Find Your Resource

Many of you reading this have boards on which most directors are not employees of your company, and that’s the situation at the NCEO too. Our board has 21 outside directors and two insiders. Each of the NCEO’s directors makes the board stronger.

Economic turbulence forces business leaders to question things they could previously take for granted, from the reliability of suppliers to the certainty of customers honoring spoken agreements, from the ability to fill open positions to the continued tenure of key employees.

Employee-owned companies outperform, on average, non-employee-owned companies. The reason is that employee ownership creates a built-in advantage when it comes to avoiding two fundamental mistakes.

Business advisors sometimes ask company owners to do a mental exercise: Think about how they would manage their companies if they knew they were planning to sell in a year. The limits of this idea, but a similar mental exercise is one you might want to do.

You may have seen the research about the relationship between organizational success and psychological safety. It was based on an intensive study of work groups, and it found that the most effective groups were the ones in which everyone talked. The closer a group got to an equal distribution of the number of minutes each person talked, the better the group’s performance. (We wrote about it in the May 2022 issue.)

When we were designing the Fall ESOP Forum, our aim was to make sure that no matter what challenges people came with, they would leave with solutions.

Like many of you, the NCEO has been posting job announcements. In April and May, we hired three additional staff people, so you’ll be seeing new faces when you call, join a webinar, or come join us in San Diego for the Fall ESOP Forum.

Thirty-nine years ago, we held our first annual conference. We had 175 attendees. Last year we sold out at over 1,900; this year, we were on track to sell out even sooner at over 2,000. The conference is one of the most important ways we help make employee ownership grow and thrive.

By Loren Rodgers, NCEO Executive Director

NCEO research in this newsletter (see page 4) shows a mixed trend for private-company ESOPs—a slight decrease (1.2%) in plans from 2014 to 2019, accompanied by a larger change, positive this time, in active participants (an increase of 5.7%) over the same period.