And with a promotion, normally that also means that my salary has also increased. So a big lesson at the beginning of my career taught me you shouldn't take salary negotiation for granted and I think that for a lot of people they are afraid because it's an uncomfortable conversation for sure and guess what your your bosses all know that it's an uncomfortable conversation and therefore if you are not prepared or rather if you're not prepared early enough it's actually really easy to get swayed away by your bosses who are obviously, you know, a lot more experienced than you are in terms of

having that salary conversation. So if you are, you know, listening or watching right now, you know, definitely do let me know in the comments, you know, how do you feel about salary negotiations? Are you comfortable with it is it uncomfortable is it scary does it give you anxiety and yeah basically how how do you go about negotiating your salary now i'm gonna share a couple of i guess stories so as you guys know right recently i have been doing a lot of one a lot of like one-on-one interview coaching session and therefore the live streams the past couple of days have been like a lot of ways kind of related to interviews and you know when when you talk about interviews therefore it's um it's almost inevitable that the salary conversation will come up whether it comes up during the first

interview sometimes even before the interview if you happen to speak to HR, or it can happen at the end of an interview, or it can also happen right after the official interview, right, depending on who we are talking to. So I was actually talking to a client this morning, and she had prepared her, I guess, justification for the salary conversation. So normally how i how i work around my interview coaching session is you know you you tell me right what kind of questions that you are afraid of and what kind of question kind of gives you a lot of anxiety what kind of questions

that you really struggle with then i make sure that we do that role play we do that feedback analysis on that so that was actually one of the questions that she was really really stressed out about and and we practiced that one so so as she was explaining to me you know how how she was going to ask for like a better position and ask for more money the problem was she sounded like she was trying to threaten the hiring manager trying to threaten the HR. Now, that might be something that you're not aware of. And I think that actually a lot of people do not have the self-awareness on how they look, how they behave, how they sound, and the tone of the way that they are communicating when they are requesting for something. So this is kind of a broader issue around self-awareness as well as communication

skills as a whole. But if we were to sort of contextualize it specifically for salary negotiation, it's almost like a big no-no. Because if you are creating that feeling of discomfort, feeling of being too assertive, maybe a little bit aggressive, that may not actually come across well, and it could also destroy your chance to ultimately get the job offer. Because there's one thing you need to remember is that attitude and character is still being evaluated as part of the company offering you the job, right? So obviously competency, soft skills, all these are really, are really really really important but i think particularly during the negotiation time

it's also another element where the company can actually evaluate your you know character for lack of better word in the way that you are asking slash demanding depending on whichever angle that you're looking at so i think something think something that's worth taking note of is the tone of how you're asking, how you are positioning yourself, whether you're selling your value first and then asking for a number that is related, or you are saying that,

hey, whatever, this is my number and you take it or you leave it, that kind of thing. So that also takes into account, you should consider that, in a way, interview as well. You should take it equally seriously also. Now, the other story I wanted to share with you, I'm not sure where did you all discover me. So if you happen to be watching live right now,

definitely put in the comments section, how did you discover me so if you happen to be watching live right now definitely put in the comment section how did you discover me I think a lot of you guys are probably from LinkedIn but I've recently probably for the past two months been a little bit more active on Instagram and Malaysia pay gap and discord so maybe some of you sort of came from there as well so anyway the other story I wanted to actually share was back in probably it was was March, yeah, back in March this year, I actually participated as a panel in a salary negotiation role play that was organized by Malaysian Pay Gap, which was attended by, I think, 800 people. So what I did in this salary negotiation is that the role play was,

you know, I would be the hiring manager slash the interviewer. And then what the candidate did was to try to negotiate their salary with me. So I think for those of you who managed to join that session, and if you want to share in the comment or the chat box, what was the biggest takeaway from that sharing, you know, feel free to, you know, drop a comment. But anyway, what I wanted to really point out from that role play session, and this was probably a realization that I had, and I think I kind of knew it in the past,

but it didn't like fully resonated with me, is that I think a lot of people don't realize that like interviewing and salary negotiation actually is an art. It is an art. And actually this morning, I was just talking to a client, and she's like, oh my God, it's an art, and I shouldn't have wasted time on YouTube and stuff like that.

