In recent months I have seen a number of opinion pieces
asserting that, since CSR should ideally be embedded in corporate strategy and
culture, there should no longer be any need for CSR managers. In my view, this
completely misses the point. There are other areas of business that are
considered to be everybody’s responsibility and yet nobody is suggesting that
the subject-matter experts are not needed. A company where all staff take
responsibility for controlling costs does not fire its finance team, nor does a
company with a strong health and safety culture dispense with the services of
its health and safety manager. Indeed, one might argue that companies with
senior subject-matter professionals are more successful at embedding the
principles of their area of expertise into the business, since there is a
dedicated person or team creating the structure, narrative and performance
metrics that are necessary to weave it into the daily work of people in other
disciplines.
There may still be companies where having a CSR manager is
seen as a kind of “ethics offsetting” – making CSR the responsibility of one
person so that none of the others need concern themselves with it - but this approach
is simply untenable in these days of the connected consumer with strong views
on fairness and transparency. But effective CSR is too complex – and arguably
too important – to be approached by simply writing it into everybody’s job
description. Somebody needs to be scanning the horizon for emerging social or
environmental risks, keeping abreast of new legislation, looking for
opportunities to demonstrate leadership and drive momentum towards ever-higher
standards of ethics and transparency, not just in their own organisation but
across business in general.
Of course, whether CSR Manager is the correct title for
somebody with this role remains moot. Terminology has long been a challenge and
no doubt will remain so, not least because the landscape is constantly
changing. When I first began working in this area, the headline issue was the
ozone layer and the internet hadn’t even been invented. These days enlightened
business leaders are expected to deliver data-driven responses to a wide range
of environmental and social priorities, voluntary initiatives and disruptive
business models in an era of radical transparency and consumer activism. In
setting their strategy they have to determine materiality, align with
frameworks like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, engage meaningfully with
disparate stakeholder groups and embed processes and metrics that deliver
against publicly-stated goals and targets. Whatever name we choose to give
them, it’s hard to see how all of this could be achieved without the support of
experienced subject-matter experts.