Scott Stirrett's Blog

The world’s biggest problems won’t be solved by the social impact sector alone — here’s what’s needed

Addressing the world’s most pressing challenges — like the climate crisis, income inequality, and the COVID-19 pandemic — increasingly requires collaboration between governments, social impact organizations, and corporations. For instance, delivery and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine requires cooperation between governments, social service organizations, and businesses.

No policy, social innovation, or technology is likely to single handedly solve our most intractable social issues. David Smith and Jeanine Becker write that too often problems are addressed with “piecemeal and even siloed solutions, and with efforts that aren’t sufficient to address the problems at the scale at which they exist.” The social impact sector must acknowledge the complexity of these challenges and how each requires cross-sector collaboration, resources, and leadership.

Cross-sector leadership experience is critical to catalyzing systems change. Our past and present experiences influence our worldviews. Where we sit often shapes where we stand. If all your experience is in only one sector, you’re likely to overlook ways that other sectors influence a given system — be it food, housing or climate. To be a systems thinker, you need to address root causes, adapt to complexity, and catalyze large-scale social change. Having knowledge of and experience in only one sector means you likely only deeply understand a piece of a much larger system, thereby limiting your ability to create long-term impact.

What is cross-sector leadership?

Cross-sector leadership is the ability to work with, understand, and influence the public, social impact, and corporate sectors. Nicholas Lovegrove and Matthew Thomas observe that cross-sector leaders balance competing motives, acquire transferable skills, develop contextual intelligence, build subject matter expertise, cultivate diverse relationships, and are flexible in pursuing emergent opportunities.

Perfectionism isn’t a super power – it’s a mental health risk

While attending university, I became obsessed with productivity, sleeping overnight in the library, in order to balance course work, extracurricular activities and a part-time job. Eventually, I experienced a breakdown as the sheer exhaustion of trying so desperately to be perfect overwhelmed me.

Perfectionism is an increasingly severe public health issue that we need to take seriously. According to the American Psychological Association, perfectionism is “the tendency to demand of others or of oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance, in excess of what is required by the situation.”

Perfectionism can be debilitating. Some of the symptoms include procrastination and sensitivity to criticism. Perfectionists are so afraid of failure that they never get started on projects or take far too much time completing tasks. They are also more fragile in the face of challenges. If one expects perfection, minor setbacks can be completely destabilizing.

Perfectionism shows up in three main forms: self-directed perfectionism (when someone expects perfection of themselves); socially prescribed perfectionism (when someone feels pressure from society to be perfect); and other-oriented perfectionism (when someone holds others to impossibly high standards.)

Rather than being a superpower, perfectionism is associated with “depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive‐compulsive disorder and eating disorders.” Perfectionists ruminate about their deficiencies, concentrate on what could have been, and are often beset by shame and guilt. Many may think they are fundamentally flawed or broken, and the only way they can redeem themselves is through striving for perfection. According to Sarah Egan, a senior research fellow at Curtin University in Australia, “the higher the perfectionism is, the more psychological disorders you’re going to suffer.”

Venture for Canada didn’t invest in staff professional development in its early days — here’s why you should.

In the early days of Venture for Canada, we invested very little in staff learning and development — most of our focus was on simply surviving.

Starting a social impact organization is not for the faint of heart and for much of the organization’s first two years of operations, we struggled to regularly make payroll. Consequently, Venture for Canada (VFC) had a minimal budget to invest in learning and development. In these early years, we were a small team of less than five people, who often did not have the time to devote significant time to learning amidst many other pressing priorities.

Flash forward four years and our priorities have shifted, with investing in learning and development much closer to the top. VFC has close to 25 employees. As part of our staff performance review process, all employees and their managers agree on annual learning goals. The organization also has a dedicated staff development budget and we have implemented numerous learning initiatives, like a regular book club series. Members of the VFC board of directors also participate in various learning opportunities to enhance their relevant governance skillsets. The board and leadership team’s participation in lifelong learning is vital, as it sends the message that learning is an important organizational priority.

