Sherrington Associates was founded in 2014, with the original purpose of “Optimising Leadership”. In 2018, an executive coaching programme for our senior management helped us realise our shared value for sustainability. What followed was the repurposing of our business to support clients to embed sustainability as a core culture across the organisation. ‘Influencing Sustainable Leadership’ became our new purpose.
Sustainable leadership has since been our core business, recruiting leaders, coaching and developing leaders, sustainable succession planning, and assessing leaders using our new 4A Assessment Platform. We believed it was crucial that we live up to the high standards expected of a business that advocates for better corporate sustainability, which is why in 2022 we began the process of becoming a certified B Corp, achieving our certification on Christmas Day 2023 with an overall B Impact Score of 83.9!
Becoming a certified B Corp is testament of our commitment to use business as a force for good. We are proud to be part of this growing, global movement of purposeful B Corp businesses.
What is B Corp?
If you are not aware of B Corp yet, it is a global movement of people and businesses committed to using business as a force for good, balancing people, planet and profit. B Corps are companies verified by B Lab to meet “high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability”. There are currently over 7900 certified B Corps globally and more than 1800 in the UK.
B Corp certification is not to be underestimated. It is a rigorous and time-consuming process and definitely not a “tick box exercise”. With the threshold for certification set at 80 points, and the median score for ordinary businesses who complete the assessment currently sitting at 50.9, businesses who achieve certification deserve their place in the B Corp directory.
The B Impact Assessment
To become a B Corp a business must undergo a rigorous assessment process beginning with the B Impact Assessment (BIA). The BIA scrutinises a businesses performance across five impact areas: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers. Not only does the BIA clearly demonstrate a company’s performance and also provides a roadmap for further improvement. For us the BIA was composed of 123 questions scrutinising how our business operates. The BIA examined how our company is managed and how we prioritise social and environmental responsibility in our decision making. It investigates how we look after our team, their financial security, career development, engagement and job satisfaction. It assessed how we engage with the communities we are a part of our environmental management practices and the quality of our relationships with our customers. Ensuring we had exceeded the required 80 points for certification (it is not uncommon for points to be deducted during the verification process) we were proud to be in a position to submit our application for certification.
Verification
Following the submission of our BIA, we entered the verification stage of the certification process. Again, this is a rigorous process with our dedicated B Corp analyst working with us through each stage, to analyse and verify the evidence we submitted for many of our 123 BIA questions. It was however a very supportive process with our analyst’s main aim being to support us to certification.
Joining the B Corp community demonstrates our commitment to meet the highest standards of social and environmental impact in everything we do. It ensures we are held accountable and allows us to lead by example.
All B Corps are a work in progress. It does not end with certification. We will now look towards re-certifying and improving our BIA score, using the B Impact Assessment as a tool to improve how we do business. Our initial B Corp certification has highlighted all of the things we do well as a business, but also areas where improvement can be made. By focusing of these areas, we can continue to improve and use our business as an even greater force for good!
Click below to learn about our 4A Model of Sustainable Leadership and how we use it to impact leaders-sustainability.
