The Founder, CEO, executive leadership, or the Board have announced that they want a more environmentally sustainable business. A great decision and one that will help the company long-term …. but what next?
Beginning your sustainability strategy in an SME with limited resources can be difficult and challenging, especially as you look to set up traction between your existing practices and any future sustainability plans. Where do you or your Board begin?
Well, you have taken the hardest decision already by deciding to act. Before announcing your decision to the rest of the organisation or your PR representative, stop and consider the following 8 steps. These steps are very much the next actions the leadership team should re4flect on before informing others. They will help you give structure and direction to your plans.
Be clear in all your minds why you have started your sustainability programme for the business. What are the stimuli behind the move? Why take the jump now? Do you see the potential for future growth and expansion? Do you feel that there are issues appearing in the businesses’ practices that concern you? Are you jumping late onto the bandwagon the rest of your competitors are already settled into?
In speaking to Boardroom, the “why” question can hold a multitude of reasons, and often reflect different opinions around the leadership table. The critical issue is, to be honest about your respective reasons and the issues that have led up to this moment, as a reason behind becoming a more sustainable business is less important than the decision to switch tracks and move towards becoming more sustainable as a business. When an agreed consensus and purpose appears, capture it as it will be a keystone in the stages that follow. The stronger the why the more motivated you will be as the leaders accountable and responsible for the organisation’s sustainability and its integration within future business plans.
A Sustainability leadership mindset and its ways of management are the antitheses of short-term business-focused responses to the everyday issues that constantly have senior managers fire-fighting the same issues repeatedly. Implemented with forethought a sustainability approach supplements and strengthens the organisation’s practices, culture and ways of anticipating likely and significant business risks. This isn’t a once and done undertaking. Some internal changes linked to asset investment programmes may have a 10–20-year phase of operations. So, sit back, reflect and strategise for the future.
I work with several senior leadership teams who h. complained that they haven’t had time to take a long-term view of their business and its position within the marketplace. Frankly, this is a ridiculous statement as companies rarely stand still, you are either growing wings and rising or developing small stubby forelimbs and heading for extinction. Taking time as a senior team or business leader to reflect, assess, select long-term goals and consider what is happening around the business in the wider world. Sustainability megatrend assessment is a fantastic tool to aid such reflections and to shed new insights on the world outside your business. So, take time to consider the long-term with those who can supply insights, frame it within a sustainability context to focus yourselves and focus on what can be achieved today, and what will require a longer-term strategy to conduct.
You have now started to formulate priorities for your sustainability strategy! You are creating the foundations on which it will be built, and your priorities will form the bricks that define the strategy’s main structures. Your still following business logic – not a hint of tree-hugging anywhere.
Adopting a long-term mindset, and depending on the way you make long-term decisions, begins to align sustainability management with business priorities, and creates an agenda to work amongst other business plans, goals, changes and priorities. Sustainability shouldn’t be viewed as yet another new demand on precious management time, but a leadership demand that helps the entire organisation take a longer-term view of its most significant business priorities, opportunities and risks on your time.
I love brainstorming, carefully managed and focussed it can be a valuable business tool and collect valuable business insights. Strangely it doesn’t have to be the usual group of corporate actors, in one past case ideas flowed in a team when the CEO, two operational staff, and a junior procurement officer worked together on solving a problem – the CEO to his surprise was reduced to taking the notes, as he had the least insight into what was a considerable business inefficiency!
Brainstorming can be a great team builder; it can motivate people to step up as future organisational leaders and gets people actively engaged in a sustainability programme for the business. However, like any ‘chaos’ management tool it needs careful handling and works best when the agenda is clear to all and demands specifics from the participants. No idea is too big or too small. in some brainstorming sessions, be clear however on what you want from the session actions, goals, future visioning of customer ‘wow’ scenarios or practical future aims. ‘Be greener’ doesn’t help any organisational team formulate a strategy, so tease out the issue into a more workable statement within your options, such as ‘Reduce the plastic waste tonnage arising from the packaging line’. This sets a clearer aim as well as a quantifiable target on an object with the desired outcome. It brings focus and a clear business priority to the activity around a flip chart.
