Equipping managers with the skills to integrate responsibility principles throughout their companies, regardless of business function, is the make-or-break for CSR over the next decade, argues Sue Slipman. Here she outlines plans for a ‘CSR Academy’ that aims to achieve just that.
CSR practice is in its infancy but must grow up fast if organisations are to meet the challenges of re-creating and sustaining stakeholder confidence.
For the CSR agenda to make any real progress, it is imperative that we create managers who firstly understand what CSR strategies mean for their function in the business, and who then have the competence and the commitment to implement them. The key task over the next 10 to 15 years is therefore to change manager mindsets. There are other drivers for this, but a key strategic driver is promoting CSR competencies in the education, training and continuous development of all managers – not just the CSR specialists, important though specialists are as change agents in larger companies.
In December last year, the DTI and Corporate Responsibility Group jointly set up a working group, which I chaired, to recommend how we can best respond to these challenges in the near future. During our research we saw evidence of exciting new offers in development, but provision of education for CSR competence remains patchy and confusing for would be students and employers alike. There are specialist courses. While most business education providers offer CSR modules, few recognise the need to transform their mainstream offers. Fewer still map their offers either against the skills and competencies students can expect to obtain or against the demands of external CSR compliance or reporting standards. Creating managers with the requisite CSR skills and mindset is a challenge for education and training providers, for employers and for professional institutes. We developed a competency framework working with CSR specialists that we further refined in dialogue with managerial and professional institutes and a wide range of stakeholders. The competence framework will provide a focus and approach to support change. We recommend a Government backed CSR Academy to support the transformation of manager CSR development. We envisage a fast moving, dynamic, learning organisation with multistakeholder involvement owning and refreshing the competency framework as CSR practice develops.
The CSR Academy should be a change agent influencing all manager education and training to create and nourish the CSR mindset through using the competency framework, promoting examples of best practice, offering information and advice to employers and individuals and fostering experiential learning opportunities and networks. We see the CSR Academy as an independent learning space disseminating and helping to create best practice as an energetic driver for CSR.
We hope that our recommendations help create a leap forward in promoting all managers – specialist and generalist alike – into becoming CSR practitioners.
Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 69 – May, 2003
Sue Slipman is chair of the working group on the development of professional skills for the practice of CSR. The group was established as a joint initiative between the Department for Trade and Industry and the Corporate Responsibility Group. It presented its findings to the CSR Minister on April 14.
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