Ask Slashdot: Would You Fire Your CEO? (cio.com)

As America celebrates a national holiday honoring organized labor, long-time Slashdot reader itwbennett shares this story about the modern workplace: Three years ago, talent management and human resources company Haufe U.S. created a workplace democracy in which C-level leadership is elected by the employees for a one-year term. In an interview with CIO, Kelly Max, who is currently serving as Haufe's CEO, explains how the company got to this point and what they've learned from the experience.

"If you're going to talk about how your employees 'own' the company, if you're going to tout how they all have a voice, why not go all the way and see what happens? Because why not? You already have people working for and with you who elect you every day, who either agree or disagree with you and follow you, so we wanted to make it very transparent," says Max.
This raises an inevitable question for Slashdot readers: would your own organization work as a democracy? So leave your answers here in the comments. Would your company's employees fire your CEO?

Comments

Why just the CEO?

[houghi]

Would you fire your cow orker? Would you fire the coffee lady or the person sitting at the reception?

To me it depends. Are they doing their job? If so, then no. If they don't, then yes. Not really that hard. What often is the problem is twofold.
1) The amount they get (including bonuses) is not realistic compared to the work they do compared to others. Should they earn more? Sure. Should they earn 200 times more? No.
2) It is often unclear of what his job is. Most of the time it is pretty simple, make as much money for the company as possible. Sometimes it is something else, like "increase the market position to ..." or "increase the market value of the shares".
And that might be something that is not correctly interpreted. Is it possible to achieve these goals and are they realistic or is he achieving them, then no, he should not be fired. What might need to be done is to change the goals.

And there lies the issue. Are the goals something we can agree with or are those the issue? Perhaps we do not want to increase the market value of the company for a buyout. We want to keep as much people employed as possible. Or we want to give better service to customers instead of lowering prices to increase the market share.
And if we are able to change the goals, is he still the best choice for these or not? If not, fire him. If so, all the better.

Just look at him as any employee and treat him the same. I get fired if I don't do my job and so should he, but first ask what that job actually is.

I can be the world best perl programmer and am hired to write perl, but if the rest works with c# what I do is meaningless and a waste of money.