But anyway, so in that salary negotiation role play, I think what I demonstrated, and I think that a lot of people didn't realize, is that negotiation is basically conversation mastery. And what does conversation mastery mean? It means that it's really down to the power of communication. So it's communication, influencing, and then negotiation, right? Communication, influencing, and then negotiation.

Now, a lot of people directly get into the negotiation phase and then they try to come up with some sort of script to try to influence somebody else. It doesn't work like that. If you have poor communication skills and you don't really understand like EQ and all these other dynamics, it actually makes it really difficult.

And it's not about how old you are. It's not about which rank you are. It's not about all these things. It's just learning the technique and being a really, really good communicator to be able to pick up multiple things, then this is actually how, you know, you can be a little bit more successful or rather set yourself up for success. So it's not something that is like an immediate thing.

Obviously, you know, for some of my clients, I tell them that, you know, interview coaching, salary negotiation session, you can come to me one or two sessions, but I call it the quick kill sessions. And why is a quick kill is that I can immediately tell you what to say because I know what hiring managers want to hear. I know what HR exactly what they want to hear. However, the fact that you struggle to influence, the fact that you struggle to negotiate tells me that you have a much bigger problem. Your bigger problem is communication. The lack of deep understanding on the communication process, the art of like attentive listening, processing intention, and then being able to express it in a way that can still influence but be polite and be friendly at the same time, sounds very easy. So in this, anyway, back to that, back to the role play session that I was talking about.

So I actually talked to two separate candidates. I mean, it's a role play. So the thing is that the conversation was only 10 minutes, right? So I basically asked questions and then the candidate would then reply and so forth. But the thing is that as I was asking questions, a lot of you guys don't realize that in a salary

negotiation, information is power. So the person that gives out the most information is the one that's going to lose. Now, this may sound a little bit complicated and it's clearly more complicated than what I'm going to share in this live stream but basically, in a salary negotiation,

each party should be listening and should really care about what the other party is concerned about. So the person that gives out the most information without knowing what are the bullets, for lack of a better word, will really, really lose out. So I'll give you a great example. So in that role play, there was this one part where I was, I guess, interviewing a person who's like changing a job, right? So this is probably very common for all of you who are changing jobs and you're probably going through a conversation with HR trying to negotiate your salary. Now, from that conversation, there were a few things that I managed to pick up from the candidate that all could be used as an element for HR to really push down your pay. And the worst thing is that the candidate actually did not really realize what I did.

Because I asked the question, yes, but you need to focus on selling yourself. Whether it's an interview session, salary negotiation session, you kind of see it at the same. So there are multiple things that you could be saying that could really downgrade your value to not get the number that you want. Even though you may deserve the number, but because you gave HR or the hiring manager all these bullets that you should have kept your mouth shut if you really wanted to get more money. So let me give you some examples of what I consider things that you should not say. Stop talking about the fact

that you want to learn new things. If you're going to learn new things, then what is the company paying you for? Because you sound like you need a lot of training, right? So stop talking about the fact that you need learning. You need to stop talking about just the years of experience. The years of experience do not matter as much as your achievement. Now, this is again, other points around selling yourself. Then the third thing to stop talking about is what I consider like fluffy words, meaning oh you know i'm just really hard working

you know don't worry i'm you know like personal qualities and just keep talking about personal qualities because um you are there to be you know salary is based on your ability to do the job well and to do the job fast with you know minimal mistakes right so talking about personal qualities during a salary negotiation actually does not help. And you may think that it's helpful, but it's not helpful. Maybe, you know, during the interview process, it might help. But specifically on salary negotiation part, it actually doesn't help. Then other things that you shouldn't really talk about is, if let's say you have been working for some time, like stop talking about your university,

nobody cares anymore. And the more you talk about your university tells me that, oh yeah, this person is so junior, then you know, I can probably negotiate and everything else. So one thing that you really, you guys need to remember is that from the company standpoint, the hiring manager or HR, normally they are very, very experienced because you are not the first candidate that they are speaking to in terms of salary negotiation. And therefore, you should prepare your case very well on what you think is the contribution that you can bring, but also make sure that you don't mention some of those things that I just told you just now. Because yes, you can build out a big case to sell yourself, but the moment you put in all these words, all these bullets that make me feel like you are more

