Instead of receiving a large, guaranteed salary, “the view is that there should be more accountability and more performance orientation to executive compensation,” said Aalap Shah, managing director.

“For employees that have some tenure with a company, a down round or depreciated value can result in a perverse incentive to go ‘next door’ and get a new package that is valued at a much lower stock price but [has a] higher wealth creation opportunity,” said Aalap Shah, managing director.

“One of the top five things an incoming CEO should be doing is succession planning, because that is a company that is truly looking at the future and is appropriately considering corporate governance,” said Aalap Shah, managing director.

"If the board approaches the CEO and says, 'We would like to talk about CEO succession,' and the CEO feels threatened by that, or if they actively resist that, it's time to find a new CEO," said Peter Thies, managing director.

“When you pay a CEO salary, and a cash bonus, that is real cash coming out of the company’s bank account,” said Jan Koors, senior managing director. “When an executive gets a share of stock, it’s like payment in kind.”

“Longer-term incentive plans covering three to four years also are becoming more common across healthcare organizations of all sizes,” said Alexander Yaffe, managing director.

“Aligning executive compensation with a company's performance allows the company to have pay coincide with how well the company's doing," said Wes Hart, managing director.

Especially when it comes to succession-planning discussions, P&C carriers “are thinking about those individuals' compensation programs in a really thoughtful way to make sure those individuals aren't enticed to leave the organization,” said Tim Dupuis, principal.

“You can certainly expect some scrutiny, so you want to make sure that you’re making prudent and defensible decisions about your executive pay determinations,” said Bill Reilly, managing director.

“In the last five to ten years, at almost all of my client companies, we’re constantly talking about pay for performance,” said Tim Dupuis, principal.

“What they want to do is make sure [cybersecurity] is becoming ingrained culturally, and the path to do that is by linking it to [executive] compensation,” said Aalap Shah, managing director.

According to a Pearl Meyer survey, 30 percent of US employers offered job titles as a reward last year. Big businesses particularly seem to like dry promotions: 40 percent of companies with annual revenue between $300 million and $1 billion played the dry promotion game.