I accepted my company’s counteroffer, and now they’re going back on our agreement

A reader writes:

I have seen you and other people say that you shouldn’t usually accept a counteroffer. I wish I had listened to you, but I didn’t.

The backstory is I have worked at my company for almost a decade, and for the first several years I was extremely underpaid. I know this because I made a lateral move that resulted in a significant pay increase. With each transfer, I have been clear that growth (and money, of course) are very important to me.

Recently I was recruited (I did not seek this new position, it came to me) for a position that would have increased my pay slightly. It would have changed my work status from fully remote to hybrid, but most importantly, it was a training opportunity that many do not get.

When I told my current employer, they asked me not to make any rash decisions and to give them 48 hours. They returned with a counteroffer that involved a promotion and a raise — $20K more than the new position would pay, and $30K more than I was making already. I am the sole provider for my family, and when I considered the additional money, not having to travel, and not losing any PTO or benefits, I decided to accept.

Several months later, while the raise has materialized, the promotion has not. I am still stagnant, doing the same work as I was before, with my manager telling me to be patient.

The trust is gone! I’m grateful for the raise, but angry to not be learning anything new and to have given up on an excellent opportunity. I don’t understand why my manager would lie to me about the promotion. (We did have layoffs recently, so those of us who are left are stuck doing a lot of extra work. I can’t help but feel my boss knew those were coming and got scared that he would lose me and have to lay off those other people as well, so he chose to lie to me.)

Probably the answer is “your boss sucks and is unlikely to change.” But prior to this, I really trusted and liked my boss, and now I can barely talk to him. I have been looking for other jobs but this market is terrible. How can I handle a situation like this?

You are not the first person to accept a counteroffer, turn down the outside job, and then have your employer renege on the promises they made to keep you.

It’s incredibly shitty behavior from an employer. They essentially lied to get you to act against your own interests. They may not have intended to lie — they might have really thought they’d follow through on what they promised — but once they became tempted not to do what they committed to do, they wildly mishandled it. There are situations where an employer might legitimately find itself unable to meet the commitments they made in a counteroffer — for example, if they had a sudden and dramatic revenue drop or were acquired by a company that refused to honor the original plan — but in that case, at a minimum they owed you a conversation about what had changed, a profound apology, and an active attempt to work with you to figure out what could be done instead. It doesn’t sound like that’s happened (and it’s not even clear if something like that was in play, or if they just took their promises cavalierly).

Have you talked to your manager about what happened? If not, it’s worth a conversation where you say something like, “I was ready to leave for an opportunity that would have been strongly in my interests, and you convinced me to stay by committing to promoting me. I took you at your word and turned down the other job on good faith because I trusted that the company would honor the commitment it was making to me. I’m really struggling with the fact that I agreed to stay with a specific agreement for a new job, and that hasn’t come through. I’d like to talk about a timeline for making that happen, ideally a quick one since I turned down a different position for it.”

But if that doesn’t change anything … you’re absolutely right to have lost all trust in them. They’ve squandered that trust just about as deeply as an employer ever can. You don’t owe them any loyalty at this point, and you should have no qualms about leaving as soon as something you want to leave for comes along.

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