625: Why Exceptional Work Without Executive Presence Won’t Earn You More Than the Average 2027 Merit Raise

Are you waiting until your performance review to make the case for a bigger raise in 2027? By then, the decision may already have taken shape. Welcome back to Speak Up, the number one right business communication podcast, where we help hyperforming introvert leaders, including you social introverts, turn your ideas into influence and improve business outcomes. Because being brilliant does not automatically make you influential. I am your host, Laura Camacho, your career accelerator, executive presence, strategist, and godmother. And by the end of this episode, you will know how to shift from reporting activity to communicating enterprise-level impact. That is what senior executives understand and remember. Build a simple impact portfolio and compensation narrative that gives your manager compelling evidence to advocate for you and use your one-on-ones and other relationships to calibrate your value, strengthen your executive reputation, and build advocates and build an arsenal and allies. All right, so if you're a director or above, including council, partner, any kind of executive level role, I have some good news and bad news about compensation for next year in 2027. The good news is merit raises are back and the bad news is cross-the-board raises are not. So you cannot assume you're going to get that 3%, or 3.5%, and you actually could get a lot more if you play your cards properly. All right, so do not wait until your performance review, which for a lot of you is going to be in December. That is going to be too late. Today's episode is particularly important because there is a significant shift going on right now about how companies are thinking about compensation for next year. According to an August 2026 Yahoo Finance report citing data from pay scale, only 32% of U.S. organizations plan to give across-the-board salary increases in 2027, which is down from 36% and 2026 at the same time. Performance based increases are making a comeback with average increases expected to hover around 3.5%. So the average is 3.5%, but not everybody is getting that. We're moving away from spreading roughly the same increases across to everyone and we're moving toward greater differentiation. And that means organizations are going to have to make decisions, who gets average, who gets more, who gets less, who gets nothing. So if you're a senior leader, you need to be aware of this not only for your own compensation, but for that of the people that work for you. So you definitely do not want to walk into your annual review with a list of your 27 accomplishments. So everybody sees how hard you've worked. Your compensation is connected to something more like perceived strategic value. And that is something that you've been building. So I'm going to give you four things to start doing right now to position yourself to get an above average increase in your compensation next year. And that's without a promotion folks. So number one, stop communicating activity and task, start communicating enterprise impact. This is one of the biggest communications shifts I work on with leaders. When you're early in your career, yes, the activities matter. You complete the project, hit the deadline, implement the system. But now it's really like, how are you impacting the business? I hear sometimes very senior extremely accomplished people communicating their work like, oh, my team's been working on a transformational project. We're coordinating with four different groups. And we've had a lot of meetings with operations in IT and we're all green lights. We're making good progress. But what actually changed, right? Why does it matter? How about we removed primary implementation bottlenecks, which put us back in track for the Q4 launch and reduces risk of losing our greatest customer during this transition? That's a little bit more interesting. You're moving from what you did to why what you did matters. That folks is the life altering transformation you need to make starting right now. So you want differentiated compensation. You got to communicate differentiated value. Why is your company better because you are there? Now if you're in sales, you're increasing revenue. What about protecting revenue? What about reducing risk and proving margins, retaining key talent, accelerating a key initiative, solving a problem, developing leaders you can operate without you, strengthening a customer relationship. Those are the kinds of things that move the needle. So what is your impact? That's number one. What you need to be working on. Number two is to build your 2027 compensation narrative. Now do not wait until a performance review. A list of your accomplishments is not a conversation. That's not a narrative. I want you to think about a portfolio. Your impact portfolio. I've made it ridiculously simple for you to take that list of your 47 accomplishments and see if you can transform those into wins. So when with W, what was it stake? Like what was the core organizational challenge or opportunity or the risk that required you to take action? W, what was it stake? I intervention. What did you do? What actions did you steer? Which decisions did you make? What shifts did you influence? That's the eye and in net business impact. Quantify the change for the business, whether you're accelerating timelines, mitigating a cost or strengthening your talent pool. That is a much more powerful mindset for your executive career. Start documenting your wins. I want a portfolio of wins. If you can start, you know, recording these monthly, you're going to have something pretty impressive. And let's say that you inherit a team that has significant turnover. And of course, the simple way to say that is I improved employee engagement