Network – Learn – Lead

April 2007

It was a very energizing moment to look out on 500 corporate citizenship practitioners attending The Center's annual conference in March and realize how quickly this area in business is growing and how many new folks are taking up the mantle within their company.

The buzz and energy in the meeting rooms and corridors came from the intense networking that was going on inside and outside the sessions. Networking is sometimes an overlooked and underappreciated form of learning. I would suggest that, given the early stage of development of the corporate citizenship movement, networking may be the primary learning mode for those trying to get up to speed and keep current with the ever-changing state of the art.

For most who lead their company's corporate citizenship efforts, it is a fairly lonely outpost. They are caught between external forces and internal politics and acceptability.

On the outside the complexity of multiple stakeholders and the rapidly changing environment present distinct challenges of understanding and communicating the issues, framing them within a weighted threat/opportunity framework, and managing the delicate relationships of these stakeholders.

From the inside the corporate citizenship manager is faced with enrolling the organization in a strategic vision and strategy, and executing a strategy aligned with the business. This is a daunting task under any circumstance, but in today's environment it can really take a whole team to adequately manage and address these challenges and issues. 

But guess what? For most of you there is not going to be a sudden infusion of new positions, added colleagues, and increased revenues. Corporate citizenship, like any function in today's business, is under extreme budget pressure and is having to manage more with less.

Given this as a starting point, there are three immediate challenges that serve as guide posts. To achieve success, each and every corporate manager has to network, learn, and lead.

Network

Trying to manage a company's corporate citizenship by oneself is done at great peril. Too often individuals wind up learning from scratch and by the seat of their pants. They have had little if any education and training in this area, and there are few road maps to guide their development or well established benchmarks that can monitor their progress. Corporate citizenship is still in an early stage of development, which means there isn't a solid foundation of knowledge and an established set of competencies that can quickly bring the manager up to speed.

If you could fly to 30,000 feet and take a bird's eye view, you'd see hundreds of managers trying to figure out how to manage and create an effective strategy — all struggling in isolation. Ironically, there is an incredible amount of innovative practice and strategy emerging within companies, but few outlets that allow this to be shared with others.
 
That's why becoming part of a network is a common sense way of building knowledge and linking into the finest thinking, newest innovation, and best practices that are being developed as we speak. This is why The Center has created networks such as the Community Involvement Leadership Roundtable, the Business Network on Integrating Corporate Citizenship, and the Global Leadership Network. It is why we offer webinars and build interactivity into our executive education courses and certificate programs.

We know it's all about linking practitioners and managers to each other. Allowing corporate citizenship managers to go it alone makes no sense and does a disservice to their company and their professional development.

Learn

The challenge and opportunity of linking into networks is to learn. Not surprisingly, The Center was established almost 25 years ago to provide executive education training.

There are many challenges regarding learning in the corporate citizenship space. Information, innovations, new practices, benchmarks, surveys, and other research reports are now being produced at an incredible pace. Just look at the spate of new publications, conferences, and reports, not to mention individual company social and environmental reports. We estimate that the actual volume of information has doubled in just the last two years and will most likely double again over the next two. Put this in a global context, and you could spend all day just trying to keep abreast of the field.

And this is only referring to the external world. The challenge of gathering and assessing internal data within the firm is equally daunting. So much more business data are now relevant and material to strategic corporate citizenship. The use of internal networks is equally important for those driving corporate citizenship. Both soft and hard data become essential in formulating the citizenship strategy and keeping the firm in a leading position on corporate citizenship. This is also tied to new competencies that are required for today's corporate citizenship professional such as communication skills, organizational change theory and evaluation competencies. Not to develop these new competencies is a disservice to both the individual and its business.

That's why The Center has recently revamped its entire executive program, basing it on seven key competencies and adding a new certificate program focused on managing corporate citizenship.

Learning is a key ingredient for any company trying to make progress, innovate, and upgrade its corporate citizenship strategy and practice. Corporate citizenship is not simply a compliance procedure, and so the process and pathway toward building the organizational vision and strategy reflect a relatively complex challenge that will not be found in books or even consultants' models at this stage of development. Learning has to be active and tied to those who are in various stages of development in building their corporate citizenship. Consequently, making learning an essential component of citizenship development is crucial to success.

Lead

Finally, it does little to network and learn if it goes no further than benefiting the individual. The benefit of these activities is developing the capacity to lead — inside and outside the company.

Every company has a steep learning curve regarding corporate citizenship—especially around risk/opportunity analysis, the value proposition, and strategic direction. All of the benefits of networking and learning should accrue to the whole organization. I was impressed, for example, when I recently saw one of our Japanese partners who lead a group of Japanese businesses to examine corporate citizenship in China, come back to Tokyo and report out to the wider business community what they learned. 

If corporate citizenship is going to be driven into the heart of the business and its operations, those responsible for corporate citizenship have a teaching and mentoring role that is critical to its development. This extends to other stakeholders up and down the supply chain and across the globe.

That's why The Center will continue to examine how leadership manifests itself in corporate citizenship activities. Our research on integration revealed that middle managers can be important catalysts for change when they find creative and effective ways to lead. (View our report, Integration: Critical Link for Corporate Citizenship; Strategies and Stories from Eight Companies.) The Center has also been studying senior executives and in our recent work Step Up: A Call for Business Leadership in Society, we challenge CEOs to exhibit more visible leadership.

So, at the end of the day, networking, learning, and leading become great markers for those trying to stay at the top of their game. Although it is challenging to keep up with such an explosion of growth, it is at the same time an unprecedented moment, filled with the excitement of innovation and more importantly, perhaps a breakthrough in linking profits, principles, and social good. By taking advantage of assets and resources scattered across such a broad terrain and turning them into an opportunity for growth and development both personally and organizationally is, simply put, smart business. 

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