Listening: A Strategy and Change Blog | Hosfeld & Associates

By Kathleen Hosfeld

Looking to reap the many benefits of a stakeholder centric approach to business but wondering where to start?

First, recognize that you’re not starting from zero. You already have relationships with stakeholders. Many companies can benefit from taking an appreciative approach to identifying what they are already doing well. From there you can measure the gap between the current state and the desired future state of each relationship.

Second, accept that movement toward a stakeholder centric model represents both cultural and operational change and will take time.  This movement will take a combination of both “soft” skills and “hard skills.”  An effective change initiative will address individuals and teams, structures, behaviors and beliefs.

Third, get rid of the notion that this is just corporate social responsibility or good PR.  It’s actually a different approach to business altogether.   It means inviting stakeholders into the value creation process of your company.

While every company’s situation will differ, there are eight basic steps to implementing a stakeholder approach to a business:

1.  Determine the strategic context:  What are you trying to accomplish? Are you formulating business strategy or functional strategy?  Are you seeking the overall competitive advantage of the firm or are you working in service of a specific business unit, service or product’s performance?
2. Prioritize stakeholder influences in this strategic context:  Evaluate stakeholders using the criteria of power, legitimacy, urgency, interdependence, cooperation, and conflict. Consider all the stakeholders in your value chain. Note that research shows that investing in employees make the most significant contribution to overall financial performance. This is likely a good place to start.
3. Assess stakeholder interests and satisfaction: Many executives think they know what stakeholders want, but it’s rare when they actually do. Assessing stakeholder interests and the current state of their satisfaction can take many forms: discussion, surveys, group processes. What’s important is to make this determination based on data.
4. Harmonize stakeholder interests: Compare the interests of all key stakeholders to identify areas of commonality and difference. Look for the third way when needs or interests seem to compete.
5. Develop stakeholder strategies: Creating stakeholder strategies is an iterative process with the preceding step. Inherent in each stakeholder strategy is the best way to form a two-way exchange  that creates value for all parties. This step should include a determination of measurable outcomes.
6. Implement stakeholder strategies: Create a detailed action plan that defines accountability for full implementation of the stakeholder strategies, and support the plan with resources.
7. Evaluate: Using the measurable outcomes defined above, evaluate stakeholder efforts’ success in creating value for all.

Additional articles about the stakeholder model are available here.

By Kathleen Hosfeld

In a world where religious differences have never been more polarizing, it’s no wonder that many employers fear religious expression in the workplace.  Which is why it’s all the more remarkable that companies are tapping into spirituality as a way to improve working relationships and productivity. One such example is Google, whose mindfulness program was featured in this New York Times article.

The primary concern for many employers with religion is a lawsuit, according to Cindy Wigglesworth, as quoted by Patricia Aburdene in her book: Megatrends 2010 The Rise of Conscious Capitalism.  Harassment lawsuits take the form of employees’ alleging that a fellow employee or their boss is trying to force their religious beliefs on them. Aburdene cites the statistic that between 1992 and 2004 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission saw an 85% increase in complaints of religious discrimination in the workplace.

Yet, Aburdene says that the rise of spirituality in the workplace is one of the megatrends that is contributing to the emergence of a new form of business. In addition to Google’s mindfulness program, consider:

• The hugely successful works of poet David Whyte: “The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship,”  “Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity,” and “The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.” Whyte is a popular speaker to workplace groups and teams.

• The Interfaith Network at Ford, which represents Catholics, Buddhists, Evangelicals, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Mormons and mainstream Protestants, sends a monthly electronic newsletter to 5,000 employees.

•  2,650 chaplains have been placed in corporations in 43 states by Marketplace Chaplains USA to provide employee care in a model similar to that employed by chaplains in the US military.

• Andre delBecq, professor of business at Santa Clara University regularly attracts 30 Silicon Valley executives to his seminars on Spirituality and Management. Questions the courses address include: How is business leadership related to the idea of a calling?  What special challenges are posed for spirituality by power and wealth that accompany successful business leadership?  How can spiritual disciplines and meditation practices be tailored for the time-pressured life of business professionals and leaders?  What are the benefits of a more intense spiritual journey for the organizational leader and the organizations they manage?”

