More than ever, women are achieving outstanding levels of professional success. Whether CEOs, board members, entrepreneurs or high-performers, women are a game-changing force in the global economy.
The first step in playing the money game and winning is to learn your company's compensation philosophy. The compensation philosophy used for the broad-based population of employees will mirror the compensation philosophy used for executives, minus the use of various reward vehicles.
Compensation--especially executive compensation--encompasses an entire rewards package, including base salary, annual incentives, long-term incentives, deferred compensation, supplemental benefits, supplemental retirement plans, severance, and other perks.
Eight Common Compensation Elements
Companies implement individual pay vehicles to achieve their philosophy. Think of it as pieces of a puzzle. Although many of these vehicles can be used for all employees, the following items are commonly included to deliver a comprehensive executive compensation program. Each element serves the purpose of attracting, retaining and motivating executive-level employees, as well as minimizing risk and liability.
1. Base Salary.
2. Annual Incentives (bonus).
3. Long-term Incentives.
4. Severance Plans.
5. Change-in-control Agreements/Policy.
6. (Supplemental) Nonqualified Health and Welfare Benefits.
7. (Supplemental) Nonqualified Retirement Plans.
8. Perquisites.
Knowledge is power. Knowing what you can, could or should be asking for significantly improves your negotiating position.
Ostensibly, companies want to reward employees competitively for their efforts--hence the term pay-for-performance. Therefore, most companies create reasonable, competitive, transparent and accountable total rewards (compensation and benefit) programs that both support and promote its business strategies to ensure each employee and stakeholder reaps the benefits.
When Michelle Howard, a vice admiral, was summoned last year by the head of the Navy, she thought he'd be discussing a new assignment. Instead, he wanted to nominate her to the rank of four-star admiral—a position no woman in U.S. naval history had ever achieved.
Stunned, Howard, now 54, went home to think about whether she had the right skills "to move the Navy forward," she recalls. Her husband of 25 years, Wayne Cowles, a retired Marine and fellow Desert Storm veteran, encouraged her to accept. Her 81-year-old mother, who lives with them, said, "You need to do this."
And so Howard got ready to break a gender barrier. When she called to order her women's four-star shoulder boards, the receptionist told her, "Uh, there aren't any," she recalls. "I go, 'Yeah, I thought that might be the case.'
In today's economy, companies must do more with less. Providing executive coaches to high-potential performers is one way to get the most from untapped talent.
Unfortunately, many executives select a coach based on referrals from colleagues, without adequately considering their personal needs. The person sponsoring the engagement usually will send a few coaches for interviews and ask the executive to select one based on a good “fit.”
But without a greater understanding of what happens in a coaching relationship, it’s difficult to make a fair assessment and pick a good match.
In Your Executive Coaching Solution (Davies-Black), Joan Kofodimos says a coach should help the person-being-coached to achieve most of the following:
Strike a balance between supporting and challenging yourself
Maintain a confidential and safe environment to become more self-aware
Influence how others view you
Pick a coach for support along with the ability to challenge you
You’re more likely to open up to a coach who creates a safe, confidential and trusting environment. Coaches accomplish this in part by demonstrating they understand and respect your interests, values and concerns.
But coaches must also provide challenges that motivate you to perform beyond your habitual behaviors; confront you directly, yet nonjudgmental, with the impact of your actions; and probe the motives and assumptions underlying your behaviors.
Using a Coaching Relationship Well
The way you select your coach is significant. Pick a coach who can raise issues impartially and show you how your behaviors affect others.
For Help in Developing Feedback Loops
At home, your spouse, partner or significant other will not provide you with critical feedback because he or she knows that it is more important to maintain a loving relationship versus communicating negative feedback. According to positive psychology expert John Gottman, there is a secret formula in relationships. Gottman’s research revealed that marriages are significantly more likely to succeed when the interactions between the couple are five to one, positive to negative. The secret formula is simple: Praise your mate often.
Your peers at work will rarely share authentic feedback with you. However, your coach should help you develop the skills needed to create relationships in which you can ask for honest feedback in an ongoing basis from your peers at work.
Instead of encouraging dependence, your coach should teach you how to self-coach and manage your personal development in the future. After an initial assessment or two, a good coach shows you how to form links with colleagues and how you can help them frame useful, specific feedback instead of making vague judgments.
Your coach will teach you to ask for feedback and manage conversations without being defensive. This includes learning how to determine which feedback is relevant and valid while prioritizing issues that you need to address and figuring out how to handle them.
For Help in Clarifying Values and Purpose
Skilled coaches help you clarify your developmental, career and life goals. Your coach may also teach you how to sort out your needs, wants, concerns and boundaries in any particular situation, which allows you to become more comfortable and act more consistently when completing goals, even in complex circumstances.
