Our personal and professional beliefs have a significant influence on how we see our place in the world, our influence amongst colleagues and our impact on the business around us. This ranges from our willingness to act in a leadership role, our inner strength when defending core sustainability values, how openly we challenge unsustainable corporate cultural beliefs, our views on environmental and social governance, and worryingly how openly we cry ‘this isn’t good enough’ internally.
In a change agent role such as sustainability leadership, your worldview and beliefs will play a critical role in the energy, innovation, transformative culture and importantly the leadership communications you will bring to the business, and how effective the overall sustainability culture is in assisting business outcomes and growth.
Your beliefs will either hold you back as a sustainability leader or help you. The choice is yours! Working with an environmental sustainability leadership coach can help you recognise and address how your beliefs affect your leadership, and how to flex and adapt your skills as a leader to overcome them.
Here are six limiting beliefs that I commonly experience and that hold sustainability managers back from performing at their best.
Who says so? I doubt when you read your employment it is full of what they want you to do and short on what they don’t want. In new professions such as environmental sustainability leadership, I doubt if they had the faintest idea of what you would bring to the organisation outside a pre-conception of value and business benefit.
So be yourself, prioritise what you feel needs to be addressed and head off and do it in a strategic manner that seeks to bring other peers and colleagues with you. Only an idiot blocks a good idea, so ensure that you can always demonstrate tangible business value or a contribution towards business resilience or growth.
This helps ground your actions and builds trust that you are on the right track.
As a young environmental manager, I was informed that the only way to get experience was through lack of experience!
This belief is a common excuse for not trying something or seeking to address big scary issues such as climate change or organisational culture change towards an improved pro-sustainability stance. The truth is that in a new profession such as sustainability leadership there is no real or proven reason why you are not capable of taking the first step. In my first post within a major power utility, they had employed four of us and told us to do something ‘environmental’. They truly had no idea what they had procured. So, we set about developing our own approaches towards environmental management, audit, energy efficiency and waste management. We got a lot wrong but there was always a sense of progress as we learnt.
I now spend time coaching environmental sustainability leaders, helping them identify what they need to prioritise, and then crucially how they prepare a strategy for the task, what tools they need, who to consult or ask to champion their cause, and the first steps into the change programme. Those first small steps are key, they help you engage with the task and start to dissect it. You don’t want to be overwhelmed by the tasks you set yourself before the increasing experience starts to drive your confidence forward.
The cost of change is often used as an excuse to hold back change because you cannot believe it can be done. The availability of capital is always an issue within any organisation as competing leaders seek to gain resources, technology, or support for initiatives. The key question is. Is your investment a better bet for the business than all the others? Why should you get priority? There are many ways to make a business case for the investment to head in your direction, you just must put the evidence together, show the benefits to others as well as yourself, and start lobbying for your idea to enter the next corporate business plan.
If a business leader or team says they do not want to change, there may be a multitude of likely reasons behind their response. Some of which may be that their leadership mindset is holding them back, they are reassured by the present status quo, they risk losing power or failure, they don’t sense higher leadership support or resources for the change, or importantly you have given them little incentive to change
You need to diagnose what it is that is holding them back. In one situation it turned out that the Chief Engineer was proud of the change a previous strategy had brought. It had worked well and brought organisation support with it. Ten years ago, it had been the right strategy at the right time, and it still worked well enough. Now I was coming along and saying I believed there was another more sustainable way to manage the organisation’s transformer oil leakage issues. It was clearly the wrong time to approach him for a top-down led strategy as he was soon to retire, so instead I focussed on a bottom-up approach that brought in change at a gentler bottom-up led a[[roach, that was adopted without anybody really noticing those old ways had changed. People, the ‘organic’ within an organisation, will always tend to hang on to the ways it has always been done. Less than 5% of employees will have a high innovator personality. Doing it the way it has always been done may be effective, but time and the mindset of the external world may slowly reduce its effectiveness as a pillar for business continuity or growth. A business or organisation must continually check, renew, or replace its human capital and physical assets in the race to remain competitive or efficient.
A sustainability manager must constantly introduce (or drip-feed) new information or learning processes into the organisation, its systems, and its leaders. Information that assists and helps others adopt unsustainable practices to current ESG norms. When faced with ‘how things were done’ blocks arise, seek to make sure they are countered with a rational and calculated judgment of how effective they will be in the present or future as pressure for this sustainability issue gains increased prominence amongst stakeholders, investors, customers, communities and within their social environments. A future-fit organisation cannot readily accept the phrase ‘that is how it is always been done.
It is easy to procrastinate when we fear failure. I was always amazed by leaders who failed staff badly in their internal appraisals because they had failed at a task the manager himself would not have taken on. Failure can have dreadful consequences in some organisations (whose HR Department usually claims a no-blame culture is in place!).
Good leaders and their teams should expect to fail. That is a reality of life, the failure is not to learn from what has happened and why. The initiative works best when an individual is given time to first explore the task, uncover more information and get a real sense of how to approach the task. That is why prioritisation is so important in planning sustainability strategies. You must address the business-critical issues, there is no doubt about that, the key task is how you attack them. What resources, training, support, and timescale do you need to address the issue realistically.
So, assess your strengths and weaknesses for the task, surround yourself with colleagues or a consultant who can bring you the technical or leadership balance you need.
So, stand up, go down to the correct floor and spend time talking and actively listening to a person who does have that information, or find a mentor to answer and guide your doubts. This is a dangerous thought for any leader to possess as it saps the confidence to speak out, question what is going on or develop your own opinion of the marketplace’s realities. A sustainability leader must possess a high degree of curiosity as the scope of environmental and social issues that we cover is so large, that we can never be experts across all fields. We rely on gleaning the knowledge we need from others who have possession of it, if you are afraid to ask open questions, to find out more about an issue or to question the way various industries operate, that will always be a serious disadvantage. Be humble and authentic in willingness to take on guidance, engage in continuous learning and be prepared to be coached.