We recognize that fostering a culture of lifelong learning is a continuous journey and there are definitely areas VFC can improve. We also know that a component of knowledge mobilization is sharing our learnings with the larger social impact ecosystem. While we don’t think VFC’s approach is the gold standard, we know now that an investment in organizational learning is a crucial priority.

Here’s why.

According to a recent McKinsey report, “the call for individuals and organizations alike to invest in learning and development has never been more insistent.” Automation will have a profound impact on all areas of the economy, including the social impact sector. A 2019 study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that “should current cutting-edge technology become widespread, 32 percent of current jobs are likely to see significant changes in how they are carried out and a further 14 percent of jobs could be completely automated.”

These rapid changes necessitate all social impact organizations to make their employees’ learning and development a top priority. A recent study by Nesta, a leading British think tank, observed that increasingly, “higher order cognitive skills” are essential in most roles. In particular, folks across all functions need to embrace active learning, which is the ability to set goals, ask relevant questions, get feedback as they learn and apply that knowledge meaningfully in a variety of contexts. To become a “learning nation,” a Future Skills Council report argues that Canada needs to have “a skilled workforce capable of adopting new technologies and business models while ensuring the well-being of communities and society.” Social impact organizations will need to invest substantial time, money, and energy in organizational learning in order to achieve desired outcomes.

New Zealand has a social impact worker visa program. What can Canada learn?

As COVID-19 continues its global spread, countries around the world are curtailing immigration, including Canada: RBC Economics forecasts that the number of permanent residents entering Canada will be reduced by 40 percent from 2019 — a drastic decrease with long-term implications.

But there’s a tremendous opportunity to pilot innovative immigration and worker visa policies to better support the Canadian social impact sector. In a post pandemic world, Canada could become a global leader in welcoming newcomers through exploring innovative approaches to immigration and international talent.

While Canada has many different immigration programs, there’s no immigration initiative focused on specifically supporting the social impact sector. Canada does, however, have a “start-up-visa” program designed to attract technology companies to Canada. Entrepreneurs who own at least 50 percent of the voting shares of an innovative business are eligible to apply. Successful applicants must also receive sponsorship from specific incubators, venture capital funds, and angel groups.

Although dozens of countries around the world have loosely equivalent start-up visas, only New Zealand has a specific immigration program, called The Global Impact Visa, for those working to create positive social impact. The visa is administered by the Edmund Hillary Fellowship (EHF), which has the mission to “incubate solutions to global problems from Aotearoa New Zealand and make a lasting positive impact on the world.” According to the EHF website, “the Global Impact Visa is exclusively available to individuals and teams accepted into the Edmund Hillary Fellowship.” These Fellows are described as “entrepreneurs, investors, artists, activists, government intrapreneurs, and other innovators who are driven to develop long-term scalable solutions to pressing challenges and create global social impact.”

Compared to other work visas offered around the world, the terms are incredibly flexible. Visa holders are not tied to a specific business plan and are eligible for permanent residence in two and a half years. Furthermore, there’s no age cut-off, there are no minimum days required to stay each year in New Zealand, and dependents are also eligible to apply. EHF Fellows are working on issues such as providing financial services to the unbanked, converting human waste to fuel, and making ocean science accessible for all. Rather than assessing the issue area an applicant is interested in, EHF assesses the extent to which an individual has the potential to create positive global impact by screening for skills and character.

EHF is very effective at speaking the language of innovators and does a fantastic job spreading awareness about the program around the world. The Global Impact Visa has a rigorous selection process and is highly selective with Fellows coming from over 37 countries. Applications are increasing at a rate of roughly 30 percent per cohort and since launching EHF has received over 3,400 applications for nearly 500 fellowships. Well-known figures such as podcaster Tim Ferris, co-founder of AngelList Naval Ravikant, and filmmaker Diane Weyermann are recent Fellows.

EHF Fellows receive, “connections to New Zealand’s start-up ecosystem, government leaders, mentors, investors, research and development institutes, and Māori communities.” Moreover, Fellows gain access to “immersive experiences to learn Tikanga Māori, the Māori ways of doing things, and learn how to navigate business within a multicultural society.” The EHF Fellowship is far more than just a path to becoming a New Zealand citizen. Participating in the fellowship entails gaining access to an exclusive network and participating in unique training opportunities.