Here is what one of my executive clients had to say about clarifying his values and purpose during the coaching process:
"Have you ever watched, listened, and felt someone tuning a guitar or other string instrument? That is what it is like to have the good fortune of connecting with John Agno. He is a living tuning fork and you're that string instrument. Today, I have greater self awareness, am more in step with my calling, and better able to appreciate the journey, including the valleys, than ever before. Thanks, John for helping me get attuned with my life signature."
Structuring the Development Process
Your coach should help you manage each step of the coaching process:
Commit to fully engage in the coaching process
Get input from others
Review feedback and your personal development
Hold regular coaching meetings to learn and practice new behaviors
Implement behaviors in your daily work and personal life
Assess actual results in your personal and work lives
For Guidance in Allowing Your Perspectives to Evolve
Your coach should help you break free of any limiting beliefs and assumptions. A significant shift in perspective can occur when your coach:
Provides an additional viewpoint
Plays devil’s advocate
Looks at situations as others might
Asks questions to allow you to reach certain “aha” moments
Suggests potential approaches to put new discoveries into practice
Help in Learning New Concepts and Skills
Good coaches help you arrive at a mental model of what leadership means, what it takes to be effective and the key skills required. Your coach might help you develop skills relevant to your particular situation and assist you with strategies toward implementation of workplace interactions…to sharpen your interpersonal skills.
Confidentiality
Your coach will help you effectively navigate risky waters filled with sensitive, confidential information. Because there are no other relationships that must be protected beyond the coaching relationship, both you and your coach can say the “unsayable” to each other in a safe, confidential and trusting environment; which helps you to reach an area of self-awarenesswhere there is great leverage for developmental change.
Assistance in helping you Influence Others’ Views of You
You learn how to help colleagues notice the changes you make by inviting them to become involved in your development through providing you with feedback in specific situations. An experienced coach can help you influence others’ views by:
Positively managing relationships
Assessing key colleagues’ willingness to share feedback from participating with you in customer and internal conversations
Helping you solicit ongoing feedback on relevant behaviors
Roles a Coach Should Not Play
A good coach will consciously avoid roles that hinder your ability to build self-coaching skills and take independent action:
Cheerleader: Coaches should not give positive reinforcement from the sidelines for everything you do.
Therapist: Coaches should not deal strictly with your personal adjustment and psychological issues, even if they’re qualified and licensed to do so.
Shadow Manager: Coaches should not advise you on business decisions or act on your behalf.
One-Sided Advocate: Coaches must look at all viewpoints and resist taking one position.
Caution: Beware
Since the coach selection process is self-selecting, it is most important that you make your decision wisely.
Intuition is something we rely heavily on to gauge the course of our actions. Intuition is fast, automatic, unreasoned thought and feelings. However, we can be blind-sighted by costly intuitive errors when we over feel and under think.
Beware of deciding upon the look and feel of a good fit. Be sure to balance feeling comfortable with the person against your need to be challenged as you grow. You must believe the coach you select will help you implement positive change.
Mothers are less likely to be hired for jobs, to be perceived as competent at work or to be paid as much as their male colleagues with the same qualifications.
For men, meanwhile, having a child is good for their careers. They are more likely to be hired than childless men, and tend to be paid more after they have children.
These differences persist even after controlling for factors like the hours people work, the types of jobs they choose and the salaries of their spouses. So the disparity is not because mothers actually become less productive employees and fathers work harder when they become parents — but because employers expect them to.
The data about the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus present a clear-cut look at American culture’s ambiguous feelings about gender and work.
The data could be boiled down to hardheaded career advice: Men should festoon their desks with baby photos and add PTA membership to their résumés, and women should do the opposite. But ultimately, the solution is a realization that in the 21st century, male and female employees are not so different from one another.
A majority of top-ranked women at companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index aren't in the kinds of operational jobs--think division heads of senior managers in charge of key product lines--that usually lead to the corner office. Rather, 55% of them are in functional roles--top lawyers, finance chiefs, and heads of human resources--according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
About 94% of the S&P 500 CEOs held senior operations positions immediately before ascending to the top job, and the relative scarcity of women overseeing product lines or entire businesses has slowed their advance to the pinnacle. The data suggest that the next generation of female executives is not positioned to capitalize on the growing recognition by many companies of the lack of diversity within their executive ranks.
Women make up about half of the total U.S. workforce. The 24 female chief executives in the S&P 500 today, although a record, is still less than 5% of the total. In the layers just beneath the top job, women account for about 8% of the five highest paid executives at each S&P 500 company, according to proxy filings. About 70 of those top-ranked non-CEO women were in operating jobs, based on data compiled by Bloomberg.
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