Want a CSR Job? Read This First.

With just over two months left until I graduate from business school, I’ve started to reflect on what I’ve accomplished over the last two years. Without a doubt, the most fulfilling experiences of my MBA program have been the chances I’ve had to engage in real-world consulting projects for corporate and nonprofit clients.

In the last four semesters, I’ve worked on some pretty terrific marketing and corporate social responsibility projects - including brand audits, marketing research plans, stakeholder communications strategies, and social media tactics.

But perhaps my most satisfying consulting project was a sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement plan for Praxair, a $9B Fortune 300 industrial gas manufacturer in Danbury, CT. I’ve talked about this project in past posts, and I was thrilled to see that Boston University recently issued a press release about this engagement (including a quote from yours truly!).

These consulting projects have been the most rewarding part of my MBA, but they’ve also been the most challenging and time-consuming. In the end, though, I’ve signed up for all of them without hesitation – in large part because I (and many of my fellow MBA classmates) believed they’d serve as proof of our experience to potential employers come recruiting season.

Interestingly, last week The Wall Street Journal published an article about companies partnering with business schools to create these sorts of CSR projects for students. The article starts out positively, saying urgent “social concerns” are leading more and more companies to partner with business schools to provide real-world education and training to students (aka: potential employees).

Unfortunately the story takes on a different tone just a few sentences later:

The effort [to create real-world CSR consulting projects] is being met with both gratitude and skepticism from business schools, which say that despite the emphasis on integrating these hot-button topics into the curriculum, it's business as usual at recruiting time. Few hiring managers, they say, ask students about corporate-responsibility training or indicate it's a priority.

That’s right – according to the article, these CSR projects may be happening more frequently on business school campuses, but that doesn’t mean they’re turning into more CSR jobs for MBA graduates after school.

The article drills home the point even further, saying that engaging students in these kinds of projects “doesn't translate into hiring socially responsible M.B.As, an issue that “points to a disconnect on part of the companies: There's enthusiasm in the classroom for imparting corporate responsibility and sustainability concepts, but hiring managers attending campus recruiting sessions say it's rarely something they quiz candidates about.”

In the end it seems that MBA grads looking for CSR jobs can easily find themselves between that proverbial rock and a hard place – on the one hand, they’re receiving extraordinary real-world training for future sustainability positions; yet on the other, there’s often no opportunity to continue this work once they finish business school.

Another related and interesting study that just came out also reinforced this point:

Ellen Weinreb from WeinrebGroup analyzed six years of CSR job postings and drew conclusions about the availability of jobs and overall trends in CSR recruiting. Her findings point to an interesting conclusion for recent MBA grads wanting to get into CSR (which, by the way, is the same conclusion drawn by the Wall Street Journal article):

If you want to work in CSR, get functional experience first.

Ellen’s study shows an increase over time in VP and Director-level CSR jobs – which is great news for people already working in CSR but not so great for MBA grads just trying to jump in.

Since those high-level CSR jobs are most likely out of reach for newly-minted MBAs, Ellen suggests job seekers embed themselves in a corporate function (marketing, finance, strategy etc), learn the business, and then transition internally to a CSR role.

When you think about it, this advice makes sense; after all, to be effective in sustainability, you’ve got to first understand the business you’re in.

For my part, it turns out that I’ve actually heard this advice many, many times – and given the frequency with which it’s said, I’ve taken it seriously to heart.

Still, this puts me – and many other soon-to-be MBA grads – in a bit of an awkward position going forward.

My goal is to work in a CSR role within a big consumer brand, so I’ve stacked my resume with CSR-related projects and classes to show future employers that I know what I’m talking about.

But if in the end it turns out that these kinds of activities don’t necessarily translate into a job-seeker’s “competitive advantage,” did I waste my time on these projects when I should have been doing something else? Obviously that’s being overly dramatic, but the issue certainly gives me pause.

In the end, the best advice I can give to CSR job-seekers is sort of a hybrid model:

Learn the business through functional experience, but bring sustainability to work every day.

Yes, getting that marketing, or finance, or supply chain experience under your belt will be crucially important – not only to build credibility and a reputation for yourself, but also as a way to help you think about sustainability and CSR opportunities from within.

But just because you’re working in a non-CSR function doesn’t mean that you should chuck your CSR know-how and skills out the window. On the contrary, your understanding and flexibility in CSR can only help you do your functional job better.

