Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (31 page)

Whether it’s shipping clerks or CEOs, the common denominator is the same: unvarnished fear.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to ask for a raise. Over the years, I have sat across the desk from armies of raise seekers. The sweat-beaded foreheads in those encounters reveal much. Having been a CEO who has responded to raise requests for decades, let me tell you what works and what doesn’t:

That’s it. It wasn’t so tough, was it? These are just commonsense rules, as easy as one, two . . . eight. Follow them and you will dramatically increase your odds of fattening your salary.

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Saloon demolisher Carrie Nation campaigned with irrepressible fervor against drink until her death in 1911. In fact, she claimed to have “smashed five saloons with rocks” ere she ever “took a hatchet” to dens of booze. Her verdict on life: “You have put me in here a cub, but I will come out roaring like a lion, and I will make all hell howl!”

Whether you round out the evening with a Stoli martini—shaken not stirred—is your business, not mine. But it doesn’t hurt to put some Carrie-style fervor to work for you in swearing off being a patsy for career obsolescence:

There are always more job candidates than there are jobs, so it’s a lot easier to eliminate unsuitable candidates than to attempt to find the one perfect applicant. An interview is a kind of ritual duel, where the interviewer is continually thrusting and probing for information, hoping to draw blood, while the candidate is parrying, trying to stay alive. Every question is a potential trap, where saying either too much or too little can be fatal.

The late Dr. Kurt Einstein was a guru in assessing human talent and coached thousands of executives and candidates in the art of successful interviewing. What Peter Drucker was to management, Kurt Einstein was to talent evaluation. Kurt was not only a consummate professional, he was also one of my best friends. We met through the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), and both of us traveled the world as resources at YPO universities. I had the privilege of studying at his feet. His comments in the following exercise apply to the interviewer. Mine are advice for the interviewee.

Kurt Einstein: It’s interesting to know what the candidate would admit to.

Harvey Mackay: This question is a real test of your negotiating skills—that is, negotiating as in, “He negotiated the rapids without tipping over in his canoe and drowning.” You must provide something that isn’t so serious as to be disqualifying yet not so trivial as to appear that you’re either concealing your flaws or taking the question too lightly. I’d give high marks to a candidate who came up with something like, “I offered some ideas that I felt were constructive, but I was told not to rock the boat” or “I usually finished my assignments more quickly than my peers and some of them resented it” or “I’d take courses at night when everyone else was in the bowling league and I was told I was an oddball.” Don’t try these answers, though, unless you can back it up, because the inevitable follow-up request is, “OK, wise guy, prove it.” I have to admit that other experts are quite critical of the “Little Ms./Mr. Perfect” answer, like “I’m a workaholic,” or “I’m a stickler for detail.” The answers I give here don’t go quite that far, but they are borderline. The other experts would advise shifting the emphasis off yourself with something like, “I’m learning to be more tolerant of the mistakes of others.” If you ask me, that’s a distinction without a difference. I still think we’ve got the right approach.