Many organisations may feel they are addressing this aspiration in their millennials by pointing at various corporate social responsibility projects they are engaged in.
However, while corporate social responsibility may have been a hot-button issue in the boardroom some years ago, the mention of it may be slightly muted now. The reason for that is that corporate social responsibility, on the whole, has failed according to former CEO of BP, John Brown, in his new book, "Connect: How companies succeed by engaging radically with society".
The solution, according to John Brown, backed by his co-author Robin Nuttall, a Mckinsey principal, is what they call : IEE - Integrated External Engagement.
All sounds fine and dandy. But the devil is in the execution. How does a steer given to an organisation with regard it's relationship with external (and for that matter, internal) stakeholders percolate down to the level of an individual exec.
If IEE is not to be merely a CSR 2.0 and fail for the same reason that CSR failed then the focus needs to turn to the individual exec.
Which is precisely what an innovative study on CSR carried out at INSEAD did. The study was called the Response project, led by INSEAD Academic Director , Professor Maurizio Zollo(profile shown below) and the goal of the project was "understanding and responding to societal demands on corporate responsibility".
In one of the key findings, the following is reported:
"5. Part 2 of this report focuses on one important way to bridge the gap between managers’ and
stakeholders’ understanding and behaviour: training/coaching programs. The results of the
first field experiments on CSR training effectiveness ever attempted, reported in Ch. 9, show
that:
The standard executive education approach based on engaged discussions and case
analyses fails to facilitate managers to shift towards higher probabilities to make
socially responsible decisions.
On the other hand, coaching programs based on introspection and meditation
techniques, without any discussion about CSR topics, exhibit a significant impact on
both the probability to act in a socially responsible way and on the factors that
influence the probability to behave that way."
In other words, executive training/coaching programs may hugely benefit an organisation by including meditation. In this way, it could make much more effective CSR/IEE, thus realising a win-win for the organisation and stakeholders.
If a millennial was looking for a boss they could run with then this may be such boss: tuned-in leadership that has genuine engagement with and understanding of the needs of both external and internal stakeholders and can engineer that towards all-round organisational excellence.
In the 'War for Talent', it's those forward thinking organisations that are able to attract these socially-conscious millennials that may be able to replicate the success of the Facebooks and the Googles.
The form of meditation used in the corporate training for the study was based on 'Sahaja Yoga' which entails awakening of 'kundalini energy'. It's interesting to note that in a recently published scientific paper sahaja yoga meditation is shown to keep the brain young and enhance cognitive ability:
"Maurizio Zollo is the Dean's Professor in Strategic Management of the Sustainable Enterprise, in the Strategy Institute, at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and the director of the Center for Research in Organization and Management (CROMA). Zollo holds PhD and MSc degrees in managerial science and applied economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Laurea degree in economics from Bocconi. Zollo previously had appointments in strategic management at INSEAD, Fountainbleau, France, the Wharton School, and the Advanced Institute of Management in the United Kingdom, and was visiting professor/scholar at MIT for the 2012-14 academic years. Best known for work in the field of strategic management on mergers and acquisitions, dynamic capabilities, and organizational learning, Zollo has in more recent years turned his attention to how organizations learn to change in a responsible way. He headed up a European-Union-funded project called RESPONSE, and currently directs an innovative global research initiative called GOLDEN, the Global Organizational Learning and Development Network for Sustainability, which brings together people from around the world to study how companies make the transition to sustainability successfully. Editor of the European Management Review, and former president of the European Academy of Management, Zollo has published nearly thirty articles in prestigious academic journals, ten managerial publications, and two books, as an academic, and previously was a management consultant at McKinsey & Co., a major consulting firm, an associate for Kidder Peabody Italia, and a financial analyst for Merrill Lynch Capital Markets." -from the book Intellectual Shamans by Sandra Waddock
