More and more businesses and business leaders are speaking up and taking action on issues widely seen as important to society.

Nike has made a striking intervention in arguments about civil rights and race by selecting as the face of its campaign to celebrate 30 years of the ‘Just Do It slogan Colin Kaepernick, the NFL player unable to find employment because of his protest against police killings of African Americans. P&G has intervened in arguments about gender with campaigns ‘Like a Girl’ and ‘We See Equal’ depicting boys and girls defying gender stereotypes. Apple CEO Tim Cook has intervened in arguments about discrimination, challenging the states of Alabama and Indiana on LGBT rights.

Business leaders including Unilever’s Paul Polman, Virgin’s Richard Branson, Allianz’s Olivier Bäte, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Danone’s Emmanuel Faber, and others have joined together to challenge governments to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, as the IPCC has warned of the policy changes required by 2030 to avert the worst effects of climate breakdown.

Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose

Sitting behind these kinds of eye-catching public statements sits the growing trend of business leaders integrating social challenges into the heart of their commercial strategies and corporate goal-setting. Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan is a well-known example in 2010 the company launched a ten-year strategy to double the size of the business by 2020 by achieving goals such as improving the health and well-being of a billion people, halving the environmental footprint of their products across their lifecycle, and sourcing 100% of its agricultural raw materials sustainably.

And Unilever is not alone the proportion of the 200 largest corporations in the world setting themselves corporate sustainability goals rose from 77% to 94% between 2012 and 2017.

Why is this happening now?

Several forces are converging to drive these new actions from business leaders. Public attitudes are shifting. Millennials have higher expectations of CEO activism than older generations research by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research shows 47% of Millennials (age 18-36) believe CEOs have a responsibility to speak up about issues that are important to society, compared with just 28% of Gen Xers (age 37- 52) and Boomers (age 53-71).

Investor attitudes are shifting too. Larry Fink, chairman of Blackrock, the largest asset manager in the world, raised eyebrows in January 2018 with his letter to CEOs. In it, he stated:

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”

Business leaders need to see addressing social challenges as at the heart of their job description

Such shifts in attitudes are partly built on a recognition of the limitations of expecting governments to be able to single-handedly effectively address today’s complex interconnected global challenges that span national boundaries. The scale of business influence in global society has changed drastically over the past generation. Global trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s spawned a massive growth in the number and size of multinational companies. Whereas a generation ago the world’s top 100 economies were dominated by nation-states, now over two-thirds of the world’s top 100 biggest economies are corporations. Such growth influences fans' expectations of increased responsibility and contribution.

It means taking a stance when speaking out is required

Lots of commentators have been noticing this new behaviour, with Kotler and Sarkar writing on Brand Activism, and both the Harvard Business Review and the World Economic Forum publishing features on CEO Activism. But what does all this mean for the practicalities of the kinds of activities business leaders now find themselves getting involved in? What do they need to be good at? And what does that mean for talent management and executive development?

What new demands does this put on business leaders?

The much greater economic clout and influence of globally integrated business has thrust business leaders, whether they like it or not, into a far more overtly ‘political’ kind of role on the world stage, needing to be adept at playing public leadership roles alongside commercial leadership roles. The question is whether business leaders embrace these new roles, as in the examples discussed here, or ignore them and risk getting tripped up.

There have been plenty of business leaders over the past decade or so who did not recognize how these forces had started to shift the ground under their feet and what this meant for how they needed to play the role of business leader differently and consequently got themselves and their companies into trouble as a result.

We have been leading a program of research on this changing role of business leaders at Ashridge Executive Education, part of Hult International Business School, talking with some of the CEOs at the forefront of this trend. Their experiences suggest that today’s business leaders need a different mindset and a different skill set from their predecessors.

A new mindset

A generation ago, a business leader’s job was to keep their head down and focus on the business. Challenges in society were the job of political leaders. For business leaders to get involved would be a distraction, lack legitimacy, and only end up adding cost to the bottom line.

But in today’s world, business leaders need a different mindset to be successful. When today’s challenges cross borders, and the economic influence of global business contributes to the challenge of agreeing on effective regulation in the first place, business leaders cannot just leave global challenges to political leaders alone, and they cannot be confident that just sticking to legal minimums is enough.

Instead, today’s business leaders need to see addressing social challenges as at the heart of their job description, and not a source of cost but at the core of how they create value. Rather than seeing a trade-off between ‘doing good’ and ‘making money’, business leaders need to aim to achieve each through the other.

That means abiding by international human rights norms and global environmental agreements regardless of whether national governments are enforcing them effectively. It means seeking opportunities for growth through innovation in products and services that help bring to market solutions that make a difference. And it means taking a stance when speaking out is required.

A new skillset for leading change inside and outside the organization

Embedding such a new approach within a business requires some familiar leadership skills. The chief executives we spoke to talked of seeing their role in influencing change in their organizations in terms of opening up the space for others to behave differently through the goals they articulated and the rationales they developed for pursuing them, the stories and people they celebrated, the conversations they started, the questions they asked, what they were seen to spend their own time doing, and which individuals and groups got recognized and rewarded and for what.

However, the business leaders we spoke to also spoke of a significant shift in the scope of their leadership roles. They now see their role more and more as leading beyond the traditional boundaries of their organization, proactively leading change in consumer and supplier behavior, industry norms, and government policy. Some are leading collaboratively with industry competitors, NGOs, and government where challenges need to be tackled and only collective, systemic solutions will do.

