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LEVERAGE YOUR PLATFORM

Make a Difference

To the world you may be one person; but to one person you may be the world.

—DR. SEUSS

The future of work is being drawn with lighter border lines. Professional and personal identities are fusing as a result of social media. Organizations no longer choose between social impact or profit. Governments and businesses are being called on to shape society. And it’s easier than ever to collaborate across geographic regions. Businesses will increasingly be judged not only by the value they bring to their shareholders but also by their positive impact on society.

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset managers, delivered a call to action in his annual letter to CEOs, stating, “Your company’s strategy must articulate a path to achieve financial performance. To sustain that performance, however, you must also understand the societal impact of your business as well as the ways that broad, structural trends—from slow wage growth to rising automation to climate change—affect your potential for growth.”

The confluence of societal and organizational needs has led to this moment. Displaying different values at home and at work is falling out of fashion. And that’s really good news. Interconnectivity, transparency, and greater accountability. Grab your career ladder, climb onto your platform, and take a stand.

Did you race out of the office to meet with a nonprofit agency about establishing a job-training program for underprivileged youth, but veto the budget for staff development at your office? That’s not a good look for you. If you are truly passionate about equal access to education, how about creating corporate training programs that have spaces for community members to attend? By doing so, you are endorsing an educational initiative that serves your business and the community. You can actively facilitate mission-driven, personal connections across sectors that create change.

Think of your life as an atom. Each time you make a split, energy is released. In contrast, integrating personal, organizational, and community goals expands personal and corporate capacity.

Integrating Your Many Roles in the World Produces the Most Powerful Effect for Yourself and Others

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Whether you are a CEO or the newest associate, consider how your position provides you a chance to make a big decision or perform small tasks that will alter the world around you (for the better). This is not necessarily about investing more money, it’s about investing attentional capital.

It’s becoming increasingly popular for companies to establish Corporate Social Responsibility programs. However, recognizing how to leverage your platform is more than a campaign carried out at the institutional level. It’s a state of mind in which you ask yourself, “How does my position allow me to help others?” It begins with a desire to act with intention and an inventorying of your nonmaterial assets, such as the ability to speak up, share access, and be generous with your relationships. Our choices can have inadvertent negative or purposely positive civic, environmental, and financial consequences.

Sometimes your power comes from asking the right questions (that leads to a more informed decision): “What are the community and workforce impacts if we build the factory in this town verses another?” “Will any families have to be moved?” Working in China, where many employees are from one-child families, the responsibility to care for parents and grandparents can be great, and the stress is multiplied when families are relocated far from the only offspring. After working long hours, will your employees spend their energies traveling far distances to care for relatives? How will they cope in the absence of family support nearby? Official presentations may not paint the full picture. The choice you make in a conference room in Madrid will reverberate for the factory supervisor, worker, and grandparents in Asia.

Have you earned enough respect that you can invite a dissenting voice to your organizational meetings? Can you advocate for others? A little experience may enable you to say what others can’t. My client Marc, three years into his role, asked the senior managers at his firm to make a point of dismissing the newest employees in the evening because he observed that they were afraid to leave even though their work was done. That small intervention had a huge ripple effect, as the junior analysts got to spend their evenings with family, head to the gym, or go on a date.

India is a country of more than 60–70 percent functionally illiterate people. Osama Manzar, founder of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, is on a mission to “eradicate informational poverty” for India’s poor and rural population who are deprived of access to information and rights. He has traveled to more than 5,000 villages, established in excess of 700 digital resource centers, fought for net neutrality, and advocated for investment to connect the unconnected. He has digitally empowered more than 7 million poor tribal members, aborigines, and minorities. Through amazingly creative means, his team taught people throughout the country to leverage their positions. For example, Osama constructed cubes with different symbols on each side and used these to teach illiterate communities to access the Internet not by learning the alphabet, but by memorizing pictures that could lead them to information they could consume aurally.

THIS IS FOR YOU IF

•   You want to live your values—in everything you do.

•   Increasing capacity is the goal, as there aren’t any more hours in the day.

•   Your company has resources that cost you nothing to share and are invaluable to others.

•   Triple wins excite you. You’re ready to benefit yourself, your organization, and your community.

TAKE ACTION

Images   Make sure your choices are aligned with the person you want to be and what you want to achieve. Whether your company is big or just getting started, include a “social cost” when evaluating your financial budgets.

Images   Review your supply chain, including vendors of consultancy services. Hire a firm owned or led by women, veterans, immigrants, or members of the LGBTQ community. A few keyboard strokes can connect you to lists of certified minority-owned businesses. Identify the decision-makers in your company. Share your research and ideas with them to make it easier to request proposals from more diverse companies.

