Why an executive should sign the company’s standard employment-agreement form, with an addendum

In my contract-drafting class, we’ve been discussing employment agreements, studying (among others) those of Martha Stewart and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. I’ve long thought that “politically” it’d be advantageous for executives to sign their companies’ standard employment-agreement forms,* along with an addendum to cover executive-specific issues such as severance and the like. That way, the HR department could legitimately tell employees, “everybody signs this — even the executives sign it, along with an addendum with a few extra provisions arising from their positions.”

* This presupposes that all employees sign employment agreements. In the tech world that’s a fairly-common practice, mainly to nail down the employer’s ownership of IP rights, and secondarily to confirm employment-at-will.