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CSR Training: Seven strategies to make it work for participants

CSR: Teaching, learning, practicing
Executive training programs can be boring, dull and virtually useless. Or they can be dynamic, career altering, fun and productive.
Here are some thoughts on how we can make CSR Training work better for participants.
How do we learn to do CSR Better?
What do we mean by ‘doing CSR Better’?
Different people have different answers to these questions. I’ll share mine with you, but encourage you to seek other answers and opinions too. In CSR, diversity rocks!
Let’s take the second question first. What is ‘doing CSR Better’?
For me it is all about value, always, every time. CSR is about creating and aligning value; value for shareholders and value for stakeholders. In ways that is not zero sum. It is done through the integration of resources, strategy, time, etc.
With this perspective we do CSR better by creating more value for any given level of inputs and by optimizing value created against inputs like time, money, opportunity cost, etc.
So, how do we learn to do that?
Notice that I said how do we learn to that and not how do we do that. You can see numerous posts on how to do CSR here.
This post will discuss what I know about teaching and learning CSR; knowledge built over decades of doing CSR and several years of developing and delivering CSR training to executives and leaders worldwide.
1. Diversity is key. By its very nature CSR is about working with diverse interests and developing common ground and value-alignment. Successful CSR programs involve internal and external stakeholders with a ‘what’s in it for them’ approach.
Having different industries as well as diverse sectors (private, public, NGO, community, government, international organization, etc.) and geographic diversity adds a lot of value to CSR programs. So too does having a range of functions and positions at the learning table.