junior than you really are it makes me question whether you can actually do the job or not then your chances of asking for more money is going to be difficult because guess what all these words that you're saying um HR is just gonna take back all these words and like repeat them back to you when they say that they can't pay you because you said by the time right it's like you said it yourself so you can't deny and discuss or like try to renegotiate because you basically gave them all the bullets to say why you shouldn't get paid more does that make sense like okay actually really think about what i'm saying here and i think for those of you who managed to join the um salary negotiation role play on this court by Malaysian PayGap that I mentioned,

hopefully those were some of the takeaways that you guys managed to take on as well. Now, after that salary negotiation role play, a lot of people actually dropped me a message asking me that, how do you train to be able to catch all these points so quickly? Now, if you actually listen to it, it sounds very natural. A lot of people drop me a message and say, how did you manage to identify so many things and basically do a lot of influencing? Communication skills and specifically, specifically active listening.

Listening is one of those really, really underrated skills because everybody's busy talking about, oh, speaking, public speaking, Toastmasters, yada, yada, yada. I'm telling you, listening skill. Listening skill is the one that will bring you all the way in your 9 to 5 career. You need to learn how to listen before you learn how to speak. Unfortunately, this is really lost nowadays. Everybody is busy trying to get visible by talking a lot. But if you learn how to listen

and you learn how to listen properly, this is actually where and how you get a lot of very important information that you need to do your job. Not rushing and going to do something, not giving out all the information and not giving out all the information and giving out all the important points that may be beneficial to you, especially if you're talking about salary negotiation. But even at the workplace, actually the person who listens well

is the person who can probably execute with less mistakes and implement the task that needs to be done with less mistakes. In fact, I've also worked with very high caliber, I guess you can call them very ambitious 9 to 5 professionals that have traditionally done very well, high flyers. And there is actually one common theme that I noticed in them

is some that actually kind of like causing them to get stuck at the manager level or senior manager level and unable to move up and that the problem is that they don't listen they don't listen so after a while if you don't listen well what's going to happen is that you develop this habit of making assumption which is a really really really big problem and it will stop you on your way up the corporate career ladder because at certain point if you are not trying to listen to understand whatever other people are saying nobody nobody will want to work with you, nobody want to work for you, and it's going to be very troublesome at that point. So anyway, it all

actually boils down to communication skills. It sounds very simple, but it actually takes a lot of skill. And I'll tell you guys this one thing if you are currently interviewing and you are struggling during an interview you likely have very poor communication skills or rather you have not really learned the like the the whole communication framework because it's not really something that's usually being taught so you probably didn't learn like the entire communication framework from um how messages are being interpreted by each person. And that's the personality part. And then the art of listening, the art of processing intention, and then the art of expressing yourself in a structured way.

Now, that's a much more detailed problem than just, you know, oh, I'm struggling with interview. Interview is the symptom and it's already the outcome of a poor communication structure, if that makes sense. Now, this is actually something that I actually teach in my course right now, The Corporate Survivor. So anyway, we're not going to go into that. I just want to give you guys some insight

as to how, if you truly, truly want to fix the root cause, you really need to look into your communication skills. Okay? Now, last point before I go into a bit of the Q&A is please negotiate your salary. Whether you get it or not is one thing, but I think that you should get into the habit of at least raising the salary discussion to help yourself overcome the fear. Because if you're not going to do it once and after a while, you'll start taking it for granted and never truly learn the skills as well as getting the bravery to at least try to negotiate your salary. So don't make the mistake that I personally made the early days of

my career that kind of affected my career in the X number of years later on because my starting pay was quite low. So don't make my mistake. You know, be courageous and raise that conversation if you need to. So if you are obviously applying for a new job, changing your career, this salary negotiation will happen right before the job offer stage or rather the end of the interview stage but if you are currently at the workplace right now likely the time that you have the salary conversation is during your quarterly or half yearly or maybe year-end performance review so you really want to prepare for that so we're not going to go there and a little bit more for that the full-time job strategy to ask for promotion and salary negotiation because that

