Sustainable Leadership

Sustainability leadership is about driving change faster. A practitioner understands the relationships and resources a business relies on to achieve a successful sustainability transformation and can embed this knowledge into everyone's role. But to achieve this, you need specific attributes.

In our experience, leadership is not just about leading a team and trying to be at the top. It is more about specific leadership attributes like the inclusion of stakeholders. It is possible to divide leadership into three types:

Do they lead with a purpose? Are they thinking about producing solutions for people and the planet? In general, long-term thinking is more important than short-term thinking.

Are they a conducter-based leader? An effective leader creates conditions in which people, teams, and communities are aligned with the organization's goals.

Do they have the characteristics of a catalyst leader? In a chemical reaction, a catalyst doesn’t get used up. Equally, a leader needs to create the energy for agitating the change.

Obviously, sustainability is not industry specific. But some of the common levels of integration that all organisations go through in driving sustainability can be described in the following picture:

One example of a purpose-driven organization is Patagonia. One time they ran an ad in?The New York Times?on Black Friday telling people, “Don’t Buy This Jacket”, showing one of their own products. But why did they do that?

Patagonia wanted to show the consumers why it’s important for them to know what tey’re buying. They highlighted a simple fact: Each piece of clothing, whether or not it’s organic or uses recycled materials, emits several times its weight in greenhouse gases, generates at least another half garment’s worth of scrap, and draws down copious amounts of freshwater now growing scarce everywhere on the planet. Therefore, Patagonia is offering a repair service for their clothing, as an alternative to buy a new jacket.

‘’Everything we make takes something from the planet we can’t give back.’’

It is important to understand that sustainability is not a revenue pillar, but a mindset, a force that is ready to take action. In the end, everyone needs to consume less. Businesses need to make fewer things but of higher quality. Customers need to think twice before they buy. Patagonia understood this simple truth early, but there is more need for a leadership of this kind.

Challenges

Today's biggest challenge isn't whether organizations have ambition or strategic goals – that’s more or less common sense now. The real challenge is how they're going to execute this in the real world and engage everyone. Those challenges could be divided into four categories:

The Learning Challenge

In this case, it illustrates that too much fact gathering can paralyze analysis. However, moving too quickly without careful reflection and information affirms the saying haste makes waste. So, we need to balance learning with action.

The Development Challenge

We know how to engage and empower employees, but there's also one more thing to consider: “if you empower dummies, you'll get dumb decisions faster!” Sustainability leaders should not only encourage their employees, but also develop their skills so that they can accomplish what needs to be done.

The Reconciliation Challenge

To achieve sustainability, we must break old habits, stop old behaviours, and introduce new ones. It is inevitable that conflict will arise as a result of this type of deep-rooted change. In order for sustainability leaders to solve the sustainability issue and rebuild relationships, they will need to address as well as handle that conflict.

The Impact Challenge

There are only so many hours in a day, and sustainability leaders will have to make some tough decisions. As an example: “Do we spend more time building relationships on the team and investing in people or working to accomplish the job effectively and efficiently?” The answer is that sustainability leaders need to constantly balance focusing on the task and focusing on the people.

Conclusion

Thinking pragmatically, we need to stop looking at the companies who have only moved an inch towards sustainability. We need to look at the bigger picture. The question that arises very often - Is a sustainability transformation based on an individual effort or only possible through collective action?

The answer is: both. For instance, a board member might allocate the right resources, right people and everything else that is required for the change. But if he does not achieve to create a momentum by including all the stakeholder in the organization, he will not succeed.

The same is true for lower levels. A normal employees might feel that he cannot add on much - but every individual can create influence on the board members or to his/her seniors in the organisation and that influential part is actually the way where they can contribute to the bigger change.

These examples show that sustainable leadership can have various aspects and can be expressed on every level. Whether its corporate leadership as with Patagonia, an ambitious change maker in the c-suite or a passionate employee starting a recycling initiative: We will need all those kinds of sustainable leadership if we want to succeed in the greatest challenge of todays society.

In the end we would like to share with you 10 principles of sustainable leadership that can help your organisation in becoming more sustainable.

• Be decisive about your commitment to sustainability, and own it.
• Make money by being a force for good
• Pinpoint where you want to lead, and where you don’t.
• Open-source solutions for peers, competitors and thought-leaders to contribute to, learn from, and use
• Own your failings and don’t be afraid to talk about them.
• Translate sustainability into the language your audiences understand
• Align sustainability, corporate affairs, and marketing plans.
• Value progress over perfection
• Measure performance using quantitative and qualitative indicators
• Celebrate and share your success