Prejudices against corporate CEOs are tenacious. They are wealthy, prioritize money, and have big egos. However, Canadians believe that a majority of them are competent and want to do good with their business. Despite this, Canadians complain that executive decision-making processes disproportionately take into account their shareholders rather than the community.
These are some of the findings revealed to us by a major Canadian survey of CEOs carried out by the firm Léger in conjunction with the Pôle D of HEC Montréal.
Pôle D for Manager, Manager and Strategic Management is a new research center entirely dedicated to the profession of CEO, which is not limited to strategy or leadership alone. It is co-chaired by two researchers from HEC and two CEOs of Quebec organizations who supervise a team of ten researchers.
“We want to measure the perception of Canadians and Quebecers towards business leaders and their expectations of what the CEO of the future should be,” explains Alaric Bourgoin, professor at HEC and co-director of Pôle D.
The survey conducted last fall with 1,500 respondents, weighted in particular by age and region, is the first in an annual series that will assess the evolution over the years of the population’s perceptions of business leaders.
This first survey of CEOs gives us a position of Canadian public opinion very well established on the traditional prejudices associated with it, while 93% of respondents say they are rich, 89% that they prioritize money , 85% think they have a big ego and 55% think they are trying to mislead people.
On a more positive note, 76% of respondents believe that CEOs want to do good with their company and 76% think they know what they have to do and 74% consider them competent.
It is worth noting and which is repeated in almost all the questions of this national survey, Quebec respondents have a more positive perception of business leaders than those in the rest of Canada.
Thus, 76% of Quebec respondents believe that CEOs have a big ego, compared to 85% for Canada as a whole; 75% think they hide their emotions, compared to 81%, 44% think they want to mislead people, compared to 55%, and 56% think they are trustworthy, compared to 48% of Canadian respondents.
CEO priorities
According to the survey, 83% of respondents believe that Canadian CEOs manage their companies to satisfy their shareholders first, 72% for the management of their company, 62% for their customers… and only 8% for the community.
This perception of business leaders is the one that is most likely to change according to respondents when asked what their vision of the CEO of the future would be.
We want business leaders to become more involved in their community, to better embody the issues that mobilize society in general, such as environmental protection, equity, inclusion and diversity.
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Alaric Bourgoin, professor at HEC and co-director of Pôle D
“We want CEOs who are more citizens,” summarizes Alaric Bourgoin.
This popular will is not unrelated to the growing adherence of investors to ESG criteria, which are campaigning for greater openness by companies and their management to management that takes greater account of environmental, social and sound governance criteria.
Leaders should not manage for the good of their shareholders alone, but should also consider all stakeholders, be it their employees, their suppliers, their customers or the communities and environment in which their company operates. .
“The survey also reveals the prominence of the concerns of the rising generation, the millennials who have gone from child-kings to consumer-kings. They want companies to be connected to the values of the community and this is reflected in the results of the study”, underlines for his part Jean-Marc Léger, president of Léger and co-responsible for the survey on CEOs.
The element of the study that surprised Alaric Bourgoin the most was the Canadian population’s great ignorance of CEOs: 34% of respondents were unable to name one and 18% answered I don’t know, for a total of 52%.
Loblaw’s CEO, Galen Weston, obtained the best score in terms of unaided awareness, collecting 14% of respondents across Canada.
Curiously, the CEOs who obtained the next best scores are Pierre Karl Péladeau with 6% and Sophie Brochu with 3%, thanks to their unique notoriety among Quebec respondents.
Of the next five CEOs who obtained a result of 2%, there are two other Quebecers, Geoff Molson, president of the Canadiens, and Louis Vachon, former CEO of the National Bank.
“In Quebec, CEOs are perceived more positively. We are a small village and the notoriety of the CEOs is greater because they are not American leaders like there are many in the rest of Canada,” observes Jean-Marc Léger.
It will now be interesting to see in the next Pole D surveys how CEOs will be able to amend their management approach to take into account the expectations of the community in order to better embody the role expected of them.