u/CapitanAI

I'm a top performer, and have been the top 1 or 2nd of the team since I was hired 3 years ago.

I was promoted 2 years ago.

I've been over relied on. I covered my managers leave for 3 months, while also covering for another member of the team for about a month of it. I've massively over achieved kpis, last time 4x, currently on 2x.

I applied for my manager's role and didn't get it. That much is fine. But I got no actionable growth areas in the feedback, and it's a 40% pay cut if I did get it. I now report to the person who did get it and we get on pretty well. But my workload was tripled after.

Now I'm in a position where if I move up, I've a massive paycut. If I move laterally, I take on more responsibility with no real advantage, I could move to the more senior team but that's more work for the same job level..

I'm stuck and I feel like I'm being exploited.

How do I raise this without putting my head on the chopping block?

edit: I'm in a company where I'm unlikely to get retaliation, and we can generally speak quite openly. But people are people and favour and politics do exist

Edit: Thanks for your help everyone.

We went through a quick retro, numbers, highlights, low lights. In the highlights I went over the few areas I felt were impactful other than numbers and in the low lights, I said I found it very hard to focus on anything that's not right now, and had to deprioritise long term approaches that I felt ultimately would be valuable because I had too much on my plate. We talked about areas Id like to explore more and agreed on some next steps for the next few months. We also agreed to reduce the intensity for a while to rebuild the energy.