Management - Leadership

Chief executive officers can benefit from mentoring, but given their high-tier positions, acquiring a mentor with sufficient experience from inside the company can be difficult. A new phenomenon is emerging in which CEOs obtain needed mentoring from veteran leaders outside the company.

A fictitional human resource management scenario is presented, with contributors providing advice. The scenario involves a drop in morale among employees working at the office, who perceive themselves at a disadvantage compared to employees who are working remotely.

Conventional salesperson appraisals only measure previous performance, which do not predict how an individual will perform in the future. As a result, underperformers may be overvalued and star performers may be undervalued.

As start-ups grow, their strategy shifts, and aligning the sales force with the new direction is critical. Incentive systems should be revised to focus representatives on the new goals during each phase of the shift. The marketing firm HubSpot illustrates how this plan can be developed and implemented.

Research shows that chief executive officers who were given high ratings for character by their employees produced an average of 9.35% return on assets for a two-year period. The four key values for these CEOs were integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion. CEOs with low character ratings averaged just 1.93%.

Tests on rats and humans required identifying patterns which included one variation involving spacing or orientation, or two variations involving both. Rats performed better than humans on the two-variation test because they are able to integrate information more quickly, unlike humans, who apply rules in processing.