The Eight Leadership Behaviours

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is manifested in actions. It consists of behaviours which help your company create positive impact and mitigate negative impact. Some of the most important behaviours must be manifested by you and other leaders of your organization.

Leadership is critical to building a socially-responsible, sustainable, and successful company. Leadership sets the standard for acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. It provides the guidance, resources and motivation that people inside and outside of your organization need in order to act responsibly.

There are eight leadership behaviours crucial to successful CSR and they are outlined in this chapter.

Appreciate Your Opportunities

We saw that corporate responsibility can result in a number of positive outcomes which are different for every organization. Leaders must understand how their unique company can be affected by social responsibility issues. They must know which opportunities will deliver the benefits that are most relevant and most desirable.

As responsible leaders, we apply our limited resources to achieve the greatest positive impact on our company and stakeholders simultaneously. We must focus on the opportunities and areas with the greatest potential.

To do this, determine which issues are most relevant to your business. Is employee engagement important, or is environmental sustainability? What about the health of your local community? What can affect your company the most, and what are your stakeholders most concerned about?

Where do you stand on each of the relevant issues? Are they strengths or weaknesses? In which areas can you improve? Answering these questions will help ensure your CSR efforts are headed in the right direction and are beneficial for everyone involved.

Engage with People

CSR does not happen in a bubble. In fact, it should expand an organization's perspective and engage with a broader range of stakeholders. It should create deeper, more meaningful dialogue than most companies are used to.

Meaningful engagement with people inside and outside of the organization helps to earn their trust and support. These conversations strengthen the business in the long run. They provide a better understanding of the needs and expectations of stakeholders and they are a source of ideas, innovations, and opportunities.

Effective engagement is difficult for many. It requires providing more information to customers and employees than might feel comfortable at first. It means never assuming you know enough about your stakeholders. It demands dialogue rather than the one-way messages so typical of marketing and customer service operations. And it requires intense listening - to criticism, to suggestions, to everything - with an open mind.

Lead with Purpose

Corporate social responsibility is based on the positive impact your company can have on the world: the purpose of its existence beyond making money. This "higher purpose" leads to a vision of an ideal future that your company could help create.

A strong purpose provides individuals and teams with meaning. It helps them understand their own impact on the world. It guides their actions and it provides a challenge. It aligns behaviours with your organization's goals and success. When people care, they are capable of great things.

Leaders must help their organizations answer two questions. First, why do we exist: what is the purpose of our company beyond making money? Second, where are we going: what is our shared vision of the ideal future?

Responsible leaders face the challenge of establishing a company purpose and a vision of the future that is shared by their customers, employees, and other important stakeholders. The purpose and vision cannot belong solely to the leader. Then, they must act upon it.

Commit to What Matters

Purpose and vision guide us forward to a better future. But how we get there depends on the commitments we make along the way. Our commitments are the promises we make to others. We base them on what we believe in, what we care about, and what is important to us.

People use your commitments to anticipate how you will act in different situations. When these expectations match their desires, you build trust. But when you are out of touch with your stakeholders, or when they cannot understand what you stand for, trust is eroded.

Commitments are also useful internally to guide our actions and to motivate us. When we talk about "socially-responsible behaviour," our commitments and beliefs define that behaviour. By setting commitments, we articulate the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

A responsible company must understand and communicate what it stands for. It must ensure that these values are consistently acted upon, by tying them to goals and performance indicators which are regularly monitored.

Empower Others

Strong commitments give inspiration and guidance, but will not create behaviour change if people lack the skills, information, tools, choices, and confidence to create results.

Do your customers have the knowledge they need to make socially-responsible purchasing decisions and to choose your product? Can they find, buy and use your products easily? Do your employees have the skills and support needed to engage customers and to find and act upon new ideas? These are just some of the questions you must always ask yourself.

When you empower your stakeholders - be they customers, employees, communities, or so on - you provide them with the tools they need to be successful. You build their loyalty and produce behaviours more consistent with your shared purpose and commitments.

Build Support Systems

As a socially-responsible leader, you must still do more than lead with purpose and empower others. You must also make it as easy as possible for other people to make the "right" decisions.

Individuals face many decisions each day, and many forces encourage them to make choices we might find undesirable. Traditional incentive systems might penalize employee behaviour that is aligned with your commitments. Bureaucratic red tape might simply make it impossible. Customers might be under social pressure to purchase from competitors.

Responsible leaders create positive consequences for those that perform behaviours in line with the company's higher purpose and commitments. They are also prepared to effectively correct undesirable behaviours. They eliminate obstacles and inappropriate incentives that stand in the way. They use a number of useful tactics to provide this needed support to stakeholders inside and outside of the organization.

Continuously Seek Improvement

The socially-responsible organization must always move forward towards its vision of the future. The alternative to growth is stagnation and mediocrity. Responsible leaders have the opportunity to build excellence into their organizations, but this requires a commitment to progress.

Recognize that everything cannot be achieved all at once. Trust and loyalty cannot be earned overnight. Leaders must combine passion and excitement for their company's purpose with patience and discipline. They must encourage people to constantly ask "how can we serve our stakeholders better?" And they must create a climate where answers to this question are embraced and acted upon.

Only through consistent hard work will any company become great. It takes time. It is the leader's challenge to maintain energy and momentum during the entire journey.

Communicate the Truth

Honest communication is the glue that holds together all other leadership behaviours. Without communication, there can be no engagement with employees, customers, and others, and we can never hope to understand their expectations and our opportunities for improvement. Without honesty and trust, our commitments will appear manufactured and hypocritical. We will never improve, and we will never improve others.

Communication is a two-way street. It involves "downward communication" whereby our social responsibility goals, activities, and results are reported to stakeholders in a manner relevant and interesting to them. But it also involves "upward communication" where we seek and use the opinions and feedback of stakeholders. More and more, these two forms of communication are occurring instantaneously and simultaneously, so that companies are having true dialogues with their most important stakeholders.

In Part 2 we will introduce each of these eight behaviours in greater detail, and illustrate how you can implement them at your company. Applying these strategies will help you build loyalty with your employees, customers, communities, and other important stakeholders.