This is the fifth in a 6-part series on Entrepreneurial Skills for Social Impact. Parts 1 through 4 covered Vision, People, and Data. This piece unpacks why the processes behind your social impact program deserve the same design discipline as the program itself.
Imagine a volunteer leader who has a great idea. She’s identified a community need, found a nonprofit partner, recruited a group of enthusiastic colleagues, and worked with the organization to design an experience that meets a need expressed by community. She’s exactly the kind of employee every corporate volunteering program hopes to attract: motivated, resourceful, and willing to take responsibility for making something happen.
Then she tries to make it happen.
The volunteer platform doesn’t accommodate the kind of activity she’s planning. She needs approval from three different people, none of whom seems entirely sure who has the final say. There’s funding available, but the process for accessing it is unclear. The communications team needs six weeks of notice to promote the opportunity. Her manager is supportive in principle but concerned about the time commitment. By the time she’s worked through the requirements, the nonprofit partner has moved on, several colleagues have lost interest, and she’s beginning to wonder whether volunteering is worth the trouble.
From the perspective of the central CSR team, nothing necessarily went wrong. The policies were followed, the technology functioned as designed, the approval process protected the company, and each department fulfilled its responsibilities. Yet the system failed the person it was supposed to support.
I suspect most social impact professionals recognize some version of this scenario. Many have spent years working around systems that make their jobs unnecessarily difficult, and some have become remarkably skilled at compensating for those systems through personal relationships, persistence, and sheer determination. They know whom to call when an approval gets stuck, how to persuade a reluctant stakeholder, and which rules have enough flexibility to accommodate a good idea. Their programs succeed in no small part because they’ve learned how to navigate a system that wasn’t necessarily designed to make social impact easy.
While that resourcefulness is admirable, it’s also a warning sign. When a program depends on the central team’s ability to overcome its own infrastructure, the program has a serious capacity problem.
The Part of Your Program You May Not Think of as a Product
In the previous articles in this series, we’ve been exploring what corporate social impact leaders can learn from entrepreneurs. We’ve considered the importance of a compelling vision, the organizational structures required to pursue it, the people who make it possible, and the challenge of measuring whether any of it is actually working. These are familiar concerns for anyone building a business, and they’re equally relevant to those of us building social impact functions inside large organizations.
Now we arrive at process, which may be the least glamorous of the six components in Gino Wickman‘s Traction framework. It’s also one of the most consequential.
When social impact professionals think about program design, we tend to think about the experiences we’re creating for employees and communities. We consider the nonprofit partnerships, the volunteer activities, the learning opportunities, and the outcomes we hope those experiences will produce. We might invest considerable time designing a signature volunteering initiative or a volunteer leader development program. But the layer of design that deserves just as much attention is the support systems that allow those programs to function.
At Realized Worth, we’ve long used an organizational framework that distinguishes between a program’s purpose, its supporters, the programs themselves, the people who deliver and participate in them, and the capacity required to make everything work. That final category includes policies; incentives, rewards, and recognition; resources and support; reporting and measurement; and communications and technology.
These are often treated as administrative necessities — the things that have to be put in place so the real work can happen. I would argue that they are part of the real work. In fact, they determine most of what the program can realistically accomplish.
Consider how a product development team approaches its work. A good product team doesn’t begin by asking which features would be easiest for the company to administer. Instead, it tries to understand the people who will use the product, the problem those people need to solve, the obstacles they encounter, and the experience that would help them succeed. The team tests assumptions, studies user behavior, removes unnecessary friction, and improves the product as it learns.
Why wouldn’t we apply the same discipline to the systems supporting corporate social impact?
Our volunteer leaders are users of the systems we create. So are our nonprofit partners, employee volunteers, regional champions, managers, and executive sponsors. Each encounters the program through a different set of processes and expectations. Their ability to contribute depends partly on whether we’ve made those interactions understandable, accessible, and worthwhile.
A volunteering policy is a product in this sense. So is a volunteer leader toolkit, a recognition program, a reporting dashboard, or an employee engagement platform. Each has an intended user, an intended purpose, and an experience that can be evaluated and improved.
Once we begin thinking this way, a different set of questions becomes possible. For example:
- Instead of asking whether we have a policy, we can ask whether the policy helps people make good decisions.
- Instead of asking whether we’ve provided resources, we can ask whether people can accomplish what we’re asking of them with the resources available.
- Instead of asking whether the platform is functioning, we can ask whether it’s helping people participate in the kinds of experiences our strategy calls for.
The difference may sound subtle, but it changes where we direct our attention.
Before You Improve a Process, Ask What It’s For
Dan Heath‘s Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working offers a useful challenge to anyone responsible for an established program. Before investing energy in making a process more efficient, we need to understand what the process is actually supposed to accomplish.
That sounds obvious until you consider how many organizational processes continue long after their original purpose has become unclear.