This new horizon to their role has required leaders to develop skills in areas that historically have not been a conventional part of the business leader’s repertoire: contributing to public debate with an informed point of view, relating well with multiple constituencies, engaging in dialogue to understand and empathize with groups and communities with perspectives contrary to one’s own, and engaging in multi-stakeholder collaboration with unconventional partners.

What implications does this have for talent management and executive development?

Getting this new leadership role right is increasingly important for organizations. In the age of social media, silence is conspicuous and open to challenge, so doing nothing is not an option. But equally, CEO activism is not easy, and there are plenty of examples of interventions that have not struck the right note and backfired. To date, the extent to which organizations have ended up with people in leadership roles who can do this well has tended to be the result of chance rather than design.

We asked business leaders for their perspectives on how it was that they and some of their peers had grasped the need to lead in this kind of way while many of their contemporaries were still operating from an out-of-date leadership blueprint. While each individual’s story was unique, the clear theme was that certain key experiences had been crucial in influencing and shifting perspectives. For some, it was formative experiences around upbringing, university, and business school study. For others, it was influential mentors or first-hand experiences like engaging with people living in poverty, personal experience of challenges like the impacts of climate change, or personal first-hand experiences of the changing interests of key stakeholders.

These stories have important implications for how organizations think about talent management and executive development. They suggest that more is required than just briefings and lectures on global trends and their commercial implications relationships and first-hand experiences are at the heart of what it takes for business leaders to build the emotional connection and commitment to put this agenda front and center of their work. Therefore, to foster the right kind of leadership capability in their organizations, HR, Learning and Development, and Organization Development teams need to do more of the following:

Value these kinds of life experiences when making decisions about recruitment, career development, and succession planning, and make sure they are embedded in the HR processes that underpin these: If personal, first-hand experience like engaging with people living in poverty, personal experience of challenges like water stress or the impacts of climate change, or personal first-hand experiences of the changing interests of stakeholders, are key in stimulating the required kind of business leadership for the current era, then these kinds of experiences need to be deliberately encouraged, valued and sought after in recruitment, career development planning, the identification of high potentials and succession planning. Not because they are ‘nice-to-haves’ that demonstrate a rounded individual, but because of the crucial contribution they make to developing a worldview, relational ability, and organizational culture now essential for organizations to survive and thrive.

This will require deliberately looking for something different when making decisions about recruitment, career development planning, high potential, and succession planning. It will also require reassessing and, where necessary, reformulating the kinds of HR processes and indicators that supply the management information used when making these decisions.

Embed the opportunities to have these kinds of experiences in leadership development and executive education: Our research with organizations like IBM, HSBC, Lend Lease, Interface, IMC Group, and others suggests that more and more organizations are structuring their leadership development activities to create opportunities for their current and future senior leaders to have precisely these kinds of personal, first-hand experiences. To achieve this, they are employing powerful experiential learning that:

Give senior executives the chance to develop relationships with people experiencing some of the world’s most pressing challenges, and also with people working to help address these challenges.

Give them a chance to engage with new ideas to help make sense of the demands of this new business context like ecology, complexity, systems thinking, and social constructionism, and how these link with business language through new concepts like ‘shared value’, ‘brand substance’, ‘circular economy’, ‘base of the pyramid’ and ‘integrated reporting’.

Support them to make their sense of these experiences and relate them to their organizational roles through action-learning, business challenges strategic projects, and exposure to individuals in their organizations already modeling this way of leading.

Help them develop and articulate their own authentically held view on the purpose of their work and the value it creates for wider society.

Take Dutch multinational Philips for example. In their leadership development work in partnership with Ashridge, between residential modules participants engaged in strategic projects to develop new commercial propositions that help contribute to achieving the goal of the organization’s strategy: to improve the lives of three billion people a year by 2025.

One learning project challenged participants to develop proposals for serving rural communities in India with good business case potential and the ability to scale up. After spending time engaging first-; hand with women in rural Indian communities, health professionals, and NGOs, the team developed an idea to use mobile communications technology to support remote diagnosis.

The result has become a thriving public-private partnership involving Philips, government, and NGO partners. Health professionals now travel among rural communities with portable ultrasound, X-ray, and ECG testing equipment and send test results electronically to specialists in distant hospitals using mobile technology, who then liaise with the health professionals to discuss diagnosis via video conference.

Singapore-based shipping conglomerate IMC Group is another example. Working with partners from the Global Institute for Tomorrow, the IMC Integrated Leadership Programme for high potentials in the organization involves a week of classroom-based learning exploring socio-political and environmental trends, sustainable development, and business, followed by a week of experiential immersion learning, tasking participants to develop a strategy that embraces the principles of sustainable development for a specific part of the business. One iteration of the program saw participants spend a week on one of the company’s palm oil plantations in Kalimantan, Indonesia, engaging with local management, local workers, families in local communities, and ecologists.

Similar approaches combining awareness-raising with powerful first-hand experiences and opportunities to form relationships with key stakeholder groups have been taken by numerous organizations:

As part of their leadership development program, senior executives from British broadcaster Sky had to complete a business challenge on sustainable livelihoods in the Brazilian Amazon, involving first-hand engagement with local government officials, NGOs, and indigenous communities.

Senior executives at IBM work on strategic projects in emerging markets partnering with NGOs, local government, and local communities as part of the IBM Corporate Service Corps leadership development program.

At HSBC, senior executives have worked side-by-side with climate scientists at forest research stations to build awareness, emotional connection, and commitment to engaging with climate change in their work.

The motivation and skill to pursue CEO activism require cultivation and design leadership development and organization development professionals have a crucial role to play.