We can still hope that one day CSR will be such a corporate priority that all companies will recruit for these positions. In the meantime, my advice is to earn your stripes at a company you respect and admire, make your interest and intentions in sustainability clear, and with time transition into the CSR job you want.

As the old saying goes, “Your patience will be rewarded”.

Finding the Point of Balance

I’m pleased to share that my birthday was this week (for those who know me well, you know this is a big deal).

I love birthdays in general, and I especially love mine. Why?

Well, my birthday is an important time for me for a couple of reasons. Yes, I love cake and presents and having an excuse to go out to dinner or celebrate.

But more than anything, I love my birthday because it’s the one time during the year that I stop and take stock of where I’m heading.

Every February I usually take some time to sit quietly and think – to reflect on what happened over the last year as well as to visualize where I want to go in the coming year.

This is what I call making my Birthday Resolution.

Over the years my Birthday Resolutions have helped me chart my course and provided some much-needed clarity.

This year my birthday (and thus my Resolution) comes at a particularly interesting and unique time in my life. In three months I will graduate from business school and head out into the big wide world again.

But where will I head to?

Over the last year and a half my education has opened my eyes to possibilities that I didn’t even know existed. I’ve developed a true passion for using business to effect change, and most days I wake up eager and excited to find a job that allows me the chance to “do good and do well”.

Yet some days I wake up feeling weighted down by the burden of responsibility. Whether it’s dealing with the inevitable dread of school debt, or feeling overwhelmed by the expectations of others, sometimes I just can’t see the forest through the trees.

So how does this relate to my Birthday Resolution?

In some ways, you could say my life these days is a bit of a see-saw, with my job search right smack in the middle of things.

On one hand, I want my new job to be motivated by mission and purpose.

I want to find an opportunity that offers personal fulfillment and the chance to do good for other people. I also want to land in an organization and in a role that allows me to act as a good global citizen.

Yet as graduation nears, I’ll be honest: I have a lot of debt to deal with.

And sometimes that translates into feeling like I just need a job – any job – so I can start paying that off.

Not to mention the fact that it's easy feel pressured to take “the right” job after school – that is, the kind of job that most MBAs go for (consulting, finance, strategy etc). That may not be what I want, but when everyone else is doing it, it's hard to resist the urge to cave.

Given all of this, my Birthday Resolution is all about balance.

My goal for the year ahead is to find that point of balance on the see-saw - which means looking for opportunities that both quench my thirst for social purpose while also helping to turn down the volume on some of my anxieties.

Is this asking too much? Maybe. But I never said my Resolution had to be practical!

Sure, I know I’ll have to make trade-offs. This is not a scenario in which I can be guaranteed the best of both worlds. But perhaps I can strive for a job after school that is a happy medium between the two extremes.

What does this look like? To be honest I have no clue. But I’m working on it.

And I'm convinced that there are opportunities out there that will allow me to balance out my see-saw. I just have to find them!

As I kick my job search up a notch, I'll be sure to report on my progress here at The Changebase. In the meantime, have you ever made birthday resolutions? Even if it's not your birthday, I encourage you to think about stopping for a moment and taking stock of the direction in which you're heading. How can you reposition yourself to find your point of balance on the see-saw?

The Basics of CSR Reporting

As I mentioned in an earlier post on The Changebase, one of the projects I’ve been working on this semester is a CSR Reporting Directed Study for a Fortune 300 company.

This company (who will remain nameless since the project is still ongoing) contacted the Boston University School of Management and asked if the school would put together a team of MBA consultants to evaluate the company’s current CSR report and make recommendations for changes or improvements. Since CSR reporting is such an important and popular topic these days, I really wanted to be a part of this project. And, since the opportunity was presented as not just a consulting gig, but also as a class, I knew there’d be some good learning too.

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve spent the majority of my time with my team (there are five of us) learning about The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

As the area of CSR reporting moves forward and becomes more solidified, the GRI has emerged as the leading, best-in-class standard for how companies should address their environmental and social impacts. Much like LEED has become the “gold standard” in green building, the GRI has emerged as the reporting framework that most companies use. While this doesn’t mean that the GRI framework is perfect, it does mean that the GRI is the most popular guide for companies that want to report on these issues and don’t know where to start.

