Building an organisation to serve Dorothy

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. … just a little bit!

“I suspect it’s Maslow’s second highest need – respect – that people most crave from work: respect not just from their colleagues but from the world. No one wants to have to cringe when they tell people where they work.”

This insight from Michael Skapinker’s excellent column in the FT last week got me thinking about using social pressures to drive business and institutional change.

My experience and observations suggest that Skapinker didn’t go far enough: I was recently at a cinq à sept in Toronto and starting chatting with someone who works for a business consultancy. He talked about a variety of projects he was working on to reposition various resource extraction companies in the global market – interesting stuff if you’re into business strategy.

The conversation turned to what I spent my days (and nights!) working on. I told him briefly about Engineers Without Borders and our work in Africa and Canada.

And then R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

I started hearing about all the Corporate Social Responsibility projects he and his consultancy have been helping out with over the past few years. Here I had a very well paid business consultant, who was previously telling me about positioning the company for an extra $2billion of capitalization on the public markets, talking about community empowerment. Beautiful.

More than “not wanting to cringe”, my experience is that people want to be sincerely proud of the companies that they work for. This is one of the drivers behind CSR policies, corporate values and codes of conduct, and it results in business leaders being responsive to their employees wishes.

This has obvious relevance for the change we desire in EWB. If we want a company’s offices to offer exclusively Fair Trade coffee, then we should start by convincing employees that this is a good way to support global development. Change from the inside out.

I’ll take the chance to point out a great example of this by EWBers Anthony Candelario and Binnu Jeyakumar who have been respectively working to evolve their company’s Codes of Ethics/Conduct (http://my.ewb.ca/home/ShowPost/72223).

Now, the devil is in the details. How can we have a change movement driven by R.E.S.P.E.C.T.?

Lindsay Mitchell and I had a really interesting call this morning with the strategic communications folks at Blue State Digital, the folks who built and ran MyBarackObama.com. One of the concepts we talked about was something I would term as “paths to engagement” — that is, what are the likely modes or steps that people are likely to take when getting involved in a social cause or organization.

A very summarized version of BSD’s experience goes something like:

Sign up with e-mail address → Take a basic action (like sending an e-mail to a MP) → Tell a friend → Give $

This caused me to reflect on my experience with social causes and organizations, and what my likely path of engagement is. Three quick descriptions from my past:

1. Engineering Society at the University of Waterloo – I orginally got involved in student government as a participant in events; typical for engineers at Waterloo, this generally involved lots of drinking, little sleep, and sometimes a lot of running around. Not my finest moments! Then I was asked by a good friend to be a sports director, then I was encouraged by another friend to run for election on the executive in a newly created position of VP Education; responsible for being the condiut between engineering students and faculty. Now graduated and, in theory at least, making some money, I’m a donor to the University of Waterloo and direct my funds to the Engineering Society.
2. Volunteer Canada – In this case, I was asked to attend a national think-tank called Volunteer Zone Bénévoles that was being hosted by Volunteer Canada. It was an interesting weekend, and I was sufficiently vocal about change that I ended up being asked to become a member of the National Board of Directors where I served for the past 4 years. While a Board member I also participated in events, learned more about volunteerism and the policy surrounding it at a national scale, and became a donor to Volunteer Canada.
3. The Canadian Merit Scholarship Foundation – It being Canada’s premier undergraduate scholarship, I had met many exceptional people who were recipients of Loran Awards or who were in some way involved in the organization; many of these great people have been involved as leaders in EWB. Then I was asked by the executive director of CMSF to become a mentor to one of the recipients, which resulted in a great relationship with a now Rhodes Scholar Wojciech Gryc. Once again, I was asked and became a donor to CMSF.

For myself, I take a few lessons from my own “paths to engagement”.

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