Yoseph Ayele, the co-founder and CEO of the EHF, says that alongside the Global Impact Visa, access to the Fellowship network and peer-to-peer support is one of the most significant benefits that Fellows indicate they get from participating in the program. Having access to a curated community of peers who are passionate about changing the world can be life changing, and help new migrants land well in a new country. Ayele describes the Fellowship as a catalyst for “economic transformation” that can create the “foundations for a more integrated economy to serve our collective wellbeing,” which places emphasis on economic, social and environmental impact. Spacebase, which reduces inequality in the space industry for developing and emerging nations, and Hepatitis C Action Aotearoa, which works to completely eliminate hepatitis C in New Zealand, are examples of successful initiatives founded by fellows.

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Post-secondary students are graduating into a recession — here’s what that means for the social impact sector

The International Monetary Fund forecasts that Canadian gross domestic product will fall by over 6 percent this year, which will be the most substantial economic contraction since the Great Depression of 1929-1933 and significantly more severe than the Great Recession of 2007-2009. While no financial crisis is the same, economic recessions disproportionately negatively impact those entering the workforce, in comparison to the general population.

Leaders from across society — including businesses, non-profits, post-secondary institutions, and governments — need to take action to empower recent graduates to launch their careers successfully, as this will enhance the productivity, skills, and health of our country’s workforce for decades to come. Talent is the number one resource of the social impact sector, and it is the fuel for future social innovations. Young people can bring new perspectives, experiences, and skills, which are crucial to addressing our country’s challenges. Canada cannot afford to have a generation who struggle to launch their careers.

The short-term impacts of recessions on new graduates

Under normal economic circumstances, finding one’s first job is a complicated process. During an economic downturn, it is substantially more challenging. According to a study from Rutgers University, only 56 percent of Americans who completed a post-secondary program in spring 2010, during the midst of the Great Recession, were employed 9 months after graduation. In comparison, 90 percent of individuals who graduated in the booming economy of 2006 were working within the same period. Unemployment can have significant negative consequences on individuals, with studies showing that job loss often results in physical and mental health problems in the short term.

Not only is it more difficult to find jobs during an economic recession, but once grads secure employment, incomes are lower compared to regular economic times, which then has lasting ripple effects on young people’s overall career earnings. A comprehensive study of Canadian post-secondary students and graduates found that new graduates who begin their careers in recessions earn 9 percent less than students who begin their careers in a booming economy.

Researchers Arne Kalleberg and Till Von Wachter argue that job quality decreases in recessions and “that a substantial fraction of earnings losses of job losers in recessions arises because of a persistent decline in job quality.” It is not only harder to get a job during a recession, but the available jobs are lower-paying than before a recession starts.

The long-term effects

The negative effect that graduating into a recession has on wage growth can often last for decades. According to Lisa Kahn of The University of Rochester, “taken as a whole, the results suggest that the labour market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy are large, negative, and persistent.” Moreover, those who graduate into an economic recession are less likely to be in a management role or hold a skilled position at the age of 30-34, compared to people in the previous age cohort who graduated into a robust economy.

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How a universal basic income could jump-start Canadian entrepreneurship after COVID-19

What do Milton Friedman, Elon Musk, Martin Luther King Jr., Robin Chase, and Noam Chomsky all have in common? They all are supporters of providing a universal basic income (UBI), which is defined as “a periodic cash payment delivered to all on an individual basis without means test or work requirement.”

Providing everyone a basic income garners support from across the political spectrum, as people support UBI for very different reasons. Advocates for the policy argue that UBI could be the most effective way to fight poverty and advance gender equality — two key areas of focus for the social impact sector in a post-pandemic world — and support workers whose jobs are at risk of automation, or layoffs in the wake of COVID-19.

All of these benefits of implementing UBI may well exist. To ensure the brevity of this opinion piece, I will focus solely on the potential of a universal basic income that could unleash Canadians’ entrepreneurial potential through and after COVID-19.