While there are some folks who don’t like the GRI, in general I believe its reporting framework provides a comprehensive, detailed outline of the targets and impacts every company should be measuring. Its framework consists of 79 indicators that are measured along 6 dimensions:

• Economic
• Environmental
• Labor Practices and Decent Work
• Human Rights
• Society, and
• Product Responsibility.

Under each category, the GRI lists very specific metrics that companies should use to quantify and qualify their impacts along each dimension. For example, under Human Rights, one of the indicators is “Operations identified as having significant risks for incidents of child labor, and measures taken to contribute to the elimination of child labor”. You can imagine how hard it is for a global business with operations worldwide to wrap its arms around this kind of question.

And yet, it is understandably crucial for any business to understand something like this.

In addition to the indicator questions, the GRI lays out principles for content and quality – which are essentially a roadmap for how to determine what should be in a report and how to tell the company’s sustainability story. These are:

Principles for Content:

• Materiality
• Stakeholder Inclusiveness
• Sustainability Context
• Completeness

Principles for Quality:

• Balance
• Comparability
• Accuracy
• Timeliness
• Clarity
• Reliability.

Without getting into too much detail, you can probably guess that some of these principles are easier to follow than others. Yet, the more I learn, the more I realize that absolutely every single one of them is crucially important.

The fun part of this consulting project has been poring over the company’s CSR report and looking at it through the lens of each content and quality principle. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been asking ourselves questions like:

• How well does the company present balanced (that is, positive and negative) information?
• What kind of stakeholder analysis has the company done? Does the report speak to the right audience?
• Is the report complete? If not, what’s missing?

It’s really been a lot of fun to take a real-life case study and evaluate it according to what we’ve learned.

And what I’m learning is that CSR reporting is a lot harder than you might think!

Another highlight of the project was having the chance to meet Andy Savitz, a very well-known sustainability consultant and author of The Triple Bottom Line. Andy is incredibly experienced when it comes to CSR reporting, and he was kind enough to sit down with me and my team to talk about best practices in this area. Since this post is about The Basics, I thought I’d share a few words of wisdom from Andy:

A CSR Report is a Living Document: My sense is that some companies want to look at their CSR report much like they do an annual report – it’s published once a year and that’s it. But in a field as new as CSR reporting, many CSR Directors are still getting a handle on what they should be measuring, let alone actually being able to report on it. And since companies are still solidifying what to report on, they’re finding that the data they collect isn’t always perfect.

According to Andy, that’s more than ok. A CSR report should not just be about reporting the good stuff, nor should it just be focused on the past. A good CSR report should focus on being aspirational and strategic, and it should present both the good and the not-so-good (also known as “Opportunities” or “Room for Improvement”).

This leads to a second important point: A Balanced CSR Report is a Trust-Builder. Interestingly, while companies might shy away from sharing negative information, the more transparent a company can be about the good, the bad and the ugly, the more trust it will earn from its stakeholders. Andy gave the example of a company that reported its overseas employees had been offered 13 bribes – and that they turned down 9 of them.

Sure, a CSR department might cringe at the thought of reporting this. But in actuality disclosing this information improved the company’s image and reputation because everything was framed as a work-in-progress. Most audiences, it turns out, aren’t looking for immediate perfection – they just want to know that you’re working on it.

So there you have it – The Basics of CSR Reporting. In truth, there is still so much more that I’m learning – in a month I’ll probably be able to come back and update this post! But I hope this helps lay the groundwork for you as you learn about this topic.

As for my consulting project, my team and I head to their corporate headquarters in late January to present our findings and recommendations. The goal is for their CSR department to take our feedback and incorporate it into their upcoming 2010 report. It’ll be interesting and exciting to see how their new report differs from their old one. I’ll keep you posted!

(By the way, if this post was helpful be sure to check out other posts I've written on "The Basics" - and let me know if there's anything you want to learn next!)

End of Semester Recap

Perhaps one of the best parts of being a second year MBA student is getting to pick my schedule. Unlike first year, where all of the core business classes were chosen for me, as a second year student I get to decide which electives I want to take. Not only has this been a relief (since most of the core classes were quantitative, and I am by no means a math whiz), it’s also been fun and rewarding to study topics that interest me through an MBA lens.

Unfortunately, by the end of the semester, there’s little time for anything else – including blogging. I haven’t been able to write on The Changebase for a couple of weeks precisely because I’ve been too busy wrapping up all of the projects, presentations, and papers that these electives have assigned!

