Category Archives: Reward Strategy

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June 18, 2013

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Banking pay, Executive Reward, HR, Reward, Reward communication, Reward Strategy

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Balance of power – Executive pay and shareholders

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Introduction

There is considerable controversy over levels of executive pay.  There are a multitude of stakeholders or would be stakeholders pugnaciously striving for influence.  Remuneration committees are supposed to control executive remuneration.  However, as the MM&K recent survey shows, FTSE CEO Remuneration increased, on average, by 10% in 2012.  Why are shareholders allowing this to happen?

Balance of power argument

I had a fascinating discussion with the executive pay guru Cliff Weight on the subject of the balance of power argument (although the discussion below is entirely mine) when looking at executive pay. 

The Executive’s power

Most of the time the executives hold the balance of power because:

  • Changes in executive board members, unless well managed, tends to lead to a fall in share price
  • Changes in senior management generally signals a failure of strategy or strategic uncertainties – which lead to a fall in share price
  • A lack of good succession planning by the Board so there is no immediate, obvious internal or external replacement.
  • A shortage of good candidates with the relevant experience and willingness to take high profile roles.  This tends to mean organisations can be without a CEO or Finance Director for six to nine months; which leads to a fall in share price.

No Board or Remuneration Committee wants to be seen to be acting in a way that damages shareholder returns. 

The Stephen Hester debacle

A good example of how NOT to carry out changes in senior management is shown by the apparent decision of the UK Treasury to replace Stephen Hester, the CEO of RBS.  The announcement seemed to take the markets by surprise – leading at one point to a 7% drop in RBS share price.  Further, the lack of any successor or allegedly any succession planning by HM Treasury means there is something of a leadership vacuum in RBS (even with their excellent senior management team) that causes great uncertainty to both investors and employees.  This, just at the point when RBS had turned around and had a clear and compelling vision of its mission and future.

The Shareholder’s power

Shareholders have limited power over executives; they have the upper hand mainly when:

  • There are downside earnings surprises
  • Takeover or mergers are under discussion
  • There is a strategy dislocation – a disruptive technology or social trend; look at Smartphones impact on the traditional phone manufactures
  • The market loses confidence in the management of an organisation

These tend to be seminal points in an organisation’s existence that hopefully do not occur too often.

Important issues for Remuneration Committees and Executive management

Both parties to pay discussions need to think about the balance of power issues and how they influence the reward dynamic.  Strategy needs to be owned and driven by the entire executive team; hopefully mitigating the effect of the departure of any executive.

Good management of shareholder relations and open communication will help reduce any share price “shocks” when changes do take place.  Good financial PR will again mitigate both the shock and share price impact.

The paradox of succession planning

One of the potential failings of Boards when considering the balance of power argument is succession planning.  In an ideal world a replacement for the CEO would have been identified and prepared for the new role well in advance of the change.  Unfortunately there is a paradox here.  A CEO could perceive that work by the Board to identify her successor was a signal of their imminent departure.  As invariably such issues leak, so the market would view it in much the same way.  Dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t.  There is also the issue that the heir apparent may become impatient with the wait and either go elsewhere or worse actively seek to undermine the existing CEO with the Board.

There is no easy or obvious answer to the succession paradox; but clearly it is an issue that must be taken on board in the balance of power debates.

Conclusion

The balance of power approach is a useful framework to view trends in executive pay.  I can see no immediate answer to how or even if, the balance of power should be more equally distributed.  Like any good explanatory framework, the balance of power debate asks more questions than it answers.

 

 

 

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May 15, 2013

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CIPD, Hackathon, HR, Reward, Reward communication, Reward Strategy, Social Media

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CIPD Hackathon – Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage; A reward perspective

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Introduction

The UK’s HR professional body, the CIPD has recently set up a “Hackathon” to look at how HR can build an adaptability advantage.  A good idea with an interesting approach.  There appears to be limited consideration of how reward will support and enhance the approaches.  Reward has powerful implements in its tool kit to support change.   So I set my mind to an analytical structure to think about building adaptability advantage.

Wisdom of crowds – a challenge

I am a great believer in the wisdom of crowds.  Therefore I throw a challenge out to all those interested in reward, change, innovation and HR to generate ideas as to how the reward toolkit can be used to support adaptability advantage.

The reward blockers

Reward is largely designed to support existing behaviour.  So, in some organisations, it is used to support the status quo.  Rewarding behaviour that supports the organisation’s ideology and putting reward power in the hands of managers who have an understandable vested interested in supporting the status quo.  The challenge is to design an analytical reward framework that supports creative destruction, moving on from the status quo to a new organisational state and ideology.

A suggested framework – resource based strategy

I have used the resource based strategy framework as a starting place.  I know this may be consider a little old fashioned, but it works for me and if you have a better structure I would be very pleased to hear about it!  Using the resource based strategy approach we look at:

  • Resources
  • Capabilities
  • Competencies
  • Value Chain

that support adaptability and how we can use reward to support these factors.

Resources

What are the resources that support adaptability – how do we identify and cluster them?  Clearly people are the key.  But, what sort of people?  One could argue that it is the mavericks and free thinkers that lead the charge on adaptability.  Yet these types of people do not always fit or engage well with the corporate environment.  How do we reward the disrupters in our organisation without descending in to some Faustian pit of chaos?

Capabilities

How do we build organisational and personal capability to support adaptability?  What would the reward structure supporting such capability building look like?  Would we know it if we saw it, how would me measure it?  Organisational learning and routines would be key in building these capabilities – but it has always been an interesting question in the management of knowledge as to how we measure and reward organisational learning?  (Even ignoring the concept that organisations do not “learn” people do the learning).

To sustain competitive advantage our capabilities in adaptability must be hard to imitate – otherwise everyone will copy us and probability at a lower cost.    So we have to reward not only specific capabilities but those that are hard to imitate.  They may be hard to imitate because they are specific to our corporate environment – but to gain competitive advantage they must be so much more than just organisationally or sector specific.

Competencies

The competencies we need should flow out of the capabilities – or perhaps not?  What specific, observable, rewardable competencies are required and with what and how are we rewarding them?

Value chain

What are the internal and external value chains using our unique resources and capabilities that lead to adaptability advantage?  We must look to our clusters of resources and capabilities and how these are combined to give our competitive advantage.  What reward tools do we use to strengthen our value chains and the activities that support them; perhaps across enterprises and organisations, turning rigid barriers porous?

Conclusion

There are far too many questions and too few answers in this blog.  If the reward perspective; which is incredibility powerful in encouraging behaviour change can be harnessed, using the wisdom of crowds, to the task of “Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage” we will not only add enormous value to the process; but we will be key in ensuring its enduring success.  Over to you O wise crowds.