A company may have developed an elaborate volunteer approval process in response to a particular risk several years ago. Over time, additional requirements were added, perhaps after an isolated incident or a request from another department. Eventually, the process became something everyone was expected to follow, even though few people could explain why every step remained necessary.
The CSR team may have inherited a quarterly reporting requirement that measures participation by business unit. The report takes days to prepare, circulates among senior leaders, and generates occasional questions about why one region has lower numbers than another. But nobody has established what decisions the report is supposed to inform or whether the comparisons are meaningful.
Or perhaps the company has an employee recognition program that celebrates the people who accumulate the most volunteer hours. It may be popular, highly visible, and relatively easy to administer. But if the organization’s actual ambition is to develop sustained community partnerships or help employees become more thoughtful, capable contributors, what exactly is that recognition system encouraging?
These are examples of processes that may be working exactly as designed while producing results that are only loosely connected to the program’s purpose.
Heath asks leaders to reconsider the relationship between their activities and the outcomes they’re trying to achieve. His argument is particularly relevant to social impact because our field has become extraordinarily good at measuring and celebrating activity. We have systems for tracking volunteer hours, counting participants, recording donations, issuing badges, and reporting participation rates. Those activities can provide useful information, but their usefulness depends on what we’re trying to accomplish.
If our goal is to create opportunities for employees to contribute to their communities, participation may be a reasonable measure of access and engagement. If our goal is to develop employees’ capacity for empathy, strengthen nonprofit organizations, or contribute to sustained community outcomes, participation alone tells us considerably less.
The same reasoning applies to the processes that produce those numbers.
Before redesigning a reporting system, we should ask: What decisions do I need to make with this information? Before improving an approval workflow, we should ask: Which risks genuinely require oversight and which decisions could be made closer to the work? Before expanding a recognition program, we should ask: Are the behaviors we’re rewarding the behaviors we want more people to adopt?
And we should be willing to discover that some of our most established practices no longer serve the outcomes we care about.
Design for the Behavior You Want to See
In the previous article, I explored the distinction between lead and lag measures, drawing on The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling.
- Lag measures tell us whether we’ve achieved a result.
- Lead measures help us identify the behaviors that are likely to influence that result.
This distinction becomes especially useful when we turn our attention to process design.
Imagine that a company wants its employee volunteering program to contribute to leadership development. Its strategy emphasizes helping employees develop empathy, become more comfortable working across differences, and strengthen their ability to collaborate with people whose experiences differ from their own. Those are meaningful ambitions, but they won’t materialize simply because the company increases the number of volunteering opportunities.
We would need to consider what happens during those experiences. Are employees encountering unfamiliar perspectives? Are volunteer leaders equipped to facilitate reflection? Are participants being encouraged to consider the community context of their work? Are nonprofit partners involved in shaping the experience and helping employees understand the issues they’re engaging with?
Now consider the support systems required to make those behaviors possible:
- Volunteer leaders may need training in facilitation rather than simply instructions for event logistics.
- Event planning templates may need to include reflection questions and guidance for working with nonprofit partners.
- Managers may need to understand why employees are being asked to spend time preparing for and reflecting on an experience, rather than simply completing the activity.
- Recognition systems may need to acknowledge thoughtful leadership and relationship-building rather than rewarding the largest number of events organized.
- Reporting may need to capture evidence of learning and relationship quality alongside participation data.
- Communications may need to explain why the experience is designed differently from a conventional volunteer event.
Every one of those decisions involves a support system.
This is why I think it’s insufficient to identify a lead measure without considering whether the organization has made the desired behavior possible. We can tell volunteer leaders that reflection matters, but if we give them no training, no time, no facilitation resources, and no indication that the organization values that work, we shouldn’t be surprised when reflection is the first thing eliminated from an already crowded agenda.
We sometimes describe these situations as implementation challenges or change management problems when they are often actually design problems. A well-designed system should make the behaviors that matter easier to understand and easier to perform. It should also make those behaviors visible enough that leaders can recognize what’s happening, learn from it, and provide appropriate support.
This doesn’t mean every employee volunteering experience needs to be elaborate or every volunteer leader needs to become an expert facilitator. It means that the processes supporting a program should be appropriate to the outcomes the program claims to pursue. If we say we want more than volunteer hours, we have to build more than a system for producing volunteer hours.
Your Support Systems Have to Work Together
There’s another complication that makes this work particularly challenging for corporate social impact leaders: most of the systems we depend on aren’t entirely ours to control.
Volunteer policies may be governed by legal, risk, or compliance teams. Employee recognition may involve HR. Communications often require support from internal communications or marketing. Technology may be owned by IT, procurement, or an external vendor. Budgets and payment processes involve finance. Regional leaders may have considerable discretion over what happens in their locations. A CSR team can develop a thoughtful strategy and still find that the surrounding organization is working against it.
Patrick Lencioni addresses this kind of challenge in Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars. His work explores how organizational departments can become so focused on their own priorities that they lose sight of the shared objectives they’re supposed to advance.
