As coronavirus takes hold of the global economy, great CEO leadership is more important than ever

Описание: Running a big company is never easy.

Spend too much on R&D and investors scream for not buying back stock. Do a massive share repo and people say you should be investing in the business. (Sometimes the same people complain about both.)

But that’s all piddly stuff now.

Today, CEOs are making decisions about whether people can put food on the table. About whether people get horribly sick. Or even die.

This is a time for leaders to be measured and defined. Did you step up? Or did you step down? Here’s some of the calculus:

Start with employees. CEOs need to keep them safe. But some of them have to go to work. They probably should be paid more. Others can work from home, and you need to try not to lay them off. Maybe cut their pay, but keep ‘em on the payroll.

And then you want to help. You want to give to hospitals, medical workers, food banks, the sick, the homeless, those in prison. They’re all coming to you with their hands out, and God knows, everyone of them has a once-in-a-lifetime case they’re making. How much money can your company afford to give?

And then there’s the business. Customers may desperately need product, or maybe desperately can’t pay. Suppliers, same thing. They might have nothing for you, the supply chain has dried up. Or they may want to get paid now, no terms, or even in advance.

And then you may want to pivot your operation to donating your food instead of selling it, or to making masks, or ventilators or hand sanitizer. And you want to do this before President Trump points his tweet gun at your head.

And then there are the wolves at your door. The bankers, the analysts and shareholders. They want to know, how bad is it going to be? Can you pay us? Is the dividend safe? What are you doing to keep the stock up?

Got insomnia yet?

Rare opportunity to step up
Thinking about all that. I touched base with a number of executives this week to see how they’re coping. I asked Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg if it’s all a big balancing act.

“Not now,” she told me. “We think it's our responsibility in these economic times to step up and do as much as we can. How that impacts our business is just not what's most important here. We are paying all of our employees, all of our contractors, whether they can work, whether they can't work, whether they're home, whether they're sick, we have the ability to do that.”

And so are other big companies like Starbucks which just extended pay for employees while its stores are closed, provided enhanced mental health benefits and donated millions to fight COVID-19. And Walmart which is paying $550 million to hourly workers during the pandemic. And Hilton which is waiving its cancellation fees. And Microsoft which will continue to pay its hourly workers and its vendors’ too. Mars is committing $20 million to fight the disease. Sony is establishing a $100 million relief fund. (Oh! A competition!) And get this. CEOs are taking pay cuts—some to zero. The last time you saw that was when?

There are countless other examples too. Sure, these companies aren’t perfect. None of them are batting 1,000% here and maybe you think they’re doing it just to look good, but understand all this costs real money.

I asked Hans Vestberg the CEO of Verizon, Yahoo’s parent company who supervises me (a zillion levels up the org chart) along with 135,399 other employees, about prioritizing.

“I've tried to manage the four company stakeholders; employees, customers, society and shareholders and seeing that we have a fair balance,” said Vestberg, sporting a Verizon T-shirt during a Skype interview from his home. “In times like these when it's a crisis, how much time you spend can be a little bit tilted. In my morning sessions with my executive team, we go over the stakeholders to see what we can do for employees, what we are doing for customers. And we decide there with them what we to do for society. And then of course, any financial impact.”
What does that mean practically? Well, Vestberg is giving extra pay to mission critical employees who have to go into work, he’s giving customers more choices for free and along with his competitors big and small, signed the Keep Americans Connected Pledge, an FCC initiative to “ensure that Americans do not lose their broadband or telephone connectivity” because of the crisis.
For more on this article click here:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/what-i...