Is It All about the Benjamins, Baby?

How to discern when to say thanks and when to advocate for a raise

A question for you, managers: how do you tell when your workers need a thanks and when they need a raise?

Companies these days often act as if giving their workers beer on tap and free lunches on Fridays, donuts and company swag, and maybe the stray gift card is the best way to make employees feel like they and their work matter.

But then, a friend of mine forwarded this to me this week: “Jobs need to understand that the ONLY way to make me feel appreciated is to pay me what I’m worth.”

Now, that’s a mode switch.

That Instagrammer is flipping the background and the foreground. The foreground concerns of income are so huge that you can’t glow up the job with a bowl of Nature Valley bars. Snacks in the break room might just symbolize inadequate compensation.

But look, money is a symbol, too. And as a symbol, it’s prone to drain out its meaning. Will you pardon a little communication theory? People who study symbols make a distinction between the signifier and the signified. Here, the money is the signifier. It’s the foreground object that you can see and touch and squeeze and pocket and trade. And the signified is the background idea or concept behind the money. Here’s a weird thing about signifiers: they tend to lose touch with their signifieds.

That’s the point of those scenes in Breaking Bad when you see Walter White’s useless cash stacked on pallets in a storage unit. That’s what Christopher Nolan’s getting at when the Joker burns that pile of money in The Dark Knight. Those stories flip the foreground and background by detaching the signifier from the signified.

The money’s the point of it all, until you’ve lost the all.

So, yes, you should advocate for your team to get a raise. Being a person’s expensive these days. But the signifier of a salary holds its signified best in a company culture where money is just one of the ways you say, “Hey, thanks for what you do.”

There’s a scene in the fourth season of Mad Men that plays out this foreground/background shift exquisitely. Peggy Olson comes striding into the room where Don Draper is seated on the couch looking ad layouts. She’s troubled; he asks what’s wrong. She’s angry that he’s won an award for an ad concept she created. Draper’s dismissive:

Draper: It's your job. I give you money. You give me ideas.
Olson: But you never thank me.
Draper: That's what the money is for!

When you watch the whole scene, you’ll see that it doesn’t eliminate the tension between background meaning and foreground money. Draper has a point, and the script lets him have it for awhile.

But for me, the scene’s nasty turn happens when Draper shouts, “You should be thanking me every morning when you wake up, along with Jesus, for giving you another day!” The thank you has somehow become salary that the young professional owes her manager.

This week’s newsletter’s talking to the managers about the money and the gratitude. But I’ll be the first to admit that I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth. How do you make it all about the Benjamins without—making it all about the Benjamins?

We’ll talk about tactics in this week’s Mode/Switch Pod. But for now, let me close by commending managerial humility. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire,” writes T. S. Eliot, “Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” I’d like to recommend two humble concessions to help your team deal with one unavoidable tension of being an employed human: they need better compensation and they need better community.

Be the first to acknowledge that no workplace culture is sufficient to meet all the needs of your workers. In that sense, Don Draper is almost right when he shouts, “That’s what money’s for!” Your team needs more adequate pay, and that’s probably going to take relentless advocacy from you towards your higher-ups. That’s more than kind of exhausting. But it can be even more fatiguing to pour your very self building organizational community, only to see your team shrug and check their apps for the online check deposit. That calls for humility on your part, so it’s a good thing that humility is endless.

Be the first to concede that no workplace compensation is sufficient to meet the human needs of your workers. In that sense, Peggy Olson’s right to say, “But you never thank me.” The day-in-day-out work of giving credit, showing respect, and granting honor—all these practices address human needs that no dollar can touch. Heath Ledger’s Joker comes to mind again: “It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message.”

By now, you can recognize how this week’s managerial mode/switch works: some tensions you can eliminate; most you have to navigate.

-craig

Big shout-out to Yuxiao Zhang who took her first turn doing the graphic design for this week’s newsletter. Glad she’s joined the team! This week’s issue depended on text-threaded conversation with Andrea Munday, who sent me the Mad Men scene with a text saying we could write a whole article on just this one scene. She was right, and she generously supplied ideas and cultural allusions. Plus, she populated the LWYW playlist.

One final question for you: how responsible are managers for the mental health of their team? Send us a note at themodeswitch@gmail.com. We’d like to use your stories and insights in an upcoming newsletter.