A few weeks ago I attended the Women’ in Leadership conference at UC Berkeley. It was an amazing day. My very first panel was: Social Impact. It was fantastic – I was worried it may be heavily non-profit oriented, but it ended up being a good mix.
A woman on the panel – has the job that I want – though I didn’t know it until she spoke. Meg Garlinghouse, Head of Employment Brand and Community for Linkedin. From her title I would have not guessed she was so invested in the social responsibility aspect, but was happy to learn so. I guess it does go hand in hand with working with brand and community. She had some great advice, but one piece of her advice gave me pause.
Let’s start with the good. All the ladies in the panel agreed that you have to work past your organization. Creating a network, helping other and other companies may end up helping you and yours. This worked well for one woman who ran a non-profit, but even in the private sector – working with other companies creates alliances and also the ability to venture into socially responsible practices in good company. Some companies may think “well, if we’re the only ones, either we’ll be trend setters or foolish” having a partnership will allay these fears.
Next: storytelling. For non-profits this may mean hearing from the people you have directly helped – making sure that you are constantly assured that your efforts are going to good use. However, for a for-profit company – what is story telling and how is it helpful? This may be different in the fact that the company may be doing the telling. In forms of PR and Marketing, reminding the customers that the company has the community’s best interest at heart. Or even just reminding the company every now and again that Sarah in Ohio really likes the fact that she can buy fair-trade coffee at your store. Stories help keep the company on track and motivated to do more.
The one piece of advice that concerned me was “take the professor, not the class.” This translates to the corporate world to “work for a company you admire, not because of the job title.” She went on to say, if you admire the company start wherever you can, and then find ways to move up or even create a social responsibility program. I don’t know about that. When I worked in non-profit, I saw that there was a lack of social media marketing. I encourage the non-profit to allow me to work on a plan. I felt a lot of resistance; I wasn’t being paid for that. And even when I was allowed- it was for, at most, 2 hours a week. Not a great start – I ended up doing a lot on my own time. To go into a company with the full intention of creating a job or disliking your current position seems sneaky and troublesome. In an ideal world, the company would be happy to hear new ideas, but the company hired you for a reason, do you expect them to let you grow your new found passion into a job, just to have to hire somebody else for the job you abandoned? Honestly, not many companies have openings in a CSR dept. they are usually made from within, but even those seem very unlikely to create.
I definitely need to work for a company I admire – one in which I can take pride and maybe even help grow in a certain direction. I however, don’t expect to be able to create my own job.
The last piece of advice that I loved and why I got back into my MBA is because: “The Wal-Marts of the world can do more than any government.” Sometimes we forget just how much power businesses have, let’s make sure they use their power for good. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
No comments:
Post a Comment