actually requires you to deliver your KPIs and really planting the seed doing different performance reviews and that's actually something that I teach in my course so we're not going to go through that but the point is that you should try to make more money if you feel that you are adding value. So, of course, if you're not adding value, then please don't because it's not going to end up well. But I think that if you truly feel like you are doing more, you are adding value, and then don't get discouraged or don't be afraid to raise up and actually ask for what you want. And, of course, whether you get it or not, then that one you cannot control. But it may help you make a decision whether is this the company

that you still want to grow your career in or maybe there are better opportunities elsewhere that will appreciate you better and will be able to offer you a better compensation plan as well as career growth opportunities. Okay, so that's all that I'm going to say. So let me have a look at the comments questions. So if you guys have any quick questions on salary negotiation, definitely let me know. And before I jump into the comments part as well,

so for those of you who may have dialed in or joined this live stream for the first time, this is actually part of my 30-day career live stream series for the entire month of May. So I will go live at 9 o'clock Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong time for the entire month of May where I will be discussing very interesting career topics but also some potentially good versus bad career advice that

I see across the various social medias that I'm on, your LinkedIn, your YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, all these social media that I do spend quite a bit of time on. And sometimes I do see things that are like, hmm, I don't really agree, or I see potential misinformation that I wanted to use this live stream to dispel as well. So if you have a topic suggestion and you want me to really look into or discuss certain topics, then drop me a message on LinkedIn, DM me on LinkedIn and let me know. If you came across a piece of advice on social media, you're not sure whether it's right or wrong, and you want my perspective, send me that piece as well.

I may select it as one of the topics for us to talk about during the live stream also. So if you want to catch the replay, make sure that you check it out on YouTube as well as on Spotify. All right. So the last portion,

for those of you who are asking me, you know, how do you be, you know, be more effective in your job search and all those other things, you can just how do you be, you know, be more effective in your job search and all those other things, you can just go to this free training at www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. So in here, I will actually teach you the six-step career planning process that you need to follow the step-by-step in the right order if you want to be successful, not just

in your job search, but also in your career as well. So the one part of this training, I also actually go through what you need to know to set yourself up for success once you have signed the job offer and then you want to be successful in that new role, in this new career, in this new company, and really set yourself up for success in 90 days or less. So that is actually the three-step framework that I teach. Get clear in the corporate world,

get confident with corporate skills and get visible in personal branding. So if that's what you want to do to learn a little bit more how you can set yourself up for success, you can just go to this training at www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. And for those of you asking,

where do I teach the communication skills and so forth, amongst other things, this is actually something I teach in my online course, thecorporatesurvivor.co. So if you want to find out a little bit more, you can just check out this link over here. Okay, so let me have a look at some of the questions. I probably have some time for just a few. Hello. Hello. If you are watching live right now,

definitely let me know where are you watching from and I guess where are you located as well. So that would be nice. So let me have a look. Right, from LinkedIn, from LinkedIn and Instagram. Yeah, so only a few months ago, I started getting active a little bit more on Instagram. So I've been posting a lot of like quotes right now.

Yeah, so that has been quite fun. Instagram stories actually is quite fun for some more random thoughts, I feel. So if you want to follow me on Instagram, you can also do the same. So Kelvin is saying Discord. So Discord was the, you you know salary negotiation role play event that i participated in and the one that i mentioned to you um shortly earlier as well

so the main lesson i'm seeing here is um do not get sweet so awesome so um in that role play um there were actually about 800 participants and one of the um biggest I guess most yeah the comment that a lot of people made was that oh it's so subtle where hiring managers or HR can easily sway you away from the main point or the main topic of negotiation and making you feel like maybe you may be lacking certain things and so forth so like I said it's just the art of negotiation right I wouldn't say that you know anyone is right or wrong, but I would highly advise you to prepare yourself

because if you don't prepare yourself, then you may have already lost the chance or if you don't prepare yourself well, you may also lose the chance. So, you know, a lot of times, like, you know, with negotiation, it's really fair play. And while companies,

your HR hiring managers, they are preparing, they have a budget, but you may also have an idea in mind on what you want and what you don't want. So how can you meet halfway? Practice, have a strategy, and then please practice. Okay? All right. So let's have a look at a quick question here. Hi, Mei Ping. At which stage of the interview or which round would it be best to negotiate salary? Now, my advice here is standard. You should only talk about salary once you have demonstrated that you have the right background skills and experiences

that is the right fit for the job. If until you get that confidence that you feel like you are the best fit, I would not talk about salary because what's the point? Even if you talk about salary, like the company is not yet convinced that you can do the job or you are the best candidate. So it's actually going to be wasted time. And you will not be able to negotiate or influence anything because the selling point is not yet done. And how is the selling point done? Actually, there are two ways. First selling point actually is through a resume. It's not through the interview, it's through the resume.

