The Ten-Percent Conundrum

Let me tell you a bit about my philosophy of management: Good work should be rewarded. By this, I mean that any person who works hard, meets deadlines, consistently performs above expectation, and doesn't act like a prima donna should get praise, privileges, perks, and pay increases. Praise is the "Attaboy!" and includes written and oral commendation, recognition at meetings, and (most important) acknowledgement to highers up that a person who works for one is a good worker. Privileges include the ability to pick from work assignments, and the leave to decline some unpleasant tasks. Perks include travel, favorable office locations, and days off. Pay increases are--well--increases in the hourly or yearly salary one earns for performing one's job duties. I like my philosophy because it's simple, and it makes people happy. Almost every worker can be motivated with one, or a combination of several, of these strategies.

The Devil's philosophy of management? Never give anything away. In order to get anything from the Devil, one must either trick him or wrest it (crushed and sweaty) from his tightly clenched fist. This is equally true of praise, privileges, perks, and pay increases. On more than one occasion, when a worker in our company is praised in a letter or telephone call, the Devil will, when ostensibly communicating the compliment, undercut it. Something like this:

Attached is an e-mail Mr. Customer sent me regarding Employee X. Mr. Customer mentioned that Employee X resolved his concerns to his satisfaction. I hope all of you take this chance to review your processes to make sure the concerns raised by Mr. Customer don't happen again.

Anyway, all of this was brought vividly to mind in a recent situation involving one of our contractors. One of the attorneys who formerly worked for us, and was a superstar performer, left five years ago to take another position. She was willing, however, to continue to perform some legal services for us on a contract basis.

Over the last four years, she has been great. Her work is always complete and excellent, she meets (usually beats) all deadlines, and she always returns my calls. Because she knew (and liked) us, she gave us a ridiculously low hourly rate for her services (really, it's a quarter of what we would have to pay anyone else). She has been performing admirably at that rate of pay for four years. So when it came time to renew her contract, I asked her if she wanted to make any changes. She asked for a ten percent increase in her hourly rate, with the understanding that we would use her services less, so the overall contract price would be about the same. Again, given her hyper-efficiency, the increase wouldn't amount to much.

This seemed perfectly reasonable to me, and I cleared the contract with the office manager. Then it went to the Devil. His response: No way. The contractor is trying to screw us, and I (minion) am too green to recognize it. We won't even consider a ten-percent increase. He was unyielding on this point. None of the arguments I proffered would budge him from his position. He instructed me to counter-offer a two and a half percent increase, and negotiate from there.

Needless to say, the contractor, a reasonable and valued contributor to my team, balked. She decided she'd rather sell her services to a more understanding client. Can't blame her there.

End result: My team lost the services of a valuable contributor, but that's really my problem because of my failure to negotiate effectively. Good for the Devil, though. He managed to flush one company asset and piss off another. Attaboy!