When I was coming of age in the world of corporate social responsibility, the common career advice was to build up your "hard skills." Become an Excel whiz to crunch all the data. Get certified in all the frameworks. Analyze. Calculate. Evaluate.
But when I landed my first job in corporate social responsibility, I quickly realized that the role called for a far broader skill set.
Yes, it was important to have a strong scientific and analytical foundation. But it was equally important to be able to educate, empower and equip people across the business to own the sustainability agenda. To spark culture change, create internal movements and build consensus among people who didn’t usually agree with each other. To persuade, nudge and influence people to change the very way they approach their jobs.
These change management and leadership capabilities were rarely mentioned in the traditional MBA program I completed as my onramp into the profession. When they did come up, they were referred to dismissively as "soft skills."
A lot has changed in the corporate social responsibility space over the past 15 years or so, but the hyper-focus on hard skills hasn’t. I see this as a missed opportunity.
With the massive scale of transformation needed in the business world, making a business case for corporate social responsibility is no longer enough. Corporate social responsibility practitioners also need to be able to make a compelling emotional case — to facilitate the "aha" moments that can shift hearts and lead to real, lasting sustainable change.
A rational, numbers-backed business case might get you to a, "Sure, let’s try it… pending data that short-term KPIs are being met." But pair that business case with a compelling emotional case, and you stand a stronger chance of securing a "hell yes!" that can sustain obstacles, economic downturns and shifts in company priorities.
So how do you go about making that emotional case? Over the past several years, I’ve dug deep into the literature and spoken with dozens of corporate social responsibility practitioners to uncover the 21st-century skills, traits and tendences that enable leaders to drive change effectively.
Here are four skills that have emerged from the research — as well as resources for how you might go about learning and honing them.
1. The ability to empathize with different kinds of people
Roles in corporate social responsibility are typically roles of influence, not ownership. If you want to truly embed sustainability into an organization, you need to work across the organization to raise awareness, secure buy-in and ultimately drive accountability for shared goals.
This requires deep reserves of empathy, patience and deep listening. It’s about getting to know your key stakeholders and target audiences on a deeper level, so you can understand how to make your work connect to their desires, their motivations and their lives.
A powerful framework for applying an empathy lens to business challenges is Human-Centered Design, also known as Design Thinking. Early in my career, I took the free Introduction to Human-Centered Design course offered by IDEO.org and the Acumen Academy. IDEO.org also offers a free toolkit filled with methods and case studies to help you apply Human-Centered Design mindsets to your work.
2. The ability to hold space for transformation
Meetings, trainings, working group sessions, conferences, summits, off-sites — if you’re trying to embed sustainability into an organization, chances are your agenda is packed with different types of gatherings.
But when you’re bringing people together, it’s easy to fall into expected patterns and standard templates for gathering. The most impactful corporate social responsibility leaders know that each touchpoint — even a short weekly meeting — is an opportunity. And that if you’re able to hold space in a way that makes participants feel trust, commitment and shared responsibility, the outcomes are much, much better.
Working in corporate social responsibility involves as much salesmanship as science.
Holding space effectively starts with getting clear on your purpose for gathering, a process brilliantly outlined by Priya Parker in her book "The Art of Gathering." It continues with thoughtful, intuitive facilitation. I’m a big fan and have been trained in "Art of Hosting," a method of participatory leadership for facilitating group processes, and in recent years I’ve tried to embrace some of the more experimental facilitation principles outlined in "Emergent Strategy" by adrienne maree brown.
3. The ability to sell sustainability
I sometimes joke that working in corporate social responsibility involves as much salesmanship as science. We need to be able to sell our impact effort as much as we’re able to explain its intricacies.
To do that, we need a strong understanding of how people absorb information — and ultimately, how people change. We need to create communications that are informed by behavioral science, an interdisciplinary field that draws from fields such as cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, sociology and anthropology. We need to explore questions like: What are the drivers of behavior change? What motivates people? And how can we make sustainable change more, well, sustainable?
In their 2018 Stanford Social Innovation Review article "The Science of What Makes People Care," University of Florida researchers Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand share five behavioral science research-based principles that can help with building a communications strategy more likely to result in belief and behavior change. These include lessons such as centering the needs of your target audience, speaking in images and creating meaningful calls to action.
4. The ability to make it fun
It’s easy to look at celebrating wins as a "nice-to-have" — a bit of fun, games and champagne to mark a team milestone.
Roles in corporate social responsibility are typically roles of influence, not ownership.
But it’s much more than that. John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor commonly referred to as the godfather of change management, describes the role of generating and celebrating short-term wins as a vital component of any change effort. It serves a range of purposes, from helping to maintain momentum to undermining cynics to keeping the bosses on board. Effective leaders don’t just hope and pray for short-term wins, says Kotter. They actively plot them on a roadmap, organize accordingly and work towards demonstrating impact.
Plus, says Kotter: "Constant tension for long periods of time is not healthy for people. The little celebration following a win can be good for the body and spirit."
Couldn’t we all use more of that?
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Four 'soft skills' you need in a sustainability career - GreenBiz
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