What does the future hold for CCI professionals? What will their job description be? How will they be doing their jobs?
It is February 1997 and the Beelf Oil Company’s new CEO is in his first week on the job. One of the first meetings he asks for is with Beelf’s Community Investment Director. The conversation goes something like this.
“Our flagship education programmes are ten years old. During that time, we have helped to develop the capacity of each of our partner organisations: for example, by inviting individual headteachers and the senior staff of partner not-for-profits to join some of our internal management training programmes. Effectively, we have been applying the same long-term approach to the people and organisation development of our community partners, as we do inside our own business units.
“This investment has really paid off in the last three to four years, because our own colleagues – especially in marketing and in HRD – have met the key people running the community organisations. They learnt for themselves just what opportunities exist to create win-win programmes linking business and community objectives.
“At first, we had to prompt HRD to use community assignments for team-building and management development. In the early cause-related marketing campaigns, it was a real struggle to get marketing to understand the business backlash we could have got by not understanding community sensitivities.
“Now, the initiative comes from the business function or the community partner – but we in the community investment team are automatically drawn in as internal consultants to help develop and review plans. Since we launched the Shared Destiny programme to encourage our major suppliers to develop joint ventures with us in education, I have also been providing the same consultancy service to the line management of our main suppliers.
“We know from our tracking studies of employees and customers, that this triangular relationship between Beelf, suppliers and schools is particularly well-known and positively rated.
“The regular education briefings which we run via E-Mail and the internal Beelf Television Network has enabled us to identify good practice in corporate support for education, both in Beelf around the world and more generally; any Beelf employee – whether they are a regular mentor for at-risk kids or getting involved for the first time in a one-off assignment to develop the marketing strategy for a Saturday school – can have access to our collective knowledge and stops wasteful re-inventing of the wheel. This back-up to all our employees’ community involvement – according to them – has made them want to do more in the community. They believe that their time is being well-spent.
“Your predecessor, of course, was heading up the Secretary of State’s Council on Learning for Life as a result of our pilot scheme using multi-media for educational leisure. That was Classrooms Without Walls. And we got a real bonus in terms of contacts when the Secretary of State went off to lead the European Commission’s Energy Taskforce….”
Commitment at the top
Back from the future, GrandMet’s Sir Allen Sheppard was telling fellow business leaders last month (January 1994) that he believes there has been a real professionalising of corporate community involvement over the last 4-5 years. “GrandMet” he added, “treats community involvement like a business”.
This change – at least amongst the leading companies – has been driven from the top, and would not have occurred without CEOs giving personal leadership. Equally, however, execution has required a growing professionalism in the CCI function – and a gradual transfer of that function’s expertise across the business. However, progress across UK business overall is not to be exaggerated – it is not yet widespread, irreversible or even always in the same direction! If the yardsticks of professionalism of CCI include:
programmes which achieve real, substantial benefit for both the business and the community;
widespread engagement of company personnel and other resources;
majority of staff able to understand and articulate what the company is doing in the community, and why;
leverage and effective use of company’s resources to add value to those of government and community etc (What David Quarmby, joint MD of Sainsbury – describes as a company “feeling best when you give what you know, no one else can give”);
then on both sides of the Atlantic, there is still a long way to go – but we are getting there!
Future trends
And some of the emerging trends, hinted at in the Beelf Oil story, can only help; trends such as applying the same ideas of partnership sourcing long-term, shared destiny relationships with supplier-stakeholders; to community-stakeholders too or big companies influencing their supply chains to adopt CCI, as more and more are now doing with environmental standards or BS5750.
A further direction is suggested in the growing body of academic literature about how small and medium-size enterprises learn. This shows that pre start-up, it can be general – but once established, it is most effectively provided through a business sector approach. Pioneering companies in the CCI field can influence others in their same trade/industry sector.
Job description
All of this implies a broader and even more challenging role for the CCI professional. The job description in future might include being able to:
understand community needs;
know the company’s business and its needs;
marry community and business needs together;
sort out the wheat from the chaff in selecting and developing community partners for the CCI programme;
define and articulate the business rationale for CCI;
network across the company and its suppliers/partners;
advise other business functions on opportunities for/from CCI or those functions;
be able to lever out cash and other resources from across the business and from external partners such as Brussels, local councils and government;
scan the horizon;
enthuse and empower line management to implement CCI strategies in line with the overall programme.
Business in the Community has been trying to revamp its own work in order to become more of a resource to CCI professionals.
Apart from on-going work to inform and engage top management and more recently to involve the next generation of top management through the Prince of Wales Seeing is Believing programme, BITC can help the CCI professional through:
the annual CCI training course with the Ashridge Management Centre – which runs for three days in the week before Easter (see diary dates for more information)
account managers who can tap into its own specialist expertise in areas like education, the environment, equal opportunities, and small business development – or that of partner bodies
BITC’s Business Strategy Group which is regularly scanning the horizon for business and social trends which are, therefore, the emerging issues both for what companies will do in the community and how they do it
CCI audits and consultancy assignments.
In future, there is a growing need to:
identify and codify emerging good practice in CCI
influence specialist business functions, in particular marketing and HRD
reach managers earlier – through MBAs and executive management programmes.
David Grayson is Managing Director of the Business Strategy Group, BITC and has recently joined the advisory panel of Community Affairs Briefing. He can be contacted on 071 629 1600
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