Most of us agree that being a responsible parent or responsible adult is important, and if asked, I imagine that every person reading this could articulate the elements of responsibility: Telling the truth, demonstrating good character and modeling good behavior and values, treating people fairly, being disciplined about earning a living, and being responsible with money would show up in most people’s lists. To those, many would also add community service and practicing one’s faith.

It’s equally important to apply a set of values to being a responsible business owner, executive, and manager. It’s the right thing to do. And now, business social responsibility is being heavily scrutinized by consumers, who are asking pointed questions about business behaviors up the supply chains from the products they purchase.

It’s tempting to assume that because I am a responsible and good person, my business is therefore equally responsible and good. But as any parent who has ever had to march an eight-year-old back to a retail store to return (and apologize for) a shoplifted item knows, responsibility and character don’t happen by osmosis. They require specificity, discussion, and practice, practice, practice.

Does your business behavior enjoy the level of specificity, discussion, and practice necessary to satisfy downstream consumers of your products (not to mention your own values)? Just as becoming the adult you want to be is a journey and not a destination, the same thing is true of becoming a socially responsible business. Let’s examine a few pillars of the business social responsibility journey, borrowing bit from the national Character Counts curriculum being taught to most of our children and grandchildren, and a bit from the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Trustworthiness

On the surface, this is obvious. Don’t lie, don’t cheat or steal, and do what you agree to do. But what about having the courage to do the right thing? What might that mean for your business? Many businesses have found themselves in the crosshairs between local mask mandates and walk-in customers who refused to wear masks. In discussions with many retailers, I heard the same thing repeatedly: “I didn’t want to upset the customer, who was a long-time client and important to our business. But later, when I realized how uncomfortable it made my staff and my other customers, I realized I had failed to properly consider and balance all the needs.” 

Having the courage to do the right thing can be hard, particularly when confronted with an unanticipated predicament. This is why we encourage businesses to have a set of values or principles, and to review those values and principles regularly with their teams. Challenging your options in an unforeseen situation against a set of well-known principles can make the right thing to do obvious very quickly, and the practice of discussing the meaning and implications of your values can give you and your teams the courage to do the right thing even when it’s difficult. 

Respect

Take a moment to consider the elements of respect, and most of us recognize that nearly every day goes by with some small failure. What does it take to treat everyone with dignity and respect? And who is everyone when it comes to a business?

Let’s start with that definition, because it clarifies the scope of the problem. “Everyone” means everyone you work with, their families, your investors and advisors and their families, your customers and prospects and their families, the community in which the business resides, suppliers and service providers and their families, the employees of those suppliers and service providers and their families, and the communities in which those suppliers and service providers do their work.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set a worldwide standard for a life of dignity and respect. The SDGs state that all people have a right to life without poverty, zero hunger, equality, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, decent work, peace, and justice. 

Though it shouldn’t be, that’s a tall ask. How can a business even begin to address such big issues? We start by articulating that respect is important. We tell our employees, customers, community, suppliers, and investors that these are our values, and that we won’t tolerate violations of those values. We publish our policies regarding respect, and we openly discuss our progress – successes and failures! – as part of our self-reporting. Consumer research suggests that consumers do not expect perfection of their providers (yet), but they do expect transparency.

Next, we ask all our suppliers, service providers, and investors about their policies regarding health, safety, wages, employee treatment, equality, and community impact. We do research to see if we can confirm or disprove those claims, and we bring up issues for discussion and clarification when we find evidence that a company we do business with is not respectful. To confirm supply chain social impact claims, we ask them if they have third-party audits or witnesses that can confirm their adherence to their policies.

Is this a lot of work? Yes, though with practice, it becomes faster and easier. Just keep reminding yourself and your employees that you are on a journey. Focus and reward your progress.

Fairness

The dictionary definition of fairness is “impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination.” It doesn’t mean that everyone gets the same thing every time—that's just Solomon proposing to cut the baby in half—but it’s tempting to apply fairness in this way, because it’s so much easier than grappling with the true nature of fairness. 

A good way to start exploring fairness is to bounce your actions against these three questions:

• Does this decision take advantage of anyone?
• Does this decision reflect or depend upon a personal bias?
• Is this decision playing by the rules, and if it is, are the rules themselves equitable to all?

If you begin with this simple framework, and teach it to your employees, you will become a progressively more fair business. You will also unearth surprising pockets of unfairness, giving you more discussion points and ways to progress on your responsibility journey.