Images   Make reading the news an active exercise. What’s getting you excited or frustrated? How can you support people working for causes you care about? Look around the office with a widened peripheral lens. Think about practical offerings: a desk to work at, a closet to store flyers, a place to plug one’s phone, even access to restrooms.

Images   Remember that your company may have resources that cost you nothing to share and are invaluable to others. Brazilian cosmetic company Natura sends vans to pick up employees living far from public transportation. Empty seats on the van are offered to students who live along the corporate bus route but far from their schools.

Images   Dare to ask the second and the third questions—because you can.

Images   Your presence can be an asset no matter your place in the hierarchy. Show up and honor a person or program.

Images   Talk to your colleagues about the issues that you care about, and see who else shares your passions. Worried about rising obesity rates? Do you work at a kid’s TV channel? Are you on the marketing team? Perhaps you can opt not to advertise sugary food, thus stimulating candy and fast-food companies to offer healthy alternatives.

Images   Professor Adam Grant refers to the sharing of our knowledge, skills, and connections as “microloans.” Become a lender.

KEEP IN MIND

•   You can delegate tasks, but you have to do the personal work first. Who do you want to be in the world?

•   Be sure your initiative has true heart. People see through branding and marketing opportunities masked as community service.

CASE STUDIES

Turning Trash into Opportunity

“What is my role in the world, and what do I want to do with it?” was the prompt for a program I co-led in India. For inspiration, we met Milind Arondekar, founder of Aakar, along with the “waste pickers” he helped organize. Waste pickers earn a living by collecting recyclable materials dumped by India’s burgeoning middle class. The women’s saris flowed elegantly as they separated discarded plastic cups from paper products. We chatted while we worked. We began talking about families, and then moved into a discussion about gender roles and domestic responsibilities (for our children and our parents). As the exchange progressed, the Indian women asked for advice on retirement savings. People who not long before didn’t have enough money to get through the day were inquiring about financial planning!

How did the waste pickers’ circumstance improve? In 1993, Milind Arondekar and his wife, Sharada, realized that the success of their small store depended on their neighborhood’s appeal. Buckets of refuse rotted in the sun. Official sanitation trucks didn’t service the area. Waste pickers decanted the trash onto the street to see and sort the recyclables. They were an eyesore to the community and were frequently chased away by the police, leaving carpets of garbage behind. Milind worked with the local government. He obtained permission for the women to use a vacant lot to sift through the rubbish before taking it to recycling centers. Hauling the trash to the yard was hard. Milind asked the municipality for a truck to transport the refuse. The women would drive the vehicles. The waste pickers became part of the sanitation system. As city employees, they were eligible for identification cards. Now the women could apply for social benefits, register their children in school, and even open a bank account. Today, with very modest resources, Aakar assists up to 7,000 families in Mumbai, organizing small collectives to help the previously destitute women save money and receive small but important loans.

Pulling the Levers of Social Change from the C-Suite

Fábio aspires to build a better society based on strong values. He initially made his name as a Brazilian financier and later shifted sectors to lead a media conglomerate. Why? “Because banking and journalism are both levers of social change,” he told me, providing a platform to execute on strong personal convictions. When he was president of Banco Real, Fábio introduced a sustainability program that included social and environmental risk analysis, ethical investment funding, microcredit operations, and tailored banking for disabled customers. Fábio later became CEO of the Abril Group, one of Latin America’s most influential media enterprises. He believes the development of Brazil, like many other countries around the world depends on transparency. Fábio remarked that once you “turn on the lights, there’s no on and off.” He said he works every day to build better companies, better markets, and a better country. He reminds us: “Society and the world are made out of our attitudes.”

Beauty Contests Become a Microphone for Female Advancement

A highly motivated teenager, Kiah Duggins won a scholarship to study business. She enrolled at Wichita State University, where she founded “The Princess Project” to help high school girls from disadvantaged groups prepare college applications. She received a young social entrepreneur fellowship (and seed funding) through The Resolution Project and was recognized at the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGIU). I asked Kiah how she managed to gain so much notice for her work. A fervent feminist, she leveraged an unlikely platform when she entered a beauty contest through a fraternity to raise money for charity—and won. She advanced through various competitions, ultimately competing for Ms. Kansas. Kiah used her media coverage to speak about diversity issues and the importance of providing quality education to often unseen young women. One of the judges at CGIU confessed that Kiah’s bright pink booth covered in sparkles certainly caught her eye. Kiah knows how to get a response, and she’s not afraid to get positive attention for issues that matter deeply to her.

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