The resume, your resume already positions yourself for a certain value. And interviews serves to solidify that. And then it gets finalized. If they're actually interested in you, it gets finalized during a salary negotiation. Okay? All right, so next question. If this is your first job out of university,

how would you suggest, you know, any negotiation at all or just research what the starting salaries are? Now, you should be aware of the salary ranges for specific industries or specific roles that you're interested in. So I'd say that at the minimum, like you should know, you should know around how much the industry is paying. But you also need to be fair, but actually looking at the job title as well as job description. Because different job titles, right? Yeah, okay, maybe I'll rephrase that. The job title might be

the same, but the roles and responsibilities may not. And that's why there's always going to be a range because it depends on the job title. It depends on the actual roles and responsibilities. It may also depend on the size of the company as well. And that's why even if you research, you're just going to see a range and that's okay. But I think at the end of the day, you also want to take into account not just the salary,

but the overall growth opportunity, learning opportunity, and also other intangible benefits as well. So what I probably suggest is you can look at the salary range, but you should first determine what is the ultimate lowest number that you can take. And then you can consider what I call other intangibles. So other intangibles may include um you know what is the bonus structure um what how many days of annual leave that they have what kind of um you know training is provided can you claim training what's the medical benefit what are the you know additional holidays family leave yada yada all these things that may also be important depending on um your

priorities as well right for someone who you who, you know, kind of prefers more leave and like want to work certain hours, maybe that works as well. So I think you may need to really be aware of your own situation and how much you are willing to accept because there's no like one right answer depending on your situation, okay? All right, so let's have a look at other quick questions. Let me see. All right. So question here, how to negotiate better salary? Are salaries based on skill set and experience? Yeah. So as I was saying earlier, right, how do you negotiate a better salary is you need to make sure that you have a very strong resume and then you can interview really well. And what do I mean by

interview and writing a really good resume? It's all about selling yourself. If you're unable to do that in both of these, I guess, process, right, then it's very difficult because the impression is already being said that, ah, you're only probably only worth this much. And by the time right at the end, you're trying to say something else, it's actually already too late. So what I usually teach my clients is that the positioning point is done at the resume. And that's why sometimes when I do sessions with my clients, the first session, I always talk about career options, career interest options and direction. Because the career interest options and direction, lay it in with their experiences, that is the positioning point. Then after that,

only in the second session, then we review their resume and then I will help them to craft out their career summary that kind of goes on top of their resume to immediately sell themselves within five to six seconds. So that's really how it goes about it.

And then after that, we replicate that on LinkedIn and I teach them how to brand and position themselves on LinkedIn. And then after that, we replicate that on LinkedIn and I teach them how to brand and position themselves on LinkedIn. And then we practice interview to be able to convey that value verbally now.

Right? So, resume is written, but you also need to convey your value verbally because that's the nature of an interview. Okay? All right.

So, let me have a quick look at the other comments. Okay, yeah, so that's correct. So the selling point is done via your resume and interviews. And that's why it's really, really important that you understand that for job search, right, it is a process. So a lot of people actually make the mistake of thinking that, oh, salary negotiation is something that I do right at the end. No, the positioning starts right at the beginning and the positioning basically is the selling point, right?

So if you really want to find out a little bit more on what I mean by all these steps and everything, like I said earlier, it's actually in this training at www.growacorporatecareer.com where I'll walk you through the sequential steps on how you should focus your job search and really start selling yourself from the get-go.

So if you're still feeling a little bit confused by all these things, I highly recommend that you check out this training at www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. All right. So that's all the time

that we have today. So thank you, you everybody for joining. Hopefully you got some interesting insights from my very candid sharing of the salary negotiation today. And I wish you all the best in your job search. See ya.