Hey, it's Laura and Jason.
Welcome back, and thanks for being here!
This is Issue #5 of The Weekly UNLOK, where human potential meets organizational performance.
"BOTH SIDES OF THE DESK"
FROM LAURA
I hear from business owners all the time about this new generation in the workforce.
“They just expect to be paid all this money and not work hard for it.”
I listened to this person in particular a few weeks back (one of my husband’s employees at the music school). And I noticed something happening inside me that I’ve had to learn to pay attention to.
My first instinct, the one trained by twenty years and 30,000 conversations on the candidate side of the desk, was to defend the employee.
To explain to his boss… “well, have you thought about what it’s like to be him right now, in this economy, watching everyone else seem to get ahead?”
I know exactly that aching feeling of sitting across from someone with power over your livelihood and wondering if they see you.
I’ve heard it thousands of times. I was trained to hear it. I was the recruiter you called after that meeting, and you told me what you really thought, and I held it.
For a long, long, long time… I held it from only that side.
But what I want you to know... what took me a long time to admit...
MY BIAS WAS A BLIND SPOT.
It’s not because employees don’t have this real experience. They do. It’s valid.
But there’s also another human being in the equation that I spent years not seeing. The employer side.
Then my husband started a business, and I got to see what really goes into it.
Suddenly I understood what it means to stay up at night worrying about payroll.
To carry the weight of someone else’s livelihood in your hands.
To make the investment in a person, in their development, in their future, and feel it go unacknowledged.
To watch someone expect the harvest without planting anything.
The employee’s frustration is real. AND the employer’s exhaustion is real.
The question that actually matters isn’t who’s right.
It’s what happens inside EACH of them when they sit down across from each other.
Because I’ve watched this dynamic play out enough times now to know: when neither person does their inner work first, the conversation doesn’t go anywhere.
It just loops, endlessly.
This is exactly where my Four A’s begin. AWARENESS.
Awareness of what’s running inside your head before you walk into that room.
For the employee: What story am I telling myself about what I deserve and why I haven’t gotten it yet?
For the employer: What story am I telling myself about this person’s motivation that I haven’t tested against reality?
You can’t build anything from a story you haven’t examined.
And I know what you’re thinking…
“But I’m the one who’s been patient. I’m the one who’s been waiting. I’m the one who keeps showing up.”
Point being… everyone in that room believes that.
And that’s the second part of Awareness.
The awareness that there’s an entirely different point of view that the other person believes is valid.
I can see that now. Every year I spent firmly in the corner of the candidate taught me to hold that experience with precision and compassion.
And every year I’ve spent building something of my own has taught me the view from the other side. I needed both.
The truth lives somewhere in the middle. And it only becomes visible when both people stop defending their version of it.
FROM JASON
“I want more money.”
“Okay. Show me more.”
“That’s not fair.”
I’ve heard some version of that exchange more times than I can count.
And every time, both people leave the room believing the other one doesn’t get it.
(As Laura said, they’re both right, which is what makes it so expensive.)
The employee isn’t wrong to want more. That’s a completely reasonable human desire.
And the employer isn’t wrong to ask for evidence before delivering it. That’s also completely reasonable.
The breakdown isn’t in the positions. It’s in the fact that neither person has done the work to understand the perspective from the other side of the table.
That’s an awareness problem. And it lives on both sides of the desk.
I moved to the US from Scotland with no degree and no credentials, but I built a successful career from there.
Nobody handed me anything more than an opportunity.
I found the gaps and filled them, repeatedly. I created value where it was needed.
That’s what shaped how I see compensation conversations for the next thirty years.
So when I watch a young employee say “I want more” and then bristle when asked to demonstrate why, I don’t see entitlement.
I see someone who hasn’t connected the dots yet between wanting and earning. There’s a gap in their understanding of how value is actually built.
And when I watch an employer respond to “I want to grow” by adding tasks instead of building a real development path, I don’t see a bad manager.
I see someone who hasn’t connected the dots between developing people and the performance they keep saying they want.
Same gap. Two people. Neither one sees it from the other side.
The attitude shift, the second of the Four A’s, requires something specific from each of them.
For the employee: the move from “I deserve more” to “I will become someone who clearly earns more.” That shift sounds small. It rewires everything.
For the employer: the move from “prove it to me” to “let me help you see the path.” Those two stances produce completely different conversations.
Action, the third A, is where it gets practical.
For the employee, that means identifying exactly what higher performance looks like in their role and doing that thing, visibly, before the conversation about compensation.
For the employer, that means having the “here’s what the path looks like” conversation proactively, not reactively. Building the career path infrastructure before someone gets frustrated enough to ask.
We built clear career paths at my company.
Three components: organizational structure that grew with us (org charts with open seats so people could see their future before the roles even existed), job skills and competencies for each level, and values alignment required to move up. To advance, you had to be living the values. To advance further, you had to be teaching them.
Nobody had to guess. Nobody had to have an awkward conversation about whether they were on track. The path was visible.
When the path is visible and someone still isn’t walking it, the alignment conversation, the fourth A, becomes possible.
Honest. Specific. Grounded in shared reality.
That’s a completely different conversation from the one that starts with “I want more money” and ends with someone leaving the room feeling under-appreciated.
Most of those conversations never get to alignment because the first three A’s never happened.
YOUR TURN
Inner Game: Think about the last compensation or performance conversation that didn’t go the way you wanted. Which A was missing, and who was responsible for it, you or the person across the desk? If you think they were responsible, take another minute with it…
Outer Game: Does your organization have a clear, visible path from where someone is today to what “more” looks like? If someone asked you right now, could you show it to them?
We’re here for the ripple effect ✨,
Laura & Jason
P.S. - Did this message resonate? Reply back and let us know. We read every reply.
BEFORE YOU GO: HOW WE CAN HELP
FOR COMPANIES: The compensation conversation is a symptom. When people have to ask for a path, the organization has already missed its window. Book a strategy call.
OR... [Take the free self-assessment →]
FOR INDIVIDUALS: If you’re looking for one-on-one support, Laura works with a small number of people personally. Book an activation session and let’s get into it.