An Employee

Your brand is a traditional catalog brand. You have a Director that you think highly of ... you pay her $100,000 a year and a 20% bonus.

A digital brand offers your Director $150,000 a year and a 40% bonus.

What do you do?

Do you let her walk because your compensation manager has rigid salary bands that must be adhered to?

Do you promote the individual?

Do you match the salary?

If you're in the catalog and/or retail industry, the answer has all-too-often been ... "Let Her Walk".

And for a decade, we've let the brains drain out of the building. When the brains drain out of the building, we lose our ability to modernize our businesses.

I ran across an instance last month ... I was told that the company lacked creativity, and didn't have the staff required to do new/interesting work. The compensation team had salary bands, and was not terribly willing to accommodate unique circumstances.

If we want to modernize and dig out of our challenges, we're going to have to make exceptions. It's not enough to pay somebody at the top end of a salary band. We're going to have to create our own bands for exceptional/gifted/necessary employees.

Or we can accept tepid results, right?