my promotion was pulled after I tried to negotiate the salary

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I’m writing to you because I believe what happened to me today (literally 30 minutes ago) is a lesson to be learned — though I’m struggling to identify exactly what that lesson is.

For the past eight months, I’ve been working for a small company, and I absolutely love my job. In fact, since starting here, I’ve grown to love it even more. My manager (the CEO) told me that I would be receiving a promotion, but I decided to wait until everything was officially confirmed in writing before getting too excited.

That day finally arrived, and I received an email with my promotion letter. However, the salary increase was disappointingly low — almost £35K below market rates. (I work in the UK.) I responded with a huge thank you for the opportunity, while also asking if there was room for a discussion regarding the salary.

I followed your advice and went into the salary discussion well-prepared. I outlined the projects I have successfully worked on and delivered, highlighting my achievements. I also provided data on market salary benchmarks for the role and detailed what the new position would entail, including line management responsibilities.

During the discussion, my manager tried to downplay the promotion, saying it was “just a change of title” and that I was “already doing the job” — as if that justified the lack of a meaningful salary increase. Fast forward to the actual discussion, and he was very adamant that the salary wouldn’t be changed. We ended the conversation with him saying, “I’ll think about it.”

During the discussion, I also mentioned that I was looking forward to contributing to the leadership team. Then today, completely out of the blue, he told me that he didn’t like the conversation and that I would no longer be getting promoted.

I feel absolutely shattered. I tried to understand his reasoning, and he said it was because of the conversation we had. I explained that salary discussions are completely normal and that if I was hiring/promoting someone, I would expect to have a salary conversation. I suggested that perhaps we weren’t on the same page, but to me, it didn’t seem like a terrible conversation at all.

I’d really appreciate your thoughts on this.

Wow. Your manager … kind of sucks here.

I suppose it’s possible that something about the way you handled the conversation was really off — you were rude or overly argumentative, or the number you were asking for was wildly out of whack with what the role is envisioned as. But if that were the case, a decent manager would have been more explicit about what the issue was. It would be one thing if he’d said, “This position will require handling delicate negotiations with skill and tact, and after you shouted at me, slammed your fist on the table, and cited numbers for a completely different job, I’m rethinking whether it makes sense to move you into the role as we conceived it.” But it sounds like what he said was more that he didn’t like that you had the audacity to think you could try to negotiate salary at all and should have just been grateful for what you were offered.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about that. I wasn’t there for the conversation, and I don’t know what your boss’s side of this would be. But it sounds like you don’t know either, because he didn’t bother to elaborate — and that itself makes his handling of it suspect.

Also, his statement that it was “just a change of title” doesn’t make a lot of sense because they did offer you a raise with it, so a raise was already on the table; you were just negotiating the amount.

It is true that salaries for internal promotions don’t always match up well with market benchmarks. A lot of companies, either formally or informally, put limits on the increase they’ll give when you take an internal promotion, even if that puts your new salary below market rates for the role. That generally doesn’t make sense; they should pay what the work is worth, which is what they’d pay an outside candidate. However, there are cases where that approach is more defensible, like if you’re getting a chance at a job that you probably wouldn’t have been competitive for as an outside candidate, but which you’re getting because you’re internal. (Even then, though, once you’ve demonstrated you can do the job at a high level, you should be bumped to market rate for the work.) It’s possible there was something like that at work here — but then your manager should have explained that, not left the impression that he was yanking the offer solely because you tried to negotiate.

If I were in your shoes, I’d go back to your manager to talk, framing it as, “I hoped we could talk through what happened with the promotion discussion because it’s important to me to be on the same page as you. My understanding has always been that it’s normal to negotiate salary, whether as an outside candidate or an internal one, and I want to make sure I understand what happened. Was there something about the way I approached the conversation that raised concerns for you?”