Is a Chief Impact Officer in Your Future?
Photo by Azzedine Rouichi on Unsplash
Hiring the right person to help you weave your purpose throughout your company is just good business.
Building your company on a strong foundation of social and environmental impact as well as profitability makes good business sense. The challenge comes in maintaining the passion that got you into the business in the first place as your company grows. Even if you’re the most committed founder, you know that at some point you’ll need more help running the company.
An operations leader comes to mind as one of those key hires. So does a marketing and sales leader. A financial guru is right up there near the top as well. Eventually, a great human resources leader becomes indispensable to helping you build the right kind of culture to deliver on the company’s mission.
But what about impact? Where does that fit in the list of priorities? How do you hire to ensure that impact remains the thread woven into the fabric of everything you do? On the one hand, as we argued earlier, nothing can replace a totally engaged founder as the company’s impact champion. But eventually, you’re going to have to delegate that piece of the pie as surely as you would if sales or marketing were outside your zone of genius.
How do you know when the time has come to give impact to someone else?
Our strengths really are our weaknesses, so knowing when our strength starts to slide into weakness is an important leadership skill. One of the challenges facing many entrepreneurs is that they are usually excellent and resourceful problem solvers and, as such, spend a lot of time solving problems. This may be okay, and even necessary, for a while, but if your company is to grow, eventually you must spread the joys of leadership around a bit. It’s true of sales. It’s true of technical innovation. And it’s true of impact.
Before we get into titles, what you want to look for is a full-time person who can ensure that everything you do in your company reflects your mission. The way you make and package things. The way you engage with retailers and customers. The people you partner with in your supply chain and as investors. If this sounds like a big job, that’s because it is. Far too big for a founder who has to look at the whole picture.
You might start out hiring a fractional Chief Impact Officer to inventory and develop some ideas for your impact programs. We would recommend a director of impact, although Deborah actually lists herself as the chief impact officer (CIO) of her own company. Regardless of the title or rank of your impact champion, she should have a seat on your leadership team.
What should a company look for in a CIO?
If a reasonable budget for a CIO or director level impact champion isn’t in the cards just yet, you can look at hiring an impact-minded graduate of one of the growing-number of business school programs offering experiences or even degree programs that include strong sustainability or social impact components.
In the best of all worlds, however, you’d find someone with the practical experience and leadership skills to fit that CIO position. Ideally, this contributor would be well-connected to influencers and investors and people in your industry who have a passion for impact that aligns with your company. It may be a former CEO who wants to focus on impact. Or, it could be someone with a marketing background. We’ve known cases where retailers or buyers fit the bill as CIOs because they know how to think through a business plan that brings in partnerships with suppliers, manufacturers and so on.
Bottom line: this is not necessarily a time to get overly bogged down in credentials such as degrees etc. Cast a broad net in your thinking.
Ok, we’ve hired a CIO. Where is the focus?
By sitting on your leadership team, the CIO will be well-placed to cast a wide umbrella over your company’s impact programs. Think in terms of stakeholders. He or she should sit down with whoever heads up your marketing, HR, customer experience and operations and create plans with each area. It may be feasible for your CIO to lead several teams from different functional areas of the company. Deborah has a team devoted to community partnerships, which includes non-profits but also celebrities and investors who want to give back to the community.
As we noted in our last blog, impact gives focus and substance to your marketing and PR, so the CIO should be closely involved in all these activities to look for ways to promote the company’s purpose alongside its product. In this regard, the CIO serves as an important community builder within your company and in the larger community. The CIO also serves as the focal point for your company’s efforts to tap into resources like B Corp, pulling out the best practices to bring into your company.
Last, but not least, the CIO should keep a close eye on the founder, especially when the founder seems to have become permanently bogged down in the day-to-day grind, to provide the much-needed reality check or emotional boost. CEOs can feel as though they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, so one of the CIOs jobs is to remind the founder why he or she got into the business in the first place.
Doing so can restore the balance between the problem-solving side and empathetic side of the founder’s brain. Restoring that balance is no insignificant matter. For better or worse, employees model their emotional responses and behavior from their leaders. A great CIO can help the founder or CEO scale their passion rather than squash it.
Sincerely,
Rob Craven & Deborah Luster
About Rob Craven: Robert is the founder of ScalePassion and the Managing Partner of Findaway Adventures. He has served as CEO of MegaFood, NewOrganics and Garden of Life.
About Deborah Luster: Deborah is a serial entrepreneur in CPG, packaging and publishing. The first President and founding team of Annie’s and Chief Impact Officer and Founder now at Goodles, Deborah actively works with founders and companies internationally aligning proposition and purpose.