Eight actions for creating catalytic cross-sector partnerships

Eight actions for creating catalytic cross-sector partnerships

EXECUTIVE BRIEFING

Many of the limitations and challenges associated with cross-sector social impact partnerships are rooted in their points of origin. More intentionality, responsibility, and creativity are necessary to unlock a greater number of truly catalytic opportunities. 

As the field of corporate social impact matures, organizations are embracing cross-sector partnerships as a means to advancing social and environmental goals. With ample institutional resources and access to wide-ranging capabilities, corporations are able to envision and invest in big ideas. Increasing attention from the private sector is altering the architecture of cross-sector collaboration, creating new opportunities for ambitious projects and deepening value alignment. 

At the same time, exciting examples of partnership activity are often flanked by examples in which opportunities go unmet. Given asymmetries in resourcing and capabilities, partnerships are too often rooted in matching dependencies between organizations. When that’s the case, partners satiate certain needs while overlooking more powerful approaches to collaboration, leaving behind big, creative, and sustainable ideas. Partners also lower their ceiling for impact when they proceed with too narrow an understanding of their own assets within an ecosystem, stunting potential unlocks that bloom from outside – and occasionally unlikely – perspectives. And, when organizations neglect to systematically embed trust and accountability, underlying relationships risk failure – in turn jeopardizing catalytic opportunities. 

These barriers to a catalytic result are best addressed at or before the point of partnership inception. Anchored in interviews with social impact leaders representing large corporations, NGOs, and philanthropies, this report presents eight actions that organizations and their leaders can take to raise their ceiling for impact. 

The eight actions:

  • Bring on cross-sector expertise and perspective 
  • Place a premium on emotional intelligence (EQ) 
  • Mine ideas from business units and individuals beyond your social impact team 
  • Embrace third-party views of your capabilities and liabilities 
  • Open dialogue with partners-to-be about your asymmetrical advantages 
  • Interlock organizational incentives 
  • Engage outside facilitators during (and after) ideation 
  • Hardwire feedback loops

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The state of play: DEIB

The state of play: DEIB

Organizations have taken a larger interest in the practice of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging since COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd, and other pivotal events brought long-entrenched societal inequities into the spotlight. While their arc of progress is uneven, the simple fact remains: injustice occurs as prominently in workplaces as anywhere else, affording companies the opportunity – perhaps the responsibility – to model solutions that could ultimately yield a wider societal benefit. This trend report describes five key trends for DEIB in 2022:

The trends: 

  • With high expectations from current and prospective employees, companies are revamping recruitment to meet diversity goals; they are struggling to employ complete strategies.
  • To advance equity and inclusion, companies are leaning into stronger benefits, policy updates, and employee resource groups; data on efficacy is scarce, but makes clear that the work is just beginning.
  • Employee perspectives on DEIB effectiveness vary in ways that are unsurprising; company leadership has a responsibility for more open and reciprocal communications to better respond to these differences.
  • Reporting and disclosures around DEIB are improving, but the data is inconsistent and incomplete.
  • DEIB executives are turning over at an increasingly high rate; lack of resourcing, insufficient company-wide engagement, and burnout are major contributors.

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The state of play: ESG

The state of play: ESG

ESG describes an array of non-financial factors that investors, regulators, and other stakeholders use to evaluate the performance of companies. The growing popularity of ESG-motivated investing is contributing to more transparent and rigorous corporate reporting practices as well as operational changes aligned with improved social and environmental impact. ESG factors are increasingly understood as interconnected with–rather than distinct from–the financial performance and value of a company.

ESG can retain the attention it has garnered over the past few years if companies and investors better match their public commitments with operational rigor. Skeptics will undoubtedly remain, but ESG can become a powerful force for change if stakeholders make it so. This trend report describes five key trends for ESG in 2022:

The trends: 

  • Social issues are at once more fragmented and more important to the general public than climate concerns; as companies concentrate their climate commitments around carbon neutrality and net zero, the public is likely to become even less forgiving of those that perform poorly on social factors.
  • Dozens of ESG reporting frameworks and regulatory standards exist in jurisdictions around the globe; efforts are underway to consolidate and simplify those frameworks for the sake of consistent and universal reporting requirements.
  • Investors and companies are seeking deeper expertise and greater accountability related to ESG on their management teams, staff, and boards; the marketplace for that talent is not yet well established. Soon, that will change.
  • More retail investors, small funds, and large institutional investors are embracing an activist posture related to ESG and expressing growing skepticism that companies will make good on their commitments; the efficacy of ESG-motivated investor activism is on the rise, too.
  • Until recently, private markets have taken a back seat to public markets in ESG investing; now, private equity investors are playing a major role in the next chapter of the ESG story.

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