A Triple Shot Of Succession | How Not To Regret A Career Move | The Stagnant Pay Gap For Female Managers

Plus: The Rhetorical Device That Makes Volodymyr Zelensky Move Hearts And Minds

Happy spring🌷, everyone. Time for new beginnings and, apparently, new CEOs. This week in Forbes Careers:

–At Starbucks, an old CEO is new again. What does that mean for succession?

–Two questions to avoid regretting a career move

–Jobs for Ukrainian refugees

Last week, Starbucks announced that Howard Schultz is coming back as CEO—again—marking his third tour of duty as the coffee chain’s chief executive. It’ll be on an interim basis this time, but it left many governance experts scratching their heads: Why wasn’t someone ready to step in? How could this hurt recruiting his successor? What does this have to do with Starbucks’ employees’ current unionizing campaign?

While the answers to those questions are unclear, when I spoke to them last week they all agreed that in most cases interim chief executives spark their own challenges, and not having someone ready can signal bigger issues. Such “boomerang” CEOs can “essentially operate in a repeat methodology,” one executive search consultant told me. “But things change. [The] solutions five years ago are not necessarily good solutions now.”

Of course, succession matters not just at the CEO level of a multinational coffee behemoth, but in any job and any sized business. Having a CEO retire without a permanent successor named is a red flag about the board, writes contributor George Bradt. Small businesses—or any company with family owners—can have their own outsized challenges, as any watcher of the Roy family from HBO’s Succession series knows, write Bill Conerly and Edward Segal. And all too often, writes contributor Dan Pontefract, the focus of succession planning remains on up-and-coming leaders who do nothing but devote all their time to work. What do you think: Is Schultz coming back an asset for Starbucks? Or is it a sign of other issues?

Work Smarter

Worried about regretting a career move? Ask these two questions in your job interview. 

Here are six tips for coping with a toxic work environment.

Over “hustle culture?” Four ways to shift to more realistic expectations and a more reasonable pace of life.

The most essential leadership skill right now might just be the ability to heal divides.

Increasing your negotiating skills starts with finding a way to build your confidence.

On Our Agenda

It’s not just you: A new survey of more than 9,600 U.S. employees released March 17 by Willis Towers Watson finds more than half are open to leaving their current job, and 44% were actively looking for a new one during the fourth quarter of 2021 or planned to in the first three months of this year. 

Toward a “corona-normal” future workplace: Better Life Lab, an initiative of the think tank New America, published a definitive new report about where work is headed with an on-point rundown of what’s in and out in our new world of work. What’s in: deep work, stable schedules and a “Chief People Officer focused on employee experience.” What’s out: interruptions, unpredictable “clopenings” and a “Head of HR focused on compliance.” 

Narrower for some, unchanged for managers: To mark last week’s Equal Pay Day, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a new study which shows that while the pay gap for women in the U.S. workforce has become smaller over time, the pay gap for women in management has not. “Since GAO last reported on this topic in 2010, using data from 2007, the percentage of managers who are women has increased by about 2 percentage points, and the pay gap between female and male managers has not changed,” reported the non-partisan agency. 

Help for hire: Thinking about a career as a management consultant—or need to hire one of your own? Forbes’ list of America’s best management consulting firms,in partnership with Statista, ranks the outfits recommended by some 1,300 senior executives.

Refugee resumes: The New York Times reports that job boards are overflowing with offers of employment for refugees from Ukraine in Europe. The country is recognized for its skilled workforce, the Times reports, boasting the largest tech engineering workforce in Central and Eastern Europe.

Book Club

Former Jamba Juice CEO James D. White’s new book, Anti-Racist Leadership, comes with a warning for any readers not ready to take the issue head-on: “This book is not apolitical. This book is explicitly anti-racist. … This book acknowledges that capitalism is built on a foundation of systemic racism,” reads the description of the book, co-authored with his daughter Krista. “There’s no room to straddle the fence,” White told me in an interview earlier this year. “We’ve come to this tipping point in our society where we really have to take a stance.” 

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