For CEOs, base salaries often are only a small part of their pay.
There are stock awards and bonuses that often make up more of their compensation than their official paycheck. But when our research intern, Kelly Arndt, began looking at CEO compensation for publicly traded plastics processors, she also found company leaders who gave up part of their pay during 2020 to make sure employees were rewarded for their efforts as they turned up to make sure production continued throughout the pandemic.
Sometimes the entire leadership team cut their pay, sometimes just the CEO.
You can read her analysis of CEO pay here in the All Things Data blog.
As expected, when we spoke to top executives this year for our CEO special report, COVID-19 raised a lot of new challenges for leaders.
"I believe the pandemic and resulting actions required to operate safely and continuously challenged us to look at what was mission critical in our processes and what was not. … We created new processes, obsoleted some processes and created workarounds with creativity and resolve," said Andrew Thompson, CEO of Inhance.