Your Role Has Grown. Have the Terms Kept Up?

Find out if you’re doing a bigger job or just more work, and what you should ask for next.

Audio edition

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Most senior leadership roles expand without anybody ever formally announcing it. There is usually no memo. No revised job description. No conversation where somebody says, "Your role is different now."

It happens another way. Someone leaves and the role never gets backfilled. A project needs an owner. A reorganization creates a gap. Your leader starts forwarding more decisions your way because you handle them well. Each addition looks small when it happens, and most of the time, nobody attaches terms to any of it.

That is the first thing I want you to see. Most of the time, nobody sits you down to negotiate an expanded role. The work just starts landing on you. And because it happens gradually, you can be doing a meaningfully different job before you ever stop and say, okay, when did this actually change?

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Situation Playbook

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Language for this situation

When you need to disagree with a senior leader

disagreement

The situation

A decision is being made in the room that you believe is wrong, and the person making it outranks you. Saying nothing costs you credibility later. Saying it poorly costs you credibility now.

What you need to establish

Judgment. Show that your objection is about the outcome, not about the authority of the person making the call.

Language you can use

I support the direction. My concern is the sequencing, and I would rather raise it now than after we commit.
Can I offer the risk I am seeing? If it is already accounted for, I will drop it.
I may be wrong here, and I want to be. What is the plan if the timeline slips by a month?

What the language communicates

It separates the disagreement from the relationship. Framing your objection as a question about risk lets the senior leader keep authorship of the decision while still absorbing your information. That is the difference between being heard and being managed.

Likely follow-up

They may ask what you would do instead. Have one alternative ready, stated in a sentence, with the tradeoff named: "I would push the launch two weeks and keep the scope. The cost is the quarter; the gain is not relaunching."

When your scope is being reducedscopeMembers only
When compensation comes up before you are readycompensationMembers only

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