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October 2006
Companies are waking up to the notion that alignment between strategy and corporate citizenship is the way to create sustainable value for both business and society.
The work undertaken by the Global Leadership Network (GLN), a group initially formed by 10 of the world’s leading corporations and now inviting additional corporations to join, shows that there is a strong desire to more fully understand how to achieve this alignment.
Since the GLN's launch in February this year, the group has doubled in size, attracting leading companies from around the world and from a variety of industries. Spreading across four continents, the network has received commitments from the telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, oil and financial services sectors, among others. In addition to IBM and the other the founding members (3M, Cargill, CEMEX, Diageo, FedEx, GE, GM, Omron and Manpower) new members include Nokia, Pfizer, ING-Americas and SK Telecom. GLN has also successfully launched its first regional network in Brazil which includes five companies: Alcoa, Philips, BASF, Santander Banespo and Vivo. At the same time, many organizations are approaching GLN to help champion the initiative in their respective regions.
The companies that founded GLN have invested in the development of tools and services to help achieve excellence in corporate citizenship. The GLN’s goal is to bring together hundreds of other companies that share a vision of and commitment to corporate citizenship excellence.
The corporate citizenship planning and assessment tool
One concrete result of this investment is a specially designed online corporate citizenship planning and assessment tool available exclusively to GLN members.
This tool takes the GLN framework outlined at right and offers users a way to diagnose how aligned their corporate citizenship strategies are with their business priorities.
Designed as both a learning experience and a benchmarking system, the tool provides users access to good practice company case study examples and quantitative self-assessment scores.
The online tool enables several people within one company to undertake assessments of their corporate citizenship performance at the same time, allowing for business unit specific assessments and internal benchmarking comparisons.
A tool in three stages
Users complete three stages of the corporate citizenship planning and assessment tool. The stages ask for quantitative self-assessments while providing reflection prompts and case studies that allow the user to benchmark against other companies and assess their corporate citizenship drivers of business strategy. (Corporate citizenship drivers might support key strategic priorities by reducing risk, opening up opportunities for growth, generating learning that supports innovation, reducing costs through greater efficiency, and generating revenue. A corporate citizenship driver can also influence strategic priorities by constraining them.)
The three stages are:
Stage 1: Diagnostic. In this stage, users identify corporate citizenship drivers of strategy and relate them to strategic business priorities.
Stage 2: Assessment. During this stage, users assess the alignment of specific corporate citizenship drivers to business strategy. The assessments result in two scores, one that marks the company’s performance in managing the driver, another that indicates the potential contribution of this driver to core strategy.
Stage 3: Planning. During this stage users determine a plan of action for their corporate citizenship drivers by identifying the key stakeholders to be consulted, creating a timeline and schedule for work flow, and identifying challenges and key success indicators.
Once the tool is completed, it generates both detailed and summary reports that provide scores for the potential of each assessed corporate citizenship driver to contribute to core strategy, and the company's actual current performance in managing the driver. The reports also compare the company's scores with those of others who have completed the tool. (When completing the tool, companies can choose to share their data anonymously or with attribution.)
Using the information generated by the tool
The goal of the corporate citizenship planning and assessment tool is to help a company understand how well it is aligned internally so that it can perform at world class levels as a business and as a corporate citizen. It challenges companies to evaluate the strategic potential of existing corporate citizenship programs and initiatives. It also provides a framework for companies to identify issues which, from a business perspective, make sense for them to take leadership on.
The reports generated through the system are intended to be shared internally with the senior management team or with key people in the business to gain greater buy-in and understanding of how corporate citizenship fits with strategic priorities.
To learn more about the Global Leadership Network and find out how it can help your company create alignment between its corporate citizenship and its business priorities, visit www.globalleadershipnetwork.org or email info@globalleadershipnetwork.org.
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