These snapshots suggest not only a role for spirituality but the significance of spiritual seeking related to our experiences in the workplace.  The question becomes how we can respond responsibly to this need.

Aburdene quotes Wigglesworth, a former HR executive, as saying it is possible to open the door to spirituality in the workplace, but it takes careful planning.  The steps she recommends include consciousness and cultural competence training in the same way corporations have dealt with affirmative action, disabilities, sexual orientation and sexual harassment.

One of the things that are needed is a grounded understanding of spirituality that is broadly inclusive of all religious traditions as well as those with no religious tradition including atheists and agnostics.  I’ve been considering several characteristics of such a broadly inclusive perspective and would like your thoughts.

Consider the following:

•  Spirituality is the human process of meaning-making. Spirituality in the workplace includes those practices that engage employees in reflection and discovery of meaning for themselves as individuals and as members of their team, business unit or company as a whole.

•  Spirituality in the workplace is the experience of interconnectedness that expresses itself as inclusivity, compassion, reciprocity and service.

•  In the spiritual-but-not-religious workplace, employees experience a sense of individual and/or collective calling; they are drawn to specific work because it’s work that needs to be done, and the individual or group is uniquely qualified to do that work.

I want to hear from you. What is spirituality for you? What aspects of your spirituality do you feel can be brought to the workplace without proselytizing?  What aspects of spirituality would contribute to your workplace performance or to a more soulful experience of work?

Please comment here or send me a private email if you prefer by using the contact page.

For another article on spirituality at work, please see my article The Spirituality of Strategy

By Kathleen Hosfeld

Two of my “summer reads” are books that make the case that strong relationships with key stakeholders are driving financial performance and are central to how business is being reinvented. The first is Patricia Aburdene’s  book: “Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism.” The second is “Good Company, Business Success in the Worthiness Era,” By Laurie Bassi, Ed Frauenheim, and Dan McMurrrer with Larry Costello.

Aburdene’s book follows the framework of her hugely successful megatrends books written with John Naisbett, and cites seven interrelated trends that encompass corporate social responsibility, spirituality in business and so-called “conscious capitalism.” The term conscious capitalism, which Aburdene used in speaking engagements for several years prior to the publication of the book, has been picked up by both academics and business people alike.  A conscious business embraces three things:

• a strong sense of mission and purpose,
• a stakeholder perspective – which cultivates strong relationships with key stakeholders rather than prioritizing stockholders or profit as the sole directive, and
• conscious leadership.

“Conscious leadership” in this setting means leading holistically through the lens of relationship-oriented values.  Recently, practitioners have also begun to articulate the cultural dynamics of conscious business as having these key values: Trust, Authenticity, Caring, Transparency, Integrity and Learning.

(Note: This definition of conscious capitalism is complimentary to but not the same as the conscious business model developed by Fred Koffman. That model emphasizes self-knowledge and self-awareness as the basis of conscious behaviors and choices.)

Both Aburdene’s and Bassi’s books look at the question of “why” businesses are changing their practices. Aburdene, while citing multiple drivers of economic necessity and changing values, shines a spotlight on the spiritual values and practices from which the conscious capitalism arises. Bassi and colleagues, who also cite a spectrum of drivers, highlight the changing values and expectations of stakeholders and their influence on company behaviors.  They have created their own term – “worthiness”— which connotes the qualities that make a company worthy in the eyes of customers, employees and other stakeholders.

Good Company emphasizes the role of the employee in all three important “worthiness” areas:  being an employer, seller and steward.  I like the summary of one Amazon reviewer who said “Good Company shows how a strong leadership culture that’s serving all of its stakeholders and society pays off for everyone buying from, working for, investing in, and doing business with the company.”  A worthy company does not choose one stakeholder over another. Everybody – including the community and environment – wins.

Both books include stories of real businesses and executives doing well as a result of a broader stakeholder perspective. One of the things I appreciate about Good Company is that the authors also point out when companies who are doing well in some areas stub their toes in others.  This reads to me as imminently practical and realistic. The new paradigm is still emerging and all of us still in that transition will arrive at various degrees of consciousness – worthiness, goodness, sustainability, etc. — at different times.

(In another article, I will explore the  updated business case for a stakeholder view .)

More about the books:

Megatrends 2010

Good Company