Shift, November 2013
What is leverage? It is a company’s ability to influence the behavior of others.
The concept of leverage plays a key role for companies in meeting the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. The Commentary to Guiding Principle 19 states that leverage is considered to exist where the company ha the ability to effect change in the wrongful practice of an entity that causes harm
Leverage gets to the heart of what companies can realistically be expected to do in practice when faced with human rights challenges. Even when companies have a dominant or influential commercial position in a business relationship, there are many questions about how to identify and exercise the most effective forms of leverage. At the same time, every company — regardless of size, industry or geography — faces situations in which it does not have, or does not perceive, sufficient leverage to influence the behavior or others. This raises questions about what steps can be taken to create or increase leverage; what steps could have been taken earlier in the relationship to have created leverage; and when and how to consider terminating a business relationship…
For What Purpose?
Leverage is about creating the opportunity to change how people think and behave. In the context of the Guiding Principles, it is about changing the thinking and behavior of key people within a supplier, contractor, business partner, customer, client or government, where their organization’s actions are increasing risks to human rights.
The purposes of using leverage may range from obliging another entity to address the issue, to engaging another entity to discuss the issue, to persuading another entity to address the issue…
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