But it’s been a great semester of learning, and since I’m often asked to talk about how what I study relates to my interest in CSR and sustainability, I thought I’d share a little recap.

I started out my semester with a one-week intensive course called Global Sustainability, which basically looked at issues like food and water scarcity, energy constraints, and global migration and the impacts they have on our planet. If you haven’t checked out my previous summary on this class, I recommend reading it.

The rest of my four month semester consisted of five other classes:

Government, Society and the New Entrepreneur focused on the topics of “economic globalization, environmental sustainability, international entrepreneurship, and the interplay between growth and prosperity”. Through in-depth studies of various countries (Japan, China, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Russia and Brazil), my classmates and I gained a broad overview of how globalization impacts trade, economic growth, education, environmental conservation, and entrepreneurship around the world.

Big Takeaway: While our world is more connected than ever, each country’s national interests are more divergent than ever. To solve an issue as big as climate change, for instance, world leaders must balance their responsibility to their own people with a shared responsibility to care for our global resources. Tough job for sure.

On the other end of the spectrum, Consumer Behavior focused on the attitudes, behaviors, social norms, and decision-making processes that consumers use and reference when they make purchases. For this course I worked with a team to develop a hypothetical new product (along with target consumer and marketing recommendations) for green cleaning producer Seventh Generation. Lots of primary data collection, and lots of consumer behavior theory.

Big Takeaway: The more I spoke with potential target consumers, the clearer it became that people really are wary of the “green” label. They’ve heard it so many times – and yet they still don’t really understand what it means nor do they trust its value. A clear warning sign for marketers…

My Corporate Governance seminar centered on the interplay between governance, accountability and ethics in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. Through in-depth, “governance gone wrong” case studies, we developed a framework for understanding how factors like board oversight, compensation structures, and organizational culture affect the level and type of governance at a company. This class was especially timely one year after the global financial crisis.

Big Takeaway: Much like CSR, there are varied opinions relating to the value that good governance brings to an organization. Is governance just about compliance and risk management, or does it actually add value? Are investors willing to pay more for good governance? I think (and hope) they are.

Entrepreneurial Management focused on the challenges and hurdles faced by early-stage entrepreneurs, including the identification of and access to capital, scaling growth to reach beyond the early adapter market, and building a successful team. Perhaps the most fun part of the class was serving as a consultant to a social entrepreneur who’s facing these kinds of issues right now as he builds a line of ethically-sourced footwear. Like consumer behavior, this involved lots of primary data collection and marketing recommendations.

Big Takeaway: As a social enterprise footwear company, the client I worked with wanted to “do good and do well.” Yet, the potential consumers we spoke with reminded us that it’s not just intention that matters – cause marketing campaigns need to be genuine, transparent, easy to understand, and perhaps most importantly, have an immediate and tangible impact on a meaningful cause. Not always an easy task!

Finally, one project that I started this semester and will finish in early January is a CSR Reporting Directed Study. Back in October a Fortune 300 company contacted my school to inquire about putting a team of MBAs together to evaluate their current CSR reporting – and I jumped at the chance. In order to make recommendations, my team and I have spent the semester doing a deep-dive into the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project. We’re now just starting the recommendation phase and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Big Takeaway: Sustainability reporting is more than just wrapping your arms around numbers (although it’s fair to say that getting a handle on a company’s data is hard enough!). In fact, two key themes that keep coming up are transparency in information sharing and stakeholder engagement – two crucial topics that are very hard to get right and very easy to get wrong.

So all in all it’s been an incredible four months, especially compared to my first year of business school when it was so hard to “see the forest” through all that data analysis!

In the end this really was a semester of putting all of the pieces together, which is a great feeling. And now on to winter break!

So You Want to Be a CSR Director?

This past weekend over 2,400 MBA students, CSR professionals and social entrepreneurs congregated on the campus of Cornell University for the 2009 Net Impact Conference.

For those of you not “in the know,” Net Impact is an international network of people looking to use their business skills to create global social change.

I’ve been a member of Net Impact for a few years now, and I have to say that attending their annual conference is a must (if you’re not a member, I highly encourage you to join).

When I attended last year as a first year MBA, I remember feeling overwhelmed by all of the new ideas, terminology and opinions swirling around in the air. This time though, as a second year student, I felt much more grounded and less inundated, which made it possible to simply enjoy the opportunity to learn, connect with colleagues and friends, and share ideas around CSR and sustainability.

