Legal finagling often leaves both workers and organizational leaders worse off over the long term. The complex realities facing corporate decision makers, will often necessitate making decisions that have potential impacts on many stakeholders, all of which have unique needs and protections in the law, and some of which will contradict one another. As well, in recent years, corporations have been called out to mitigate the growing need to be a respectable corporate citizen when it comes to figuring out what kind of pension plan works. This involves thinking about what is not only legally allowed, but legally responsible to the company itself.
Here’s where leadership becomes vitally important to pension discussions.
It’s a long term game. The law does not necessarily have an effect on a company’s viability in terms of corporate social responsibility, but if there is a clear breach, then the law will intervene. Companies can, in this way, operate within the law without having a clear and implemented ethical pension plan in place, which means that there are still many grey areas in which companies may choose to modify their activities to either feed their perceived need for profits, or engage in positive and long term thinking about their role in broader society over the course of their market involvement.
In our new paper on leveraging the law for pension leadership in 2019, we explore why business leaders need to create their own sustainable pension plans, relying on their own ideals and values. Pension leadership decisions need to incorporate new definitions of fiduciary duty and the public trust that take into account both local and global ideals, as the law shifts to accommodate new definitions of legal business responsibilities around the world.
At Marris Miller, we know that leaders have to make some serious decisions about how they will resolve potential conflicts of interests and opportunities, to build positive outcomes for their pension plans. We’ll help you to discern between what you have to do, what you can do, and what you ought to do to optimize your pension plans in the wake of new and changing legislation.