Citizenship

Citizenship is an important part of the Character Counts curriculum. Children are taught that they must do their share to make home, school, community, and the greater world a better place. The UN SDGs clarify what that means by saying we can make the world a better place by ensuring affordable and clean energy, economic growth, creating sustainable cities and communities, engaging in responsible consumption and production, taking climate action to protect life below water and above land, and to develop the industry, innovation, and infrastructure to support the world’s population.

Businesses are not citizens, but the people who own and run businesses have a responsibility to demonstrate good citizenship. Your business responsibility plan should describe what you are doing to make your community and the world a better place, in alignment with these objectives.

Business social responsibility isn’t a trend. It’s a movement; a movement that was growing before the pandemic and which has heightened attention because of the social problems exposed during the pandemic. The days of thinking that CSR (corporate social responsibility) statements are a problem for public corporations publishing quarterly reports are gone. In fact, for small business owners, being socially responsible can be an area of increased customer relevance and attachment, as buyers increasingly make discretionary purchase decisions based on how they feel about a brand.

Now is the time to create specific, intentional plans, document your experience, and share your progress. Start small, with just a few steps, add on over time, and remember: Doing good is good business.

When conducting job interviews, why do we ask the questions we ask? How did the standard questions become the standard questions, and what insights do they give you into the prospective employee? We might not spend a lot of time thinking about the interview process. There is a tendency to rely on vibes, which means you might be missing out on a great employee by failing to ask the right questions and understand how to evaluate answers.

These are the problems that competency-based interviewing addresses. You’ll no longer worry about winging it in job interviews. By using this research-backed methodology, you’ll become a more thoughtful interviewer with a deeper understanding of each candidate’s fit for your company.

Focus on Key Competencies

Competency-based interviewing is all about determining what the key competencies for a role are and crafting questions that uncover a candidate’s competencies. It’s not enough to ask about a candidate’s work history. You have to have an explicit understanding of the competencies a successful candidate must hold, and you have to know what questions are going to reveal those competencies.

Seek Specific Examples

While most interviewers will ask candidates about their past work experiences, the questions might not be designed to assess specific competencies. In competency-based interviews, the interviewer will ask behavioral questions, eliciting responses based on actual experience. Candidates will recount specific examples of their skills in action, prompted by questions that begin with phrases like “Tell me about a time when…” or “Give me an example of…”

Probe for Details

A competency-based interview is an opportunity for a candidate to offer an impromptu case study of sorts. Follow up on those behavioral questions by seeking further details, focusing on the context of a problem or situation, the interviewee’s thought process, what knowledge, skills, or resources they called upon to solve the problem, and the outcome of these actions.

Strive for Consistency and Fairness

If you’re winging it in an interview, your questions might go all over the place. “Vibes-based interview” techniques might result in a good conversation with someone you could be friends with, but you might reflect later that you didn’t come away with any actual data you can call upon to make a hiring decision. Competency-based interviewing solves this problem by presenting a clear rationale behind the kinds of questions you ask and by helping you produce a standardized set of questions that offer a fair framework for evaluation.

Integrate Other Interviewing Strategies

While competency-based questions help us form a better picture of a candidate’s qualifications, they are not the only questions that matter. It is but one tool in the interviewer’s kit. Behavioral psychology, social psychology, communications training all have something to offer the interviewer, not to mention all of the useful ideas that come from cognitive ability theory, situational judgement theory, and anti-bias training. On that last point, we all have biases that we might not be aware of, and we need to learn how to account for them when evaluating candidates for employment. Interviewing is a science, and while we can’t become experts in every one of these fields, we have to at least think scientifically if we’re going to hire the best people available: question assumptions, build theories from evidence, make sure our results are replicable.

Conclusion

Learning how to hire is not something we often think about, but it is a skill every small business owner has to master. Competency-based interviewing takes the guesswork out of the hiring process and lets you directly compare one candidate’s competencies to another’s. Done right, you’ll end up with a team whose goals, methods, and dispositions align with your own and whose competencies are tuned to success in a given role. But, as we’ve argued elsewhere, be careful what you ask for! Seeking out engaged, creative, and accomplished employees means you are going to have to reward those qualities. With Competency-based interviewing, you end up with the kind of employees you asked for: ask the right questions, and you’ll get the right employees.