Canada’s Vanishing Entrepreneurs

While entrepreneurship has become increasingly glorified, in reality the percentage of Canadians creating new businesses has been decreasing over the past four decades. The number of new businesses created declined from “about 164,000 in 1984 to about 138,000 in 2013,” even while Canada’s population has grown by close to one third over the past three decades. And given the unprecedented economic challenges created by COVID-19, small businesses arguably face more challenges today than ever before.

As a study from The Bank of Canada states, “data show a clear downward trend in the firm entry rate in Canada since the early 1980s.” While the report indicates a decline in entrepreneurship amongst almost all age groups, the decline is largely driven by lower rates of entrepreneurship amongst Canadians aged 25-44. From my experience leading Venture for Canada, I see this trend firsthand, as there are so many youth who want to become entrepreneurs but face a myriad of barriers and challenges to get started.

The Consequences for Canada

The aforementioned Bank of Canada report argues that the creation of new firms results in “more-productive firms replacing less-productive ones” and that “new firms can be a source of innovation as they “push incumbents to become more productive.” Simply put, a country with more entrepreneurs is more innovative and in the end more prosperous.

Higher rates of entrepreneurship enhance labour productivity, which is defined by Statistics Canada as “gross domestic product (GDP) per hour worked.” Since the 1980s, Canada’s labour productivity growth rate has fallen from roughly 3% per year to around 1% per year, and there is the potential that this growth falls even further because of COVID-19. Additionally, in comparison to its peers, Canada is becoming less and less productive. According to a 2018 Business Council of Canada report, the average Canadian generated US$50 in output per hour of labour compared to US$60 per hour in Switzerland and US$65 per hour in the United States.

According to The Conference Board of Canada, labour productivity is “the single most important determinant of a country’s standard of living.” Declining entrepreneurship rates should be of concern to all Canadians. Fewer entrepreneurs results in lower labour productivity, a lower quality of life, and less financial capacity to invest in tackling social, environmental, and economic challenges.

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Personality assessment tests are no substitute for truly getting to know your employees

American psychologist and author Adam Grant has famously described the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, arguably the most commonly used personality assessment, as being somewhere between a horoscope and a heart monitor in terms of accuracy. Unfortunately, many employers misuse personality tests to make significant human-resource decisions, from who to hire to who to promote.

Personality testing is a $500-million industry, with one in five Fortune 1000 firms using these tools to screen job applicants. While insights can be gained from many of these assessments, employers should proceed with caution in using personality tests to make meaningful human-resources decisions.

As Whitney Martin, a measurement strategist at ProActive Consulting, writes in Harvard Business Review, the most accurate personality assessments measure stable traits, are normative in nature, have a score assessing the respondent’s candidness, and have high reliability to predict job performance. The “Big Five” personality test and its variants are often praised by experts. The tool was based on extensive scientific research of the five personality traits – extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness – that were found to exist across many different cultures.

In recent years, however, researchers have questioned the legitimacy of the Big Five test. For instance, a study from the University of Oregon found that the Big Five model does not apply among older populations in Western countries. Moreover, a team of researchers in Bolivia found that personality traits did not cluster into the Big Five groupings when they surveyed members of a tribe of hunter-gatherers. If the Big Five traits are not consistent across different cultures, generations and geographies, then the test is not measuring “stable” human traits, and individuals are not truly being compared with the overall population. Nevertheless, the Big Five traits have been found in more than 50 countries around the world, meaning they can be seen as being relatively consistent across different cultures.

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Workplace coaches shouldn’t just be for senior executives

In an increasingly competitive labour market, employers are going to great lengths to attract and retain employees. From free catered lunches to luxurious company retreats, firms try to one-up each other with increasingly opulent but often superficial incentives. Instead, firms should consider offering staff access to meaningful benefits, such as access to third-party coaches. Doing so can be a workplace game-changer, boosting employee engagement and team performance.

Third-party coaching is not new. For decades, many companies have provided senior executives access to coaching services. But it is rare for companies to provide these benefits to junior or mid-level staff, partly because of the high hourly rates charged by many coaching companies. Nevertheless, as coaching has become more mainstream, there are increasingly more affordable options, which make it cost effective to provide these benefits to all staff.

