Personal Finance : How To Boost Your Pay By Becoming Indispensable To Your Employer

When it comes to personal finance for most of us, finding a job is imperative if you don't have one. If you do, however--and if you'd like to keep it--becoming indispensable to your employer should be considered an indispensable part of your work plan. There are four basic ways to do this:

1. Do your cottonpickin' job. Well, duh! But you'd be surprised how many folks out there ignore that simple little concept. During a "working life" that covered more than a hundred jobs in nearly a dozen different career fields, I often found myself receiving praise for simply doing what I was being paid to do...because my coworkers were slacking and made me look good by comparison.

2. Quitcher bitchin'! Good cheer may irritate your coworkers, true. Some of my fellow white collar types at a California insurance company used to give me really odd looks when I'd stroll in every Monday morning...whistling. They even scratched their heads every time I ignored the elevator to our fourth floor offices and took the stairs two at a time. No boss enjoys a grouchy subordinate, though, and keeping the boss happy is a really, really good idea.

3. Keep any eye out for posted in-house opportunities. My best score in that category? The Colorado trucking company I drove for (2006-2009) decided to start up a designated night shift crew. I jumped at the deal, became one of 5 charter members of that shift, and benefitted greatly. $2.00 more per hour, easier to stand out with only 5 of us making up the entire crew, and no bosses to look over your shoulder (they all went to bed at night).

4. Keep an eye out for opportinities to sell your boss on a job you created. In 1985, I went to work for Great American Insurance in San Diego. They sold, among other things, Workers Compensation insurance programs purchased by various employers around the county. Our policy files, though, were a mess. For a time, handling those messed-up files was a part of my job.

Pondering this, I eventually approached the Branch Manager, Leslie, with a plan: Put me on Workers Compensation detail and nothing else. Make me at least a temporary specialist...and I'd clean up the mess. For my meeting with the boss, I carried example files to look through and simple but detailed notes showing clearly that we were losing a ton of money via late and inaccurate premium collections (which in Workers Compensation are based on payroll audits). There were other drawbacks to the state things were in, and I made sure she understood where the Branch Office stood on those as well.

Not only did she approve my plan, but she was so impressed with both my initiative and my follow-through that she took me with her when she jumped companies in 1986. She became Assistant Vice President of Underwriting in the new firm, and I tagged along as a full Home Office Underwriter with a $10,000 jump in annual salary.

Nor did it end there. In the new place, I discovered a real problem with the Assigned Risk policies. These are what drivers with problems get when they have those SR-22 filings. Every insurance company is forced to take a share of the bad stuff out there. We couldn't do anything about that, but there were things we could do...and they weren't being done. I cleaned that mess up, too. Leslie and her boss, John, liked that...and also liked the idea (after I proposed it a few months later) of having me specialize in taking care of their top producing agent. He specialized in insuring strip malls in southern California.

Two years from the time of my first "assignment proposal" to my boss, I'd gone from a lowly Assistant Underwriter to a Home Office Underwriting Supervisor with a staff of Assistant Underwriters. Before Leslie jumped companies, my annual take had been a measly $14,400. At the end, it was $30,000. 

Of course, it also goes without saying that impressing your boss is also the best way to get favorable references whenever you do leave. It doesn't mean you're always looking for a way to suck up, either--just that you're always looking for a way to demonstrate your Extreme Work Ethic with Innovation Option. Making yourself look good to the boss helps him look good to his boss.

That's a good thing.