4 Ways Managers Can Exercise Their 'Agency' to Change
the World
In the face of today’s many messy
problems, businesses must strive to help find solutions, argues George
Serafeim. Managers who learn to exercise their “agency” at every level will be
in the best position to create change.
New business school graduates have now made their way from
campus to workplace. For them, this should be a time of optimism and energy, of
setting ambitious goals and testing new ideas. At Harvard Business School,
where I teach, many of these passions and ideas revolve around ways to harness
the power of business to address some of society’s most significant problems,
not as a separate part of employees’ lives—businessperson by day, volunteer by
night—but as an integrated whole, working in a profitable company that also
does the world good.
That said, I’ve observed some pessimism among graduates aiming
for both success in business and beneficial impact on the world around them.
They have come to believe that one can either succeed in business or enhance
society—by expanding economic opportunity or by improving public health, for
example—but not both.
In sociological terms, they feel a lack of “agency,” a sense
that only the highest rank of management can effect positive social change from
within a business. Ironically, an increasing number of C-suite executives,
including former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, are leaving their companies to
pursue social-good projects. Even they feel a lack of agency within their
organizations.
Thus, we face two groups on different ends of the career
spectrum with a shared belief in their powerlessness. It would be tragic if
their pessimism were on target. Thankfully, it’s not because it’s rooted in two
false assumptions.
The first is that profit and social good are antithetical. It’s
easy to understand why people think that way, especially with companies like
Volkswagen (VW), Wells Fargo, and Cambridge Analytica getting enormous
visibility for their profit-over-all-else methods. Yet pursuit of social good
can be a powerful, proven business tactic. For every newsworthy instance of a
corporation putting profit ahead of social good, there are multiple unheralded
examples of companies using social good-oriented initiatives to expand their
markets or enhance their profit-making abilities.
These companies have created new business opportunities by
identifying societal problems that align with—or become part of—the firm’s
operating strategy. For example, while VW was scamming emission control
testers, General Motors was moving toward its vision of zero emissions and zero
accidents by investing in electrified, shared, and autonomous vehicles. And
while Wells Fargo was creating fraudulent accounts, Bank of America Merrill
Lynch became a leader in underwriting green bonds that finance projects to
fight climate change. More recently, JPMorgan Chase made a major effort to
improve the economic vitality of Detroit.
The second false assumption is that lower and middle managers
cannot help their companies explore the profit potential of social good. That’s
something they believe is better left primarily to C-suite executives.
C-suite authority does provide access to one kind of agency, the
freedom to act in the realm CEOs manage. But CEOs do not suddenly wake up and
commit to activities that drive organizational resources to provide solutions
to societal challenges. Their employees provide them with ideas, solutions,
information, and energy that feed into their decision-making processes. Over the
years, I’ve witnessed my own students convince senior executives to improve
labor practices in the supply chain and workplace that end up improving
productivity and creating new products that serve previously underserved parts
of the population.
So, how does a person—whether the newly employed graduate or the
experienced executive—exercise his or her latent agency to bring profit-making
and social good together in a company? In my research I have identified four
keys to achieving this goal:
·
Do your research and demonstrate to yourself that there is
strong evidence that creating strategically planned social impact can enhance
your company’s success.
·
Use your professional skills to identify an opportunity for
simultaneously addressing a company challenge and responding to a social need,
then develop the case for pursuing this opportunity.
·
Be pragmatic, not just idealistic. Transformational solutions
are appealing, but they can leave people overwhelmed by the size of the
problem. Incremental work, on the other hand, allows you to gather
collaborators step by step and avoids all-or-nothing situations.
·
Build buy-in, recognizing that offering rational argument and
inspiring passion are both essential for gaining and maintaining momentum. And
develop upward lines of communication that make their way, incrementally but
persistently, toward decision makers.
A sense of a lack of agency, if allowed to fester, is the cancer
of leadership, bringing with it a cynicism about others’ efforts to do well and
do good that in turn reinforces a sense of impotence in improving the world
around us.
In the face of today’s many messy problems, businesses cannot
hide behind their walls, but must strive to help find solutions. It’s the
managers who have learned to exercise their “agency” at every level of a
company who will be in the best position to do their job and achieve great
things for their organizations and beyond.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4-ways-managers-can-exercise-their-agency-to-change-the-world?cid=spmailing-21896454-WK%20Newsletter%2009-12-2018%20(1)-September%2012,%202018
No comments:
Post a Comment