Social Impact Leadership Coalition

Read:

• The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones & Ariane Conrad.

• Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage by Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston

• How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein

• Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yunus

• Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins

• The Necessary Revolution: How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world by Peter M. Senge, Bryan Smith, Sara Schley, Joe Laur, and Nina Kruschwitz

• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

• Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

Get started.

1. Perform an internal assessment of your stakeholder performance. Examine how your company is doing in its impacts on your suppliers, your customers and the environment. Look particularly for areas in which you may have unseen risk and for opportunities for leadership. See our resources section for organizations that can help you do a comprehensive assessment.
2. Identify and support internal champions. Find leaders in your company who will has interest to help your company become more socially and environmentally responsible and has the skills to champion this internally. (Tip: It's likely to be one of your young company leaders.)
3. Start a learning program. Identify key conferences for your leadership and your internal champions and host internal learning sessions with outside experts who can help your leaders better understand what leadership in social responsibility might look like for a business in your industry.
4. Form a social responsibility leadership team. Have them complete the internal assessment above and get to work on a few practical steps (like implementing some energy-saving initiatives that will start save money).

Take it to the next level.

1. Develop a vision of leadership in social responsibility. Develop a clear and compelling vision of what it will look like when your company becomes a leader in social responsibility. Then turn this vision into a simple and motivational Mission Statement.
2. Develop a business imperative for leadership in social responsibility. While many green steps make sense on their own and there are good business reasons internally to pursue leadership in social responsibility (like enhanced attraction and recruitment), the greatest opportunities come from looking at how social responsibility fundamentally impacts your core business.
3. Define goals for social responsibility. Map out your top priorities for each stakeholder area. The more your social responsibility goals are integrated with your core product or service, the more successful you'll be in achieving them and building your equity as a socially responsible brand.
4. Empower ambassadors to innovate a comprehensive social responsibility action plan for integration into all operations. Enroll change agents at multiple levels – including those with standing and influence. Be sure to truly engage people's ideas, energy and creativity in the challenge of assessing and enhancing your social responsibility profile.
5. Develop your social responsibility message and brand. Just like your general market campaign, your message for leadership in social responsibility should be succinct, consistent and resonant with your target audience.
6. Develop and implement a social responsibility Plan. Deliver your message of commitment to internal and external audiences. Communications best practices show that external communications play a vital role in providing internal audiences with validation/visibility of what the organization deems important. Audiences are able to recognize and reinforce the credibility of a company’s social responsibility commitment when they see it being integrated into external programs and communications.
7. Make it personal. The most successful social responsibility programs engage employees in their personal lives as well, such as helping them reduce their carbon emissions at work and at home.

1. Measure and celebrate your success. Make sure you track the hard numbers (in energy saved, for example) and celebrate your progress toward becoming a leader in social responsibility.
2. Reward leadership everywhere. Recognize employees at all levels who have helped to innovate and lead in your quest for leadership. It's important to make it clear that everyone in the company can advance your social responsibility mission.
3. Build your leadership by sharing your experience. Seek out speaking opportunities through which to share your story of social responsibility leadership, particularly in your community. Remember that it's critically important to be open about how you're doing on social and environmental performance. The new market excepts transparency in claims of social responsiblity.
4. Evaluate your progress. Set new goals.
5. Reintegrate and reinvest in social responsibility. Be sure to deepen the integration of your leadership in social responsibilty with your core business over time. This is where you build brand equity through social responsibility.