If you are planning to cover your journey towards an eight-figure salary alone, then probably that’s not the right approach. In reality, you will have to build a support network, a network of people who will help you in reaching towards your goal of crore club faster. In this blog, I am going to talk about the complete process through which you can build this network, so read this blog till the end because there are some very important inputs that are going to come your way.
In this part of the blog series, I am going to cover the third point of our five-point action plan to reach an eight-figure salary. If you remember, in this part of the action plan I had told you that you need to create a list of people in your organization who could have some impact in deciding your promotion increments, your salary increments or any sort of thing which could have an impact on the kind of money that you earn in the organization.
Now let’s try to understand the fundamentals as to why did I tell you to create this list. First, I will cover the fundamentals and then I will tell you how to actually operationalize this part of your action.
In any organization, decisions like salary increments, role enhancement, promotions, etc. are not decided by just one person. It is a group of people who take these decisions and that’s why it is very important for you to know that in your organization who are these people who take such decisions. Unless you know who the people are, who have some impact on finally how much money you earn, how are you going to influence their decision making.
It is not about just doing good work. It is also about doing good work and letting the right people know that you are doing good work. In an organizational setup, there are a lot of factors that come into the picture when your promotion or salary increments are getting decided and that’s why it is critical for you to know that who are those people who need to know what you are doing so that they take the right and favorable decisions for you. That is why this list becomes extremely important in your overall scheme of things.
Now it is not easy to know who these people are. All of us in general would know that one such person would be our boss, but there could be many more people who sit in these committees which finally take these decisions. So typically, when you are making this list, you start with your boss and then go upwards. It is not about your peers or your subordinates because ultimately these are the senior people sitting at the top who take these kinds of decisions. That is why you have to understand very carefully that apart from your boss, boss’s boss, who are the other people who finally sit together and take these decisions in your organisation.
It is particularly important for you to figure out who are these people and depending upon the size of your organization, their number could vary from 10 to 25. That is the ideal number which you can think of influencing or letting them know what kind of work you are doing. Some of you might find making this list exceedingly difficult but let me tell you that this is one part of the action plan which has the maximum impact on deciding where you finally reach in your career in terms of salary growth. So, take it very seriously, don’t get into this mindset of saying, I am here to do good job and then it is up to the organization to decide how much money they want to pay me. It is equally your responsibility to ensure that you get what you deserve and by making this list, by influencing these people who take career decisions; you are playing your part in ensuring that your journey towards the crore club, towards an eight-figure salary, gets completed in time.
Now once you have completed this list, you need to divide it into four categories.
Category 1 – People who know you and who know what kind of work you are doing.
This is your favourable group and also the most critical part of your network that you have already built. One person of this network would be your boss because he or she would know what you are doing but sometimes what also happens that in larger teams the boss would not have the complete picture of your work and hence you need to ensure that all the right information is reaching your boss all the time.
Since this is your favourable group, so try to work very closely with this group. Try to pass on all the right information to them. As they know you well, the receptivity would be much higher. You must work with them very closely and give them information about your achievements on regular basis so that they have enough data when they are sitting to take any career decision about you. Working with this group is much easier compared to other three groups about which I am going to talk about.
Category 2 – People who at least know your name and a little bit about what you do.
While there is some amount of knowledge that this group has about you, but you need to work more closely with them and make some effort to get known to them in a better way. You need to pass on more information to them about you and interact more regularly with them. This should be the ideal approach to work with this group as they have limited data about you. Probably they could be neutral when some decision is taken about your career, but you need to pass on more information to them, more data to them, so that they slowly turn positive towards you.
Category 3 – People who have some negative views about you.
The third group is going to be the difficult one to deal with. Probably because of some past incident, some data which they have, they think negatively about you. The problem is, these people can harm you a lot, because in a group environment, when people are discussing about your promotion or your salary increment, one negative comment can really ruin your chances. That is why it is extremely critical that you work with this group, give it your maximum time, so that their negativity at least moves to a neutral zone. It is critical for you to understand the reasons behind they having any negative views about you and slowly work towards eliminating that view and ensuring that they at least remain quiet when some discussions about your career, your salary increments, your promotions are taking place. Because if they open their mouth, if they put even a single negative comment, it will really impact your journey negatively.
Category 4 – People who don’t know you.
This is not good because if you want to grow in your life, if you want to reach the top, key people should know you. The good part here is that there is no information about you, so you have an opportunity to only pass on the positive information to them. You need to bring them up to speed on who you are, what you do and what are some of your key achievements for the past six months. Some sort of interaction is required with these people otherwise they would be uninterested in any conversation about you.
By now you would have realized that things are becoming difficult. This action plan is not easy. While in the previous parts of the action plan you have collected lot of data, but this is purely implementation focused. This part of the action plan is all about ensuring how well you are able to grow your support network. This is so crucial to the success of your final action plan towards your journey in reaching the crore club that you need to take each aspect of it very seriously and work on it diligently. You need to ensure that the four groups that I have mentioned above and the action agenda that I have outlined for each one of them, needs to be implemented properly, so that each of these groups turn positive or at least become neutral towards you. Whenever there is a conversation happening around your promotion, increments or role enhancement, they in some way or other should be able to influence it positively.
This point of the action agenda if also dynamic and you need to continue working on it on regular basis. As much you are able to interact with these four groups and are able to pass on relevant information about your achievements, it will help you in putting your journey towards an eight-figure salary in higher gear.
All the best!