and reduced turnover. But what if you say instead, hey, when I took over, we were losing key technical talent within nine months. We had stabilized the leadership team, retained six critical employees who had been considered flight rest and avoided significant recruiting and ramping up cost. Very different story, much more interesting. So here's a question I want you to write down unless you're driving just wait. If my manager had 60 seconds to convince other executives that I deserve one of the largest merit increases on my team, what evidence would they use? Because here's something that's easy to forget. Your boss probably will have to advocate for you. You know about compensation calibration meetings. They can be pretty rough. And there's a limited pool of money and there's a lot of competition. So you want to make your value incredibly easy to articulate. Number three, use your one on ones with your manager to calibrate your value now. This is where executive presence and compensation strategy come together. It's not just project updates when you have that one on one. Remember the one on one is for your benefit mostly. And you need to be the one who's leading that meeting and getting the most value from that. So instead of waiting for December and saying, by the way, how am I doing? You could say something like this. Hey, one of my priorities right now is making sure I'm creating the impact at the next level. What do you see is the greatest value from my leadership right now? Or what could I do differently to create significantly more value between now and the end of the year? Like we're entering the end of Q three folks. This is the timing of this could not be better for you. That's going to lead to a better conversation when you start asking four months ahead of time like, hey, what changes should I be making? Where does the business need more from me? And you're showing that manager that you are proactive and that you are willing to do something differently and that you are very interested in a high merit increase. Of course, you know, we never want surprises in a performance review and neither in a compensation decision. So you want to start asking about that now. You're not going to give a mandate, but you're going to start that conversation. Think of it as starting the conversation. All right. Number four, I've told you many times you've got to build your arsenal of allies, especially it's important to have advocates in the room where you're not there because at senior levels, your career is increasingly influenced by conversations that happen when you're not there. Like somebody has, hey, is Laura ready for the VP role? not there. Who should lead this new strategic initiative or will he have enough budget to give two people on this team the top merit increase? Like you're not there. So what do people say about you when you're not there? Who is willing to advocate for you? That's why executive presence is not simply or primarily about how confidently you speak in a meeting, which is very important, but it's about the reputation that you build across the organization and how people experience your leadership and who understands the business impact you have created. Who trust your judgment? All of those things, like literally it is part of your job to manage your career. Like this not first time you've heard that, but the trap of just doing, doing, doing can get you in trouble. So I know you're already creating value across organizational boundaries, solving problems that matter to other people, making other executives successful. So make sure you develop your relationships before you need something, build your well before you need it. And one way you can do this is to rave about others to third parties, make it of course totally sincere, highly emphatic. And that's called third party validation in the word travels. If you speak well of your boss to your boss's peer, your boss is going to hear about it. Now if it's fake, everybody's going to know and you're going to be worse off, so it must be authentic. So be known as a person who makes complicated things clearer, who recognizes value in others, and you will see that people will start speaking up for you. All right. So your 2027 raise is already maybe already under discussion, you know, and that's the average. And I don't want anybody listening to obsess over whether you get 3.2 or 3.5 or 4.1%. That's not the point of this episode. The bigger opportunity is to recognize this shift towards differentiated merit compensation because organizations are now being forced to make distinctions. And that's a lot harder and more challenging to do that takes more time, brain power than just giving everybody the same. So everybody's going to need to be able to answer why is such and such person disproportionately valuable to our organization, right? So start communicating, enterprise impact, build your compensation narrative, use your one-on-ones to calibrate your value before the pressure is on and build advocates who can communicate your value in the rooms when you're not there. Because the executives who received this proportion of opportunities, compensation and promotions are not necessarily the ones working the longest hours. They're the people whose strategic value is understood. And that is part of executive presence. The higher you move in an organization, the more important it becomes to make sure people understand why your work matters. So if you would like to know a little bit more about how your executive presence is landing in different scenarios, I strongly suggest you access the executive presence scorecard that is linked in the show notes. And that will give you a snapshot of how you're doing so you can move forward. And in the case, have a fantastic day, everyone, and I will catch you on the next episode.