Responsible Business & Employee Engagement

Are You a Creating Shared Value Change Agent?

CSR professionals must shift from program manager to change agent
Oct 21, 2011 10:00 AM ET
Campaign: Creating Shared Value
Greg Hills, Managing Director, FSG

FSG's Creating Shared Value blog

By Greg Hills, Managing Director, FSG

As a CSR professional, you are nervous. When your CEO asks about how your company is Creating Shared Value (CSV), what will you say? How are you navigating this sea change from traditional CSR approaches to CSV? How might your role change and how do you position yourself and your company as a leader and not a follower of this paradigm shift?
 
Creating Shared Value, as articulated in FSG’s 2011 Harvard Business Review article, outlines a company’s ability to drive profitability and competitive advantage while simultaneously creating value for society. However, as a CSR professional, CSV represents as much uncertainty as opportunity for you and your role in the company. It’s clear that CSV requires a dramatic shift in mindset, approach, expertise, and potential impact for a CSR professional. But how?
 
To launch and steer a CSV journey, a CSR professional needs to make a fundamental shift from program manager to change agent – to do that requires wearing the following six different hats:

  1. The Teacher: CVS is not a universally known concept in the business world. This knowledge gap represents a significant barrier but also an opportunity for CSR professionals to educate colleagues and build broad awareness of the benefits of CSV and how it differs from traditional CSR approaches. For example, Nestle has launched a CSV training program aimed at educating all 280,000 employees worldwide so they can recognize and act on CSV opportunities. In meetings, workshops, and other communications, CSR professionals must convey the fundamental differences between traditional CSR and CSV approaches in order to reinforce the paradigm shift and encourage new mindsets and behaviors.

  2. The Business Strategist: Developing a CSV strategy is not the same as getting executive approval for a signature initiative or a grantmaking budget. You can’t just create a theory of change and an impact framework and start executing toward your goals. In fact, tackling CSV opportunities requires strong integration with business strategy development. For example, a multinational chocolate company’s investments in cocoa sustainability efforts in West Africa were driven by the commercial need to ensure a viable supply of quality, affordable cocoa, not by pure social impact objectives....

Read the full post, Are You a Creating Shared Value Change Agent? on FSG's Creating Shared Value blog.

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