In corporate social impact, this doesn’t necessarily look like open conflict. More often, it looks like reasonable people making reasonable decisions from within the boundaries of their own responsibilities. Understandably, the legal team wants to reduce risk, the finance team wants consistent controls, the comms team wants to protect the company’s reputation, HR wants equitable employee experiences, and the CSR team wants to make meaningful participation possible.
None of these objectives is inherently unreasonable, and all of them may be necessary. The problem emerges when nobody is responsible for reconciling them into a coherent experience for the people the program is meant to serve.
This is one of the reasons I believe executive sponsorship matters so much. A visible executive sponsor can help establish a shared objective that extends beyond the priorities of any one department. But sponsorship alone won’t solve the problem. Social impact leaders also need to develop the relationships and cross-functional working arrangements that allow people to identify conflicts, make trade-offs, and improve processes together.
For example, a CSR leader might bring representatives from legal, HR, finance, communications, and regional operations together to examine the experience of a volunteer leader from beginning to end. Rather than reviewing each department’s requirements separately, the group could follow an actual volunteering initiative from the moment an employee has an idea through planning, approval, delivery, recognition, and reporting.
Where does the process slow down? Where are employees asked to provide the same information twice? Which requirements protect something important, and which have simply accumulated over time? Who is empowered to resolve a problem when it crosses departmental boundaries?
That kind of exercise can reveal issues that no individual department would recognize from its own perspective. It also helps explain why organizational design matters so much in this work. Social impact leaders are often responsible for outcomes that depend on people and functions they don’t manage. Their success requires the ability to create alignment, build trust, and influence how work happens across the organization.
The process component of entrepreneurship is therefore inseparable from the people component. We need both the systems and the relationships that allow those systems to function.
The Discipline of Doing Less
One of the ideas I find most useful in Heath’s Reset is the willingness to remove work that no longer contributes sufficient value. This is harder than it sounds, especially in corporate environments where programs and processes accumulate history, relationships, and expectations.
For social impact leaders, the goal shouldn’t be to create the most comprehensive collection of policies, templates, and procedures. It should be to identify the processes that actually matter and make them clear, useful, and repeatable. That requires judgment about where consistency is essential and where flexibility is valuable.
A global employee volunteering program may need consistent standards for safeguarding, financial accountability, and data privacy, but it may also need to accommodate different community contexts, cultural expectations, nonprofit relationships, and local operating conditions. Trying to standardize every detail can undermine the very responsiveness that makes community engagement meaningful.
The challenge is to distinguish between the principles that must remain consistent and the decisions that should be made by people closer to the work.
I would encourage social impact leaders to make a habit of examining their support systems with three questions in mind:
- What should we continue because it’s clearly contributing to our intended outcomes?
- What should we change because it creates unnecessary friction or reinforces the wrong behaviors?
- And what should we stop doing altogether?
The third question is often the most difficult. It may also be the one that creates the greatest opportunity.
Where to Begin
If you’re looking at your own social impact program and wondering where to start, I wouldn’t recommend launching a comprehensive process redesign. Most CSR teams have more than enough on their plates already, and a large-scale overhaul can quickly become another initiative competing for attention.
Instead, choose one support system that’s creating friction or producing results you’re not satisfied with. It might be the process employees follow to organize a volunteer event, the way regional champions receive support, the criteria used to recognize employee contributions, or the reporting requirements placed on nonprofit partners.
- Start by identifying what that system is supposed to accomplish. Be specific about the outcome and the people it’s intended to serve.
- Then talk to those people. Find out what the experience is actually like, where they encounter difficulty, what they find useful, and what they do to work around the system when it doesn’t meet their needs. Pay particular attention to those workarounds. They’re often evidence that people have found a way to accomplish something the formal process makes unnecessarily difficult.
- Then identify one meaningful improvement. Remove an unnecessary approval. Simplify a form. Change what gets recognized. Give volunteer leaders better guidance. Eliminate a report nobody uses. Test the change, observe what happens, and continue learning.
The objective isn’t to create a perfect system. There probably isn’t one. The objective is to develop the discipline of treating the systems behind your program as things you’re responsible for designing and improving.
And that brings us to the final article in this series. Even a thoughtfully designed operating system won’t run itself. The next entrepreneurial challenge is figuring out how to keep the organization moving forward through all of that: how to establish a useful rhythm of accountability, identify and resolve issues, and make the difficult decisions required to sustain progress.
In other words, once you’ve built something, you have to learn how to run it.
This series is the manual for Entrepreneurial Skills for Social Impact. We’ll publish it in six components, each paired with frameworks you can use, books you might want to read, and the business thinking that you need to succeed. Next up: Implementation — how to keep your thoughtfully designed operating system running smoothly, especially in the face of obstacles and difficult decisions.
Want to legitimize this further with us? We hosted a RealTalk webinar on The Entrepreneurial Skills Every Social Impact Leader Needs where we walked through the full operating system and took questions from social impact leaders building their own function within their companies.
