Preparing for Compensation Annual Review

The Secret to Annual Raises 

The best raises don’t come from great negotiators and unfortunately not from the highest performers either. They come from people who know how to prime.

If you wait until review season to start talking about your value, it’s already too late.

By the time review cycles hit, most budgets and rating calibrations and associated recommendations and allocations are already decided. The real influence happens weeks if not MONTHS earlier in the quiet, casual check-ins where expectations are shaped.

A simple, strategic move: in your usual one-on-one with your manager a month or two before review time, prep them that you'd like to have a more meta conversation on your performance.  Walk through the major wins from the year, the projects that created impact, and the challenges you helped smooth out. The real material wins and achievements - and then ask, “Does that align with what you’ve seen? What are any other high points I may have missed? What were things I might have done better?"

Provided they agree, what you are doing is proactively priming them on how they position you in the manager review process. 

Once you’ve built that alignment, you can plant this powerful seed by saying something like:

 “I’ve been meaning to ask about my compensation - can you share with me how I'm doing in my range and if this compensation would be close to where it would be if I was hired now? Do you believe its reflective and fair for the value and contributions I've made?"

That sentence does a lot. It shows awareness, confidence, and context. You're not demanding a raise or asking for a sudden counter-offer, you are encouraging them to start thinking about this proactively and reflect organically.

When the actual review discussions start, (provided they agree) your manager is ready to advocate for you and may have already spoken with their manager - actively positioning you as underpaid and high-performing.

As the person in the room who leads these calibration sessions and works with the chief of the department on final monetary allocations - I can tell you one very simple rule, you don't want to be the one asking for a raise, you want your MANAGER to be the one doing so.

This is by FAR one of the most effective ways to ensure you are given individual attention and advocacy. 

Raises aren’t won at the table. They’re won in the month before it.