Good citizenship can unite and energise a firm in difficult times

What are the business benefits of good citizenship? As Sir Philip Craven, president of the International Paralympic Committee, said: “You are all catalysts for change and role models for an inclusive society.”

My own firm, Hogan Lovells, has provided pro bono support to the British Paralympic Association for a number of years. Lawyers in London, Hong Kong and Beijing advised in the build-up to both the summer Paralympic Games in Beijing in 2008 and winter Paralympic Games in Vancouver in 2010. In the lead up to the London 2012 Paralympic Games, we seconded a lawyer for six months and had many volunteer ‘games makers’.

Such pro bono work is one of five strands of our citizenship programme, which also encompasses community investment, charity (including matched giving), environment and diversity.

All of this recognises that our success as a firm depends upon our ability to attract, retain and motivate the best people. For all firms, your culture and values are a key part of who you are and why people wish to work with you.

With a swell of Olympian goodwill, it is perhaps timely to note that the Archbishop of Westminster is hosting a conference exploring the disconnect between the way people behave in their social and family lives with how they feel obliged to behave in business – the so-called ‘divided life’.

Can we minimise such a divide, or do we live with it? Is bridging the divide an insurmountable challenge for high-pressure businesses in intensely competitive sectors?

Scott Fitzgerald amusingly wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.

More esoterically, philosophers such as G.I. Gurdjieff have suggested that we use a series of buffers to separate out all the contradictions within ourselves, rather as the buffers between train carriages remove the friction and allow the whole to stay upright.

At the personal level, a personal coach might highlight such incongruence, for example by posing highly challenging questions like: “Imagine your funeral. Who might come and what might they say about you – and what do you wish they would say?”

Businesses often seek to gives a sense of purpose through their mission statements. But few are remotely inspiring and many are management drivel.

Yet, a key job for you as a leader is to make sure people are passionate about working with you and your firm – because going the extra mile requires them to give discretionary effort.

Perhaps the Paralympics will provide the opportunity to refresh energy in your firm, while there is such goodwill, and to push aside the inertia that continual economic stagnation breeds. To ‘look up at the stars and not down at your feet’.

To consider, as Stephen Hawking said, that “there should be no boundary to human endeavour”.

To pick up on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the Olympic ceremonies that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”.

What would it be like if your people believed, as Sir Ian McKellen said, that “the greatest adventure is what lies ahead”?