Responsibility and Learning

Social and environmental responsibility is far too important to be left just to the corporate sustainability department. And the way it’s practiced today is far too simple, ignoring the role that employee commitment and passion — and their learning and development – play in driving growth.

“There’s a problem with the way responsibility has been framed,” said Carol Sanford, consultant and author of The Responsible Business. “It’s been framed as something you do beyond what you do in the business. It isn’t about some separate thing. It means how we do business every day.”

Responsible business in this sense is not just being socially and environmentally responsible: It’s how you run a business that does good on multiple levels, from customer to stockholder. It extends to how you manage people and help them achieve their full potential.

Too often, social responsibility is framed in bottom-line terms focused on cost and measures of environmental impact. While it’s important for companies to think about their impacts, Sanford argues, that approach ignores the potential for growth and innovation that can come from responsibility.

“Instead, start with quintessential top line because top line is the place on the balance sheet where something grows — where you create new markets; where you create new opportunity,” Sanford said.

That top line should be driven by global imperatives that articulate what a company is trying to achieve on a global scale; for customers, employees, the environment and society at large. And the core of how you carry out those global imperatives is learning and development.

“You don’t do it by programs, by regulations, by best practices,” she said. “You do it by shifting how people can see, what they can think, their critical thinking skills [and] how they manage themselves. That’s how it changes.”

Sanford argues that traditional incentive and performance programs are not only ineffective, they are in fact harmful. Incentives can work for defined short-term projects, but they splinter the company and encourage people to game the system when used for larger, long-term projects and organizational imperatives.