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“Would you mind telling me your stock option plan at Maxim?” Carlos, the VP HR at Micrel asked me. “I want to do some benchmarking.” I had just joined the company as General Manager of one of three divisions the company had, so I was glad to help.
I walked Carlos through the grants I received every year I was at Maxim. There were 11 years of stock option grants. After I finished telling Carlos the grants I received, he said to me, “Is this really true?”
“Yes, it is,” I said.
“That’s very generous,” Carlos said to me.
“Well, I’m hoping Micrel will be equally generous with granting options,” I said.
Carlos was dead silent.
I had a lot of issues I needed to solve at that point in time because the division I inherited was a complete disaster. Fighting for stock options for my team, quite frankly, was not at the top of my list of issues.
If you want to retain your team, then you’ll grant them generous amounts of stock options.
As I said, I had a lot of issues I had to deal with to get this division turned around. Morale sucked. The product strategy was a disaster. The marketing strategy was even worse.
