Polly Courtice is Director of the University of Cambridge Programme for Industry, which provides executive programmes and dialogue services to build leadership capacity for the challenges of sustainable development. She is also Co-Director and Chief Executive of The Prince of Wales’s Business & the Environment Programme, and Academic Director of Cambridge University’s Post-Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business.

Polly is a member of the University’s Council for Lifelong Learning and serves on the Board of the Institute for Continuing Education. She helped to establish the UK Government’s Business Task Force on Sustainable Consumption and Production and serves on its Advisory Group. In 2007 she was appointed by Al Gore to run his Climate Project in the UK, helping leaders deepen their understanding of climate change and explore appropriate action. She is a Trustee of Earthwatch and a Director of Jupiter Green Investment Trust.

Polly’s first degree was from the University of Cape Town and she has an MA from the University of Cambridge. She is married with two teenage children and lives in Cambridge, England. 

Q. What should companies be doing to be counted as socially responsible?

A. There is no easy answer, no quick fix. There is hardly any large or reputable company out there that doesn’t recognise that they have responsibilities to society that extend beyond their obligations to shareholders – to consumers, employees, the community at large, government, and the natural environment. But it’s one thing to accept the idea of CSR or sustainability, and another actually to embed the principles or policies in practice. This is not just about corporate philanthropy, and certainly not just about good public relations. It entails measuring and managing the full impact of a company’s operations, considering the real cost, not just to the environment but to society as well. For example, taking into account the whole lifecycle of a product or looking all the way along a supply chain, not just at the areas that are immediately visible or within their direct control.

Q. Where do companies begin on such a major task?

A. They can start with fairly small steps, by doing an energy audit or by reviewing corporate travel. Many companies are finding that by reducing their environmental footprint they can also making savings - the good news is that CSR can also make business sense.

Wal-Mart is a good example of this, as its President and CEO H. Lee Scott pointed out at the London Lecture for The Prince of Wales’s Business & the Environment Programme this spring: “Sustainability has caught on throughout our company. It has become an integral part of the Wal-Mart culture. It has even become a recruitment and retention tool. Our young managers view our focus on sustainability as a higher calling.” It’s an inspiring message. But it also brings business benefits. Wal-Mart estimates that their 2013 packaging reduction targets alone could save them $3.4 billion and their global supply chain nearly $11 billion.

Q. So how important is CSR to employees?

A. Aside from the fact that CSR also means caring for the people who work for a company, what’s encouraging is that when companies do get involved in CSR they often find their employees are very receptive, and its certainly increasingly seen as a means of attracting and retaining the best talent.

Most employees’ instinctive reaction to a company wanting to behave in a way that is good for society as well as making a profit is to say “yes, of course we must do this” – but actually making it happen is quite different. This is not like an IT or quality revolution. For a company really to embed principles of CSR and sustainability in a way that is meaningful often calls for a real culture shift, where you have to look at the system as a whole. It may require a profound change in the mindset and approach of the whole workforce, and even the most effective companies can find this very challenging.

Q. Please give some examples of areas where the mindset must change.

A. CSR often involves working differently with different sets of stakeholders. Over the past decade, for example, many corporate executives have radically changed the way they think about social campaigners or environmental activists – many of whom used to be seen as troublesome ‘do-gooders’. It has become increasingly apparent that companies and NGOs and governments have to work together in new and creative partnerships to tackle some of the huge challenges we face. Another example is the big shift in attitude to the CSR and environment specialists within companies – many of whom used to be affectionately dismissed as ‘tree huggers’ by their more business-focussed colleagues. CSR can still be perceived very differently at different levels and by different functions within a company, so that what seems important, say at Board level, may be seen very differently at executive, functional or operational levels, or between HQ and a subsidiary company. But if CSR is to become a fundamental part of a way a company does business it needs to be part of the company’s mission and values and norms and practices, and that means a much greater shared understanding of what is involved, perhaps even finding new business models to achieve more sustainable ways of producing goods and services.

Q. Can there be an international approach to sustainability and corporate social responsibility?

A. Sustainable development has to be seen in an international context – but at the same time the approach has to be rooted in local or regional conditions. So a company like Cadbury Schweppes, for example, invests extensively in local cocoa growing communities in Ghana, supporting local schools and libraries for example, and even launching a farmers newspaper and radio programme. But the company also plays an active role in international initiatives like the Sustainable Tree Crops Programme and the International Cocoa Initiative which aims at improving labour conditions in the supply chain. We apply this approach in our leadership programmes around the world, addressing global issues like climate change, but taking into account local conditions. For example, our programmes in South Africa focus on poverty, health, social justice; they have a quite different flavour in the US.

Q. And what is the role of the HR Managers in all this?

A. HR professionals have the potential to make a significant contribution to addressing this issue, but they have often struggled to introduce sustainability issues within their training and development programmes. It’s proven difficult accurately to communicate what it is that people might learn (or have learnt) and what they might do differently because of this learning. We’ve recently developed a sustainability competency map to help identify priorities for individual and organisational learning and to develop appropriate training programmes and other learning initiatives. But of course competencies are only part of the picture of organisational development. Individuals are only able to reach their potential in CSR and sustainability – demonstrating strategic thinking, effective stakeholder engagement, and personal leadership – if there is an organisational climate that reflects the values of sustainable development.