Many corporate boards, responding to shareholder and public pressure, are designing pay-for-performance plans to hold CEOs accountable. But there is often a crucial flaw in such schemes: They don’t pay for performance with integrity.
The omission—evident from compensation committee reports in top companies’ proxy statements—is striking. Corporations, after all, face unceasing pressures to make the numbers by bending the rules, and an integrity miss can have catastrophic consequences, including indictments, fines, dismissals, and collapse of market capitalization. Furthermore, performance with integrity creates the fundamental trust—inside and outside the company—on which corporate power is based.
A board should explicitly base a defined portion of the CEO’s cash compensation and equity grants on his or her success in handling the foundational task of fusing high performance with high integrity at all levels of the company. Why don’t boards do that? They may be uncertain about the meaning of integrity and how to assess its integration into financial performance.
迫于股東和公眾壓力，許多公司董事會都在努力建立與業(yè)績掛鉤的薪酬體系，以期CEO們恪盡職守。但是，此類薪酬體系往往存在一個致命缺陷：僅關(guān)注業(yè)績，而忽略了操守。
從頂級公司股東委托書所附的薪酬委員會報告可以看出，這種忽略是顯而易見的。畢竟，上市公司始終面臨著完成業(yè)績目標(biāo)的巨大壓力。為此，它們不惜違規(guī)違紀(jì)。然而，這種職業(yè)操守的缺失將導(dǎo)致各種災(zāi)難性后果，包括起訴糾紛、罰款賠付、解雇免職以及市值暴跌。殊不知，操守與業(yè)績并重，才能在公司內(nèi)外贏得最基本的信任，而公司力量也只是建立在信任的基礎(chǔ)之上。
在公司各個層面上將高尚操守和卓越業(yè)績相融合是CEO的基本任務(wù)，董事會應(yīng)該在CEO的現(xiàn)金和股權(quán)報酬中劃出一定比例，專門與CEO在上述任務(wù)上的表現(xiàn)掛鉤。但董事會為何沒有這樣做呢？這可能是因為他們自己對操守的含義也并不確定，更不知道該如何考核職業(yè)操守與財務(wù)業(yè)績的融合了。
那么，董事會要設(shè)計重操守的績效薪酬制，第一步要做的就