Leadership Matters

As it is, today’s companies face greater pressure than ever before from shareholders, customers, and employees to become more sustainable. But how do you engage workers within your business to personally integrate sustainability into their everyday actions and decisions?

Frequently, executives ask their employees to exhibit behavior or take initiative only to be disappointed in a negative result. However, as we share in our business sustainability consulting, if you want to engage people in your company to be personally involved in taking eco actions and becoming more sustainable in their personal lives, then it seems only natural that the organization itself would lead those sustainability efforts by demonstrating value for the sustainability concepts they are asking their employees to embrace. On the corporate level, this takes the form as a formal sustainability plan or business sustainable strategies.

The post, Sustainable Leadership: Are you a Diminisher or Multiplier? identifies two types of bosses, "diminishers", who get less than 50% of the capability of people around them, and "multipliers" who get virtually 100%."   Leadership has the ability to make it or break it for employees, teams, departments, and the bottom line.

"In a comprehensive review by the researchers Bruce Avolio and Fred Luthans of more than two hundred leadership studies, only one quality among leaders consistently had a positive impact on their employees. It was the capacity to recognize potentials that the employees didn't yet fully see in them. Put another way, the best leaders used their own positive energy to bolster their employees' faith in their own abilities and to fuel their optimism and perseverance in the face of stresses and setbacks. That belief from a leader is intoxicating."

Bridging the gap between corporate sustainability programs and employees rest in the sustainable leaders vision - being a "multiplier".    How does this happen?

Educate: Offer ongoing workshops, training, lunch and learns, and educational activities to educate workers on the environmental issues (energy, water, waste, and others) and the associated actions causing the problems. Identify new behavior and eco actions that individually workers can take to create new patterns of behavior and choices that support environmental solutions and are aligned with the company's overarching sustainability plan.   We've learned in our eco friendly training classes, the first part is educating; the harder part is changing the behavior. Ongoing education helps create lasting change.

Create individual employee sustainability programs: The basic premise of a personal sustainability program is to reduce your carbon footprint, lighten the load on the planet as well as reap the benefits of living a more sustainable lifestyle.    Eco actions taken in a personal sustainability plan can be anything from riding a bike to work or eating organic healthy meals or recycling. It can also be about achieving a personal goal, sustaining it, and building from that platform. Tying a program to incentive structures is one way of demonstrating its importance in the organization. Another option is to extend individual sustainability plans to groups or departments within the business and align goals/ metrics with the overarching sustainability plan of the company.

Engaging workers within your business to personally integrate sustainability into their everyday actions and decisions starts with the organization and its leaders. Leading the way and imprinting upon those the characteristics of eco awareness in daily life.