Theoretically, deferred compensation should keep executives from leaving the firm. One way to defer compensation is through unvested equity pay. After four or five years, the pay is vested. This deferred compensation plan punishes managers who leave early: they lose any unvested pay. Whether such programs actually help retention has been unclear. Some studies show […]
Subject: Senior Leaders
Competition Among Peers Key to Managerial Promotions
To study the talent management processes of an organization, a team of researchers focused on the managerial skills required for management promotion. Identification of those skills is the key element in developing effective talent management programs. Managerial skills or attributes important for promotion can be broken down into human capital and social capital. Human capital […]
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Ensure the CEO Gets the Right Information at the Right Time
CEOs are responsible for knowing what is going on in their companies. No matter how large, complex or global the organization, CEOs do not have the luxury of pleading ignorance; it is their job to keep abreast of all the important facts and developments: what their employees and competitors are doing, what big new ideas […]
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How Leadership Humility Is Defined in the East and in the West
In recent years, humility has become increasingly accepted as a central feature of great leadership. Bestselling business books such as Good to Great, which considered humility as one of the two core attributes of great ‘level-five’ leaders, speeches and memoirs by business and non-business leaders, and numerous academic papers all highlight the importance of humility […]
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Candid Feedback Keeps Power-holders Accountable
Every organization has finite resources, starting with compensation, budgets and expense accounts, as well as high quality assignments, accounts or customers and even office space. The people who control the allocation of these resources have a great deal of power — and research shows that they use this power to make decisions that are in […]
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A Symphony of Agency and Stewardship Values Ensures Family Business Success
Both agency theory and stewardship theory help explain organizational dynamics, although starting from very different assumptions. Agency theory describes the relationship between the shareholders (called ‘principals’) and the company’s managers and executives (called ‘agents’) as a collaboration between parties with different interests: principals are focused on the success of the company while agents are focused […]
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Corporate Governance: The Power of Outside Directors on CEO-Only Boards
More and more board of directors have the CEO as the only insider on the board. At first glance, this movement toward near unanimous outside directors would seem to meet the mandate of independent oversight and governance that have defined corporate boards since the corporate scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, new research […]
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How a Numbers-Crunching Culture Can Increase Unethical Behaviour
An investigation into the problems of the 1973 Ford Pinto, a car susceptible to catastrophic explosions when rear-ended, revealed that Ford’s engineers had calculated that the company could save $11 per car at a cost of 180 burn deaths. While perhaps an exaggerated case of numbers pushing aside moral and ethical considerations, there is a […]
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Six Skills for the Social Media-Literate Leader
With the dominant, almost overwhelming impact that social media has on just about any function of a business, it’s easy to forget that social media is barely a decade old. The vast majority of today’s leaders built most of their careers before anyone had even conceived of Facebook or Twitter. As a result, leaders must […]
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A Lesson from China: Growth Is Not Eternal So Be Prepared
Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC), a company that specialized in the large-scale cranes used to load containers onto ships, burst on the heavy machinery landscape in 1992. At that time, the global market for large-scale container cranes was growing fast as ports were having to handle more and more super-sized container vessels. The industry was […]
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