Perhaps because it’s the topic most on my brain these days, but a lot of the panels I attended were somehow related to careers in CSR. I went to a couple of especially terrific sessions that I just know the readers of The Changebase will enjoy, so I thought I’d share what I learned over the course of a couple of blog posts.

This post centers around one panel I attended called “Developing CSR Competencies”. Moderated by Chris Pinney, director of research and policy at Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, this session highlighted recent research that BCCCC had just completed with the Hay Group, a global management consulting firm.

The research they did focused on the specific individual competencies that CSR directors need to have in order to be successful in their jobs. To add value to the report’s findings, the panel included three current CSR directors who were interviewed for the study:

• Dan Bross, Senior Director of Global Corporate Citizenship, Microsoft Corporation
• Valerie Smith, VP of Corporate Responsibility, Citigroup
• Dave Stangis, VP of Corporate Social Responsibility, Campbell Soup Company (follow Dave on Twitter here).

Chris opened up the panel by introducing a few important points which are worth repeating here:

• Each company does CSR differently – so the job functions of a CSR director will vary.
• Most CSR teams are incredibly small – for instance, the group at Campbell Soup is only 1 ½ people!
• Not surprisingly, therefore, these jobs are incredibly hard to come by – especially for folks who aren’t already internal employees at the company.

After this, he went on to outline the research findings. In general, 8 key competencies emerged as the "keys to success" for any CSR director.

Personal Maturity (aka: Humility): this basically comes down to your ability to achieve success through empowering others to be part of the process – and then letting them take the credit. All three panelists agreed letting other people shine (and thus staying out of the spotlight yourself) is an acceptable trade-off for seeing your program reach its milestones.

Optimistic Passion: this competency relates to your ability to get out of bed everyday feeling motivated about your work. It’s about being patient, resilient, and dedicated to making change. Perhaps the best part of the panel was when Dave from Campbell Soup strongly opposed this phrase ‘optimistic passion’ (two words that he did not believe described himself or his work). Yet the more he explained why he opposed the phrase, the more passionate he seemed!

Next up was Peripheral Vision and Systems Perspective: two traits that refer to your ability to understand how your work in CSR relates to various business units within your company as well as to society as a whole. Once you understand this, the next step is being able to translate these ideas to other stakeholders. Essentially, it’s how well you can see the forest through the trees – and then tell others about what that forest looks like.

After that was Visionary Thinking: a skill that forces you to look beyond that pile of “to-do’s” on your desk and think instead about how you can bring innovation and fresh ideas to your work.

Two other competencies that I particularly enjoyed were Collaborative Networking and Strategic Influencing: these attributes relate to how well you engage others in your work, ask for help when you need it, and get buy-in from key decision-makers. Dan from Microsoft brought up a particularly interesting point about the role of trust in strategic influence – without instilling in your colleagues the feeling that they can trust you, you’ll never be able to persuade them to help you.

Finally, and perhaps most important, you need to be a Change Driver: with such small teams and such big jobs, you must be the one leading the charge and taking initiative to get results.

I found all of these traits to be incredibly interesting – and truthfully a little daunting.

To be a really good CSR director, it turns out you have to be a bit of a superhero!

But the more I heard the panelists speak about their experiences, the more excited I felt about the opportunity to one day join their ranks.

At the end of the session there was still one final question that I felt needed to be answered:

With all of this emphasis on individual competencies, I wondered what it was about the panelists' specific organizations that perhaps nurtured their ability to be successful in their jobs?

Was it simply a case of just having these competencies and jumping in with both feet? Or did their company's culture, values or even governance structure have something to do with their success?

Interestingly, the panelists seemed to agree that in fact it’s the individual’s ability to bring these skills to the table that sets them apart. While some organizations may have value systems or missions that make it easier to succeed, the panelists believed that true success in these positions is based on your ability to think big yet stay grounded, to include various stakeholders in a collaborative process, and to strategically enlist the help of champions to promote and evangelize your cause.

Overall it was an incredibly valuable afternoon and I learned a lot. Thank you Chris, Dan, Valerie and Dave for sharing your insights with us!

Stay tuned to future posts on The Changebase to hear more about what I learned at Net Impact 2009…

In the meantime, ask yourself: what are you doing right now to develop each of these competencies yourself?