I love seeing how the blue water of the Caribbean meets the white sands of Puerto Rico from the air. In October, after landing, I didn’t go to the beach. Instead, I headed into downtown San Juan, where I joined 22 of my colleagues — all just a few years out of school and eager to make a difference not only in our organization, but also in people’s lives in the world at large.
They were in San Juan to participate in our Human Capital People to People (P2P) program; I was there to support them as an advisor and mentor. P2P is a skills-based volunteering initiative where our junior professionals undertake an intensive week-long pro bono engagement to support local nonprofit organizations. As with all of our volunteering programs, we were there to bring our greatest asset — the skills and experience of our people — to help nonprofits address their most critical issues and help drive transformational outcomes.
For me, the week in San Juan was a firsthand example of the benefits that a social enterprise can generate. At Deloitte, we define the social enterprise as a company whose mission combines revenue growth and profit-making with the need to respect and support its environment and stakeholder network. It is a business that embraces its responsibility to the community and serves as a role model to other organizations and its people.
The most obvious beneficiaries of P2P engagements are the nonprofits themselves. Many nonprofits find it challenging to muster the skills, data and resources they need to carry out their missions. They usually have very clear missions and well-articulated programs for achieving them, but they tend to struggle with how to deliver against overwhelming and competing demands with limited resources as well as operational execution challenges. Our teams quickly zeroed in on opportunities to improve back-office operations to create front-office or, more appropriately, mission-driven impacts.
The young professionals who do the lion’s share of the work during this experience are also beneficiaries. For them, this is a chance to give back to the community as well as learn and grow outside of the traditional “classroom” environment through hands-on experience. It may be the first time they own a client relationship, scope and develope an end-to-end client solution, or lead a team. Experiences like these expose young professionals to new ways of thinking, build their confidence and help them discover what type of leader they want to be. As important, in a time when 86% of millennials believe a business's success should be measured in terms beyond financial performance, they are able to act on that belief and put the organization's social capital to work.
But the most unexpected beneficiary of P2P was me! I was glad to be lending a hand in Puerto Rico, a place with which I have many connections. But I didn’t realize that it would help me to “re-up” the passion I felt for driving change with incredible teammates when I started my career 20 years ago. Volunteering reminded me that I work in a place filled with incorrigible problem solvers who thrive on change and the power of human connection. I also took away leadership insights that I’d like to share.
First, living the social enterprise for a week reminded me of the power of human potential. Nonprofits do so much with so little because they are very good at unlocking the energy of their people and the communities in which they operate. They embrace diversity and inclusion in both people and skill levels to help foster a more productive, innovative and inclusive society. They demonstrate that leaders should never underestimate the capacity of people who are motivated by heart and mind. The organization I worked with was laser-focused on activating the local neighborhood that it sits in to change the trajectory of the people in it.
Second, serving as an advisor to my colleagues reminded me that experience and the structure of having done things many times before can be unexpected force multipliers. Early in the week, after interviewing the nonprofit’s leaders, the P2P team members confronted a bewildering number of colorful sticky notes — each one representing an opportunity. The team had a moment where that reality of the scope of challenges set in. The mood and momentum dipped, and the path forward with just a few short days became murky. The pressure level in the room rose. I had seen this kind of problem many times before. I shared a few time-honored suggestions on how to frame and refine the problem, how to consider prioritizing impact and then sequencing the opportunities with focus. With that simple nudge, the team realigned itself and quickly identified the path forward, focusing on three problems and six clear solutions.
Finally, the P2P week made me think that, as leaders, we might want to lean on our titles a little less aggressively. My job in Puerto Rico wasn’t to lead; I was there to coach and support. And as I watched, the team members showed up in extraordinary ways. They displayed wisdom, drive, new perspective and blinding insight. They took charge and made decisions. This reminded me of the untapped potential of bright young people with passion and purpose. We leaders should be constantly searching for new ways to earn trust and unlock potential — ways to rely less on our vested authority and more on our experience and coaching
The concept of the social enterprise sounds good. But these days, business news is full of headlines that make it clear that many leaders are not yet convinced of its value — and its inevitability. If you are one of them, do a stint in one of your company’s social impact programs. If your company doesn’t have one, ask some of its young people to start one. I bet they will make you a believer, and you will find that together, you can develop innovative solutions around pressing social issues and help achieve lasting social impact.