How can companies benefit from providing coaching as a benefit to staff? According to a report from Quantum Workplace and Fierce Conversations, 53 per cent of employees address a “toxic” situation at work by simply ignoring the problem. A coach can work with an employee to provide advice for how to successfully navigate a frustrating workplace situation, thereby enhancing employee engagement and even reducing staff turnover over time.

Leveraging independent coaches will increase a company’s ability to attract employees. According to research from Bravely Inc., a human-resources startup, employees who fail to “confront their situation head on often [take] their negative attitudes elsewhere,” and are eight times more likely to write a negative review on jobsite Glassdoor Inc., which then makes it more challenging for a company to recruit high-potential staff, given how often job-seekers reference the website’s publicly available data.

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When hiring new grads, employers should ignore grade point average

Canadian employers continue to face the lowest unemployment rates in 40 years, and more than 41 per cent of Canadian firms indicate difficulty filling job openings. From my experience working with hundreds of Canadian small businesses, many, but certainly not all, Canadian firms continue to screen out job candidates who are recent grads based on grade point average (GPA), even when significant research demonstrates that GPA is of limited value as an indicator for whether a job applicant will make a good employee.

Given the tight labour market, Canadian companies are losing out on high potential talent by using academic performance as a criterion for hiring and will benefit from discontinuing this approach.

Significant research demonstrates that GPA is of limited value as an indicator for whether a job applicant will make a good employee. According to Laszlo Bock, Google’s former senior vice-president of people operations, grades “are worthless as a criterion for hiring,” and there is no correlation at all between GPA and job performance except for brand-new grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Mr. Bock argues this is because the skills required in postsecondary are very different and that one becomes a fundamentally different person upon entering the work force.

Not only is academic performance largely irrelevant as a hiring criterion, a New York University study of 10,000 students in the United States, Canada, Germany and Qatar found that students with lower GPAs reported innovation intentions that were, on average, greater than their higher-GPA counterparts. The researchers speculate that this may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their postsecondary environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates, all of which “might really benefit innovation, but not necessarily [one’s] GPA.”

The authors of the report also argue that grades, by their very nature, tend to reflect the abilities of individuals motivated by receiving external validation for the quality of their efforts, whereas innovators tend to be driven by intrinsic motivation, which can be defined as “an energizing of behaviour that comes from within an individual, out of will and interest for the activity at hand.”

Individuals who are more intrinsically motivated also appear to have enhanced longer-term career outcomes in general. For instance, a Yale study of more than 11,000 West Point cadets found that those who entered West Point because of internal motivators were more likely to graduate, become commissioned officers, receive promotions and stay in the military compared with those who entered because of external motives.

While GPA is of limited value in the hiring process, attending postsecondary is correlated with enhanced earnings and there are many benefits of receiving an education. I am not saying that there is no value in attending postsecondary and working hard in school; rather, I am arguing that GPA, in and of itself, is of limited value as a hiring criterion.

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Universities and colleges need to make graduates’ employment outcomes a top priority

Almost all Canadians know a recent university or college grad who is struggling to find employment, be it a relative, friend or neighbour. Given that, as of January, the Canadian youth unemployment rate is 11.2 per cent, nearly double the national average, there are hundreds of thousands of young Canadians who face such challenges.

As the youth unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, Canadians have paradoxically become the most educated people on earth with 56.7 per cent of 25- to 64-year-olds completing postsecondary education. For most Canadians, attending university or college is an investment that will reap long-term dividends, with bachelor’s degree holders making on average an additional $25,000 per year compared to high school graduates.

Yet, even with these labour market outcomes, there is increasing feedback from employers that graduates are lacking the skills that they need. For instance, a 2015 study from McKinsey & Company found that, whereas 83 per cent of educators feel youth are prepared for work, only 34 per cent of employers and 44 per cent of youth agree.

In order to develop a globally competitive workforce that meets the needs of Canadian employers, postsecondary institutions (PSIs) need to make their graduates’ employment outcomes a top institutional priority, implement enhanced career readiness support and collaborate with employers to develop relevant work-ready skills in students.

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