Telling your boss about another job offer
Problem with my current gig is they don't have me allocated to a solid long running piece of work for next year. Which is more important to a contractor which I am.
The background is my main project got cancelled when Exec went another way. Good reasons to go that way which I supported and I d done a good job up to that point. But resulted in being moved to lower priority projects which for a PM has the same effect on your status and influence as a demotion.
I have another offer on table which I ve gone the Mach path and said yes to as a fallback. Prob with that one is it's consultancy and working with smaller companies.
What I want to do is leverage the other offer to get my boss to push for allocating me to more solid projects. WIIFMs for him would be not being seen to lose more staff, keeping a safe pair of hands to deliver these small annoying projects (which have already got another PM fired). And retaining an experienced resource he can throw at popup tasks as this big parent program (which funds his projects) lands hot and heavy.
I thought this might be a common situation. In my case I m trying to leverage for job security as money is already good. I guess people would often be trying to get current employer to counter offer with more money.
Hey Kevin, yeah, when going for that approach the first thing you want to do is to avoid coming across like a threat.
We had a similar topic on this here.
Instead, you want to communicate something like:
This offer make it difficult for me to justify staying here.
But I'd like to stay here.
Can you help you justify my decision to stay with more challenging work?
It's also a good opportunity to display good traits:
- Loyalty and preference to stay
- Drive and ambition to lead important projects
- Contribution, for wanting to be in the projects that add the most value
A big chunk of people want the opposite: to disappear and collect a paycheck while doing nothing.
So wanting to be in the good projects is something that big bosses generally appreciate -also because they are often the same-.