Corporate social responsibility is a type of self-sustaining business model that helps a business not only run successfully but also make it socially accountable to people.
Planning to study CSR? Read on to know what skills are required to excel in this line of work.
Table of Contents
Value-thinking
Corporate social responsibility entirely focuses on creating value for a business, environment, and community all at the same time. No single thing is given more priority over the others, and neither are they practiced at the expense of one another. This approach helps build businesses that are more durable and hence sustainable. It is about a thinking pattern that particularly focuses on value-thinking.
Stakeholder-oriented
Corporate social responsibility is entirely about stakeholders. Learning to identify stakeholders and making their interests your own. CSR attempts to understand the needs of their stakeholders as it helps them to attain value-alignment, making the stakeholders more of collaborators and partners in a business; it is a relationship that nurtures one another in a sustainable manner.
Alignment-thinking
Corporate social responsibility focuses on meeting the interests of stakeholders (or consumers) in a way that also aligns with the needs and interests of the business. Alignment thinking is like strategic empathy which strives to understand the interests of the stakeholders, then find the means to make the business solve the issue or meet the demand. It is a sustainable, nurturing relationship.
Communication
Communication is a key skill for someone who wants a career in CSR. They are expected to communicate in a clear and concise manner in order to develop and implement actions in a CSR project. Communication is also about good listening, acknowledgment of others, sharing stories, and staying humble.
Mainstream business understanding
If you seek to be effective in this role, you will have to understand business. You need to be fully conversant about how your company is making its money, what is making its business model work, and what are its opportunities and risks. If managers think you’re not well-versed in business, they will not take anything you suggest seriously. It may also mean that they see CSR as not something that leads to commercial success. The task of CSR is to make a business profitable and sustainable, not at the cost of one another.
Sales
You may wonder why you need sales skills when you’re working in CSR, but you definitely need them. Selling ideas is no easy feat and it takes as much merit as it takes in a sales process for selling a device or product. You will still need to think in terms of the benefits you are selling to the other individual and how you can meet their demands as to why they should choose you and not another business.
Join a program today and hone your skills to be a successful CSR professional.
