This quick article was originally posted in Aman Singh’s columns at Vault.com and Forbes.com.
You still sweat the CSR report. You work to stay on top of best practices across the globe. And you are getting CSR integrated into the HR function since Elaine Cohen’s book, CSR for Human Resources, made it clear of the value. You may be an officer, a manager or even an individual contributor carrying out these programs and projects. And yet I believe it is not enough. Or maybe more accurately there are changes in what you are doing including stopping many of them.
Your business leaders likely believe there are global opportunities in societal and planetary terms. And yet they are often not working in the best way to produce results. Or cannot determine if they are. The next work CSR professionals are being called to take on is three fold. The first is educating the business on what will really make a difference in meaningful effects, not using best practices of others. The second arena is assessing progress in effective ways on those effects so that the business can tell if it is achieving results from its efforts. You will measure effects in the stakeholder’s terms and not that of business efforts. And finally, those two call for redesign efforts to be system wide and not fragmented, e.g.. supply-chain or packing design. It will be pervasive—in everything at the same time, all the time. In other words you will be expected to become even more of a businessperson; to play a role in imbedding responsibility into everything the business and each person does—to make it part of the DNA of the business.
This means a quintessential top line: ensuring the business is improving the health and life of customer (not just making sustainable offerings); fostering employee’s and supplier’s direct connection to markets thereby making unique, meaningful contribution (not determined by managers); improving capacity of Earth to regenerate itself, every where the business affects it (beyond just doing less harm); working with communities to express their uniqueness, becoming more economically resilient (not only giving back to social problems); and ensuring an enduring ethical return for investors. These work as a system to define The Responsible Business. You will increasingly be called on to become a resource and educator working with a system to re-imagine responsibility AS you do business.