Who should run the CSR activities?

By: Goran Sjoberg, Stockholm, Former President and Member Emeritus of IPRA, The International Public Relations Association.

CEOs frequently ask their advisors on CSR: where do we place the responsibility for running our company’s CSR operations?

There is no universal answer to the question, and the solutions differ considerably from company to company. Some general advice can be given to them:
If your emphasis is on environmental issues of a highly technical nature, you may need e.g. a chemist or another specialist with good communications skills, where the second capacity is as important as the first one;

If, however, CSR encompasses a wide variety of issues covering e.g. both social, environmental, economical and human resources, a generalist is usually needed to co-ordinate the work and outlining the interaction with quite a few and disparate stakeholder groups. In that case, two solutions seem to be more successful than others:

• the PA/PR manager, if he/she is part of top management so that the activities are part of the management decision making and not delegated down the line to a “side-office” without strong influence in the organisation;
• a senior top management person, maybe an Executive Vice President of the company, approaching retirement but with a firm position in the leading circles and with long-time experience of the company’s operations, its impact on society, and well-established contacts with several of the major stakeholders.

Regardless of which solution fits best, it is strongly advisable that the leader of the CSR operations organises a CSR team including experts from different  parts of the organisation so that maximum results can be achieved and input from and feed-back to the entire organisation is secured.