Roadblocks to Better Jobs
We are in one of the hottest job markets in over two decades so a number of highly qualified employees are rejecting more attractive offers due to four potential "deal-killers," according to Sanford Rose Associates (SRA), an executive search firm in Akron, Ohio.
These deal killers are family concerns, relocation issues, timing problems and employer counter-offers.
Family concerns top the list because they are the most sensitive and least likely to be voluntarily discussed. "When a candidate boasts that a working spouse will gladly accompany him or her to the ends of the earth, that may be more wishful thinking than reality," says George Snider, SRA's president. Children - especially those in their junior or senior year of high school - can pose another obstacle to taking a job in another market.
SRA (http://www.sanfordrose.com) has 55 offices in the U.S. and Asia.
(SRA, 317/848-9987)
Cracking the Glass Ceiling
Strategies for boosting the low representation of women in top pharmaceutical industry positions were offered at a roundtable executive meeting hosted by the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association last month. These strategies have strong application for women in all sectors of healthcare.
Only eight percent of pharmaceutical corporate officers are women, less than the 10.6 percent estimate for all Fortune 500, reported HBA President Charlene Prounis, citing a 1997 study by Catalyst, a research organization specializing in women's career issues. Prounis also offered opposing views on why women haven't advanced to executive ranks that ranged from male executives attributing it to women's perceptions of cultural impediments and stereotypical attitudes.
Other issues that were seen as barriers to women's career advancement include:
- lack of mentors;
- women's underestimation of the importance of informal networks;
- built-in company biases that reward aggressive, competitive models of behavior rather than collaborative, empowering styles of management; and
- difficulties in relocating families.
There are solutions:
- discuss women's advancement overtly and making it a primary business issue;
- reevaluate how the system rewards leadership competencies by considering empowerment, collaboration and negotiation;
- encourage formal and informal mentoring, including workshops for senior female employees sharing their strategies with junior women;
- hold career pathway workshops at field sales meetings; and
- encourage women to pursue new assignments, a prerequisite for career advancement, while seeking ways to minimize relocation.
(HBA, Susan Youdovin, 973/746-8183)
Non-Profit Executive Salaries
Non-profit executive compensation can be extremely attractive, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a Washington, D.C.-based bi-weekly newspaper for non-profit organizaitions. Consider the top wage-earner of 1997, Wayne Isom, chairman of the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Cornell University, who was paid $1,728,999, plus benefits worth $45,431.
The Chronicle surveyed 137 executives at 230 hospitals, universities, big charities and foundations and found that, on average, leaders were paid $209,914 last year - an increase of 2.9 percent from 1996.
The report identified the highest paid leaders by category; the healthcare-related executives are:
- Hospitals: John W. Rowe, president of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, earned $1,163,875 plus $216,250 in benefits.
- Health charities: Robert J. Beall, CEO of Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Bethesda, Md., earned $337,390 plus $33,985 in benefits.
(The Chronicle, 202/466-1200)