Steeden adds: "It can also be hard to navigate the balance between stewarding well for your family’s future needs and releasing resources to support the causes you care most about."
In this way Steeden touches on the responsibility that comes with stewarding of finances and resources. Business, as many advisers and investors will know, is a gift. It has extraordinary resource, including its people.
This brings responsibility, as Corah and Wookey agree.
Service to society
Wookey’s personal mission has been to help leaders of companies who wanted to model a different way of doing business that is better for people, better for business and better for society.
This was what he and a number of business leaders wanted to see happen, which was why Blueprint was set up in 2012 to introduce and integrate sources of thinking from empirical sciences and wisdom traditions, including Catholic Social Thought.
Blueprint challenges and supports companies to identify and pursue a purpose beyond profit, and to see themselves as social organisations in which people matter. It examines values in society and how businesses show up.
Money needs to be looked at in terms of risk and return as a fundamental feature, but as Wookey says: "The key is to thinking of financial services as a service to society.
"Stewardship is not just financial, not just whether or not a particular investment brings a financial return, but also carries a broader fiduciary duty to ask what are the social and environmental benefits, or whether it comes with social and environmental harms."
Wookey believes that looking at stewardship through the ESG lens is helpful, though he says ESG investment is in its early days.
Investors have a significant influence through which companies they invest in and whether and how they engage with management on these broader impacts, so whether they exercise their fiducial responsibility with a greater common good in mind.
He says this is all part of “the growing realisation of the importance of stewardship; including how investors invigilate companies they invest in, how they treat their people, who they monitor and report on their social and environmental impact.”
A socially led business thinks of itself as having two features as well as financial return:
- Clarity of purpose, which directs the business to benefit society.
- That the business sees itself as a social organisation with a positive impact on all it touches, whether employees, customers, investors, or suppliers.
Human dignity, the intrinsic value of each and every person, should therefore come into play when having these conversations with clients, with advisers, with fund managers and with the investee companies themselves.
He explains: “An investor should be asking things such as 'How are your people?', and looking at the quality of respect and human rights in the supply chain, pay, and conditions including safety. A lot more attention and research is being done in this area, and there is more reporting take place.”
