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Apr 23, 2013

Outward Trappings

Written by Anthony Demangone

Here are a few interesting articles.

  • You'll make more money if you sound like James Earl Jones. (Wall Street Journal)

The median CEO, with a  125.5 Hz vocal frequency, earned $3.7 million, ran a $2.4 billion company and was 56 years old. You can listen to a variety of frequencies here. (For perspective, Duke researcher Bill Mayew says that James Earl Jones’s voice is around 85Hz, and Gilbert Gottfried’s tops 200Hz.)

Not bad, but researchers found that executives with voices on the deeper (that is, lower-frequency) end of the scale earned, on average, $187,000 more in pay and led companies with $440 million more in assets.

But the biggest thing we filter for is cultural fit. Those tools help us, but it can get down to more subtle things. Peggy Eddens [WSFS' executive vice president and chief human capital officer] and I consider what people keep in their offices. If there are lots of pictures of friends and family and things that speak to teamwork and organizational accomplishments, it means they're relationship- and teamwork-oriented, and that bodes well for fitting in our culture.

If their office is filled with mementos of personal achievements, that probably means they have a lower likelihood of success at WSFS. If they determine what's going on by looking at reports, numbers, charts, and information from their direct reports, that's not a good sign either. But if they talk to people on the front lines and develop trusting relationships so they can hear firsthand what's going right and what's not, that means they'll likelier be successful in our organization.

I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list--the largest corporations in the United States--asking each company questions about its CEO. The heads of big companies are, as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5'9" that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. 

OK, I'm getting nervous.  But...then there's this.

Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine, dominant and, in some cases, to have greater leadership potential than those with longer locks or with thinning hair, according to a recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

So, is there anything to any of this?  Thoughts?

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