Each year, the website Glassdoor compiles a list of the best CEOs in the country. How does your’s compare?

By Steve Moran

Each year, the website Glassdoor compiles a list of the best CEOs in the country. This year they also did a deep dive into the data to figure the attributes of great CEOs. Some of the results are surprising. They also have significant implications for the senior living industry.  

  1. Company Culture Matters — This is no surprise and will be the subject of a stand-alone article. The key parts of culture are: A) How good senior leadership is; B) How employees view career opportunities; C) The quality of compensation and benefit pay packages.   
  2. Sub-Optimal Work-Life Balance — This is the most counterintuitive of all the findings. You are reading that correctly. When the work-life balance is out of favor on the work side, employees are happier. 

    The folks at Glassdoor believe the reason for this is that when people have less than optimal work-life balance, they have fallen in love with the company’s narrative about being the best, changing the world, being a cool place to work or whatever their story is.

    This has huge implications for senior living companies because it suggests that folks are willing to work harder than average for a cause they believe in and a leader that believes it too. Too often the corporate stories are unique or powerful, but when they are unique and powerful the result is team members who work harder and love their boss.

  3. Performance Matters — Everyone likes to work for a winner. Therefore, if your senior living company is successful, your team members will love working there and they will love their CEO. Don’t think that because you are privately held, your team doesn’t really know. They do.  

    They see how you spend money . . . or don’t. They see how stressed out you are . . . or not stressed out. They hear the stories you tell . . . or they don’t. No suggestion that you should mislead and if in fact you are not doing great, the best that you can do is be honest about it. Yet, at the end of the day, people love being on a winning team way more than a losing team or even a team ties the game.

  4. CEO Pay Matters —  In general, the higher the CEO pay the lower the job satisfaction. Again, don’t assume that because you are privately held they don’t know. While the exact amount of money you make may be a secret, they will know how you live your life. The “sort of” exception to this is when the company is highly successful. In other words, while it has an impact, much of the impact is offset by the overall company success.
  5. Founders Matter — In just about every case, the founder CEO was more highly regarded than a successor CEO. This is not surprising. It takes a huge amount of passion to found a company and that passion is contagious. Besides being contagious it carries with it a huge amount of loyalty. If you are not the founding CEO it is not a lost cause. You just need a founder’s mentality . . . the drive to succeed and to create.

What Didn’t Matter Much

There were several things that you might expect to matter in CEO popularity that had essentially no impact. They include:

  • Gender

  • Age

  • Education

How does your CEO stack up?

If you are a CEO, how do you stack up?

Click on the button below to download the entire report from the Glassdoor Website: