For the employee looking for a really high salary it is necessary to make a long term plan to build leverage that can be used in salary negotiations. While there are several ways to increase leverage there is one way better and safer than anyone else: to always strive for excellent performance at work.
 
In a sense, a salary negotiation does not differ from a negotiation over a used car. While the car sales man sells a car, the employer sells his labor. The salary is the price for labor, and nothing else.
 
As any price for a good or service, the salary - the labor price - is affected by the laws of demand and supply. There is generally a high demand from the employers for highly productive labor, meaning labor producing much value in a short period of time. In general, there is also a quite low supply of such labor. Few people performs above average otherwise, the average performance would be higher.
 
This means, in effect, that the price for highly productive labor in general is higher than the price for other labor.
 
There is an obvious lesson to learn here for the salary negotiator. An employee aiming for a high salary and a successful salary negotiation should always strive to perform above average. He should aim for peak performance. If he enters the salary negotiation as a peak performer, he will have substantially increased his leverage.
 
How can an employee strive for peak performance? Obviously there are several ways to do this. The most basic way is to always focus on the most valuable work tasks, while letting other, less valuable tasks wait or be done by someone else. If he is uncertain as to what tasks are most valuable, he must simply go and ask his boss.
 
If the employee always focuses on the most valuable tasks, he will in general have a higher productivity than everyone else. It is this higher productivity that will give him leverage in the salary negotiation.
 
Thus, peak performance at work is a key to a successful salary negotiation.