Dear Boss,

I’ve been at my company for five years and enjoy my job. The work is in line with what I want to do long term, I’m getting great experience, the people I work with are nice, and my boss is easy to work for and has mentored me in ways I’ve never received at a job before. All things considered, I’m pretty happy here.

However, about a year ago, my boss brought up the possibility of a promotion. There’s no natural role for me to move into (the next position up is hers, and she’s not going anywhere), but she proposed creating a job where I’d take on more responsibility, some parts of running the department, including things like training new hires and reviewing the work of junior staff members. She liked the idea because she has too much on her plate and this would let her offload some responsibilities to me. I liked the idea because I’d like to keep moving up, and the new role would come with a higher title and more pay. When we first talked about it, she told me that she couldn’t just create the position overnight since it would be an entirely new slot for our department, but that she would start talking to her own boss and HR to figure out how to make it happen.

That was a year ago, and there hasn’t been much movement. Part of the problem has been that our company lost a big contract and, while we don’t expect staff cuts or anything like that, we do have a hiring freeze, so it’s been a tough time to make a case for a whole new position. My boss has been good about keeping me informed of the status, so I know she’s continued to push for it to happen.

However, she’s been assigning me more and more of the work of the new position, even though it’s not actually my job yet. I can understand why; as I said, she’s overloaded and it helps her out to have me take over some of her responsibilities. But the things she’s asking me to do are not part of my current job, although it’s work I’m interested in doing.

I trust my boss and I don’t think she’s intentionally taking advantage of me. I believe the promotion will happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. Is there a way for me to say, essentially, “I want to do this work, but not unless you pay me for it?”

This can be trickier than it has any right to be.

As a matter of general principle, yes, you should be able to say that you don’t want to take on additional responsibilities unless you’re paid appropriately for them, particularly when those responsibilities are clearly part of a higher-level, higher-paid job.

As a matter of practice, though, it’s not uncommon for people to take on higher-level responsibilities before they’re officially promoted (and before the pay increase that would come with that promotion). In fact, at some companies it’s practically policy that you need to start doing work at the next level up before you’ll be officially promoted. That’s not how things should work, but it’s how they sometimes do.

Even when it’s not so formalized, often the way people “earn” a promotion is by starting to take on responsibilities outside the scope of their current job. (This is especially true at smaller organizations, where roles can be more fluid and it’s normal to wear multiple hats, but it can happen regardless of organization size.)

And frustratingly, in many cases declining to do higher-level work without a raise or title bump can make it harder to get promoted, since it can mean your management perceives you as overly rigid or “not a team player.” And to be fair, it’s true that someone who refuses to do anything beyond the specific scope of their job description is going against professional norms and risks coming across as difficult or even unpleasant to work with. But while that might be reasonable when we’re talking about minor changes like being asked to head up a meeting when your boss is unavailable or helping a new hire get acclimated, it shouldn’t be in play when we’re talking about major changes to your role, like managing a team when before you weren’t managing anyone.

In your case, it sounds like the new assignments your manager is giving you are more than just a minor task here and there and instead amount to significant work outside of the role you’re currently being paid for — and in fact are clearly part of a job a step up from where you are now. And you’re right that you shouldn’t get sucked into performing a job that you’re not being paid for — first and foremost because you deserve to be paid fairly for your work, but also because if you start performing the other role now, where’s the incentive for your employer to act with any urgency on finalizing your promotion? It’s one thing to pinch-hit for a more senior-level job for a few weeks, but at the pace they’ve moved at so far, what’s to say you won’t still be doing it months from now without any change in pay?

Since you trust your manager and believe that she’s acting in good faith, you’re well-positioned to raise the issue. You could say something like: “I’m really interested in moving into X job as we’ve talked about, and I understand that the hiring freeze has slowed things down. I’m wary, though, of taking on the work of that role without actually having the new title — or, of course, the pay for that work. I don’t mind helping out on a very temporary basis, but I want to make sure that if I’m doing more of the work of the new position, or doing it for more than a short time, my title and pay reflects that.”

There are a few possible outcomes from that. Ideally your manager would see where you’re coming from and pull back from asking you to take on the extra work before you’re being paid for it. Or it could prompt her to push harder to get the promotion moving again. But if you’re met with surprise that you’d resist taking on additional projects (because it’s such a great opportunity, or so forth), at that point you’d need to decide how firm of a stance you want to take. One option would be to say, “I really am excited about the prospect of the new role, but it’s important to me to get it formalized with the company first. If that can’t happen yet, I’d like to hold off on taking on the additional work until it can.” With some companies and some bosses, that might go over just fine, but it’s definitely a judgment call based on what you know of how your manager operates.

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Find even more career advice from Alison Green on her website, Ask a Manager. Got a question for her? Email askaboss@nymag.com (and read our submission terms here.)