So, as you start to formulate tour sustainability business strategy, start a series of brainstorming exercises to find what your unsustainability priorities are, or alternatively what possibilities for the business it holds out.
What are your business sustainability ideas?
Use tools such as system thinking, the inquisitive “why,” and the repetitive ‘and’ to drill down into brainstorming debates. You don’t want the enthusiastic wall of lost post-it notes ideas but a clear grouping of workable priorities and strategies that pose challenges for the business currently and in the future.
I have seen organisational leadership teams become enthused by a raft of sustainability ideas for the business and charge off in different sustainability directions, only to become disillusioned by how slow the progress is. This is unfortunately natural, and why when working with leadership teams it is necessary to match their priority list with existing (or new) organisational accountabilities and responsibilities.
It is a valuable lesson for a leadership team when they are all agreed on a direction of travel for the business, but no one from the CEO to the Directors wants to own the issue. Often it is passed to a sub-manager as a quick fix solution. This is when I step in with a series of questions – as he got the required level of authority to gain support from other department heads, has he the accountability to commission a budget for the work, to employ external advisors and consultants to evaluate the investment strategy, who are they ultimately accountable to (their line manager or the CEO?), can they enforce the policy direction?, etc, etc.
As in any project management programme, a clear line of sight with accountability for delivery, and responsibility for ensuring it is achieved is always necessary. The top table cannot exclude themselves from involvement and someone must be the sponsor and champion of the initiative.
Are you a project finisher or starter? It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of a sustainability project, and then lose interest if it takes time to complete. Macro-projects need a firm and realistic timescale for completion, with set breakpoints for senior leadership teams to review project progress, cost and deliverables. Projects can change from the first charge of excitement, new technology choices can offer a more sustainable direction, and consumer desires can alter and harden demanding a more rapid response than the organisation envisaged.
Keep your sustainability priorities on track by setting a clear timetable for reports, leadership decisions (Go/Don’t go) investment points and regular reviews. Backcasting is a useful tool in that it allows you to set a potential time limit and then review back against what progress you would expect to have been made, all the way back to the current date. Any sustainability programme, no matter how small or large requires leadership review.
In setting regular management time aside for review, don’t get bogged down in detail. You may not ne the specialist in the organisation or be aware of current technologies or possibilities. Focus on setting the direction, not the detail. It is key to focus on what is needed, not how it is to be delivered. As an executive, I always looked to say the direction I wanted the business to move in, and then give managers and specialists the time to go away and consider the how. I then nipped and tucked progress, ensuring that the right people were on board and that the project leader had the required resources and support.
So, don’t make the route to success too restrictive.
I once came across a project that was a month from procurement, when an upgraded design was announced that was more efficient. Waiting for the more efficient product would cause a 3-month project delay but give a better ROI. The project manager declined to change as he had set a ‘completed’ date in his diary. Sustainability demands long-term management strategy, not short-term goals.
Yes, I am a sustainability consultant, so you should have expected this one coming over the horizon. I have also been a corporate sustainability executive and have been through these cycles several times in my career. If you feel the practical first steps, I have set out above are daunting or require skills you don’t feel comfortable with – outsource!
Bring in the help, guidance and assistance you require to gain initial momentum, to keep the process focussed on outcomes directly linked to the business, and priorities that are clearly reflect your needs not that of others. [hello] (link to the leading green contact page). It can be achieved through active coaching or via a bolt-on temporary arrangement. It can help you find time in your diary and set the process in a more strategic setting with reduced time wastage.
If your initial appraisal identifies a number of critical business priorities or opportunities for growth, consider employing a young or experienced sustainability professional to join the organisation. Over the last decade, there has been significant growth in the number of in-house environmental sustainability staff. What has been exciting about this movie is that these positions have survived stock market crashes, economic depressions and global crises – identifying their inherent value to their organisational and the new normal in business management practices.
From experience, moving across the tracks and onto a new sustainability aligned business model can be daunting and overwhelming for a leadership team. Firstly, it demands leadership above management, secondly, it demands developing foresight and the identification of business priorities, it may require you finally address that ‘too difficult’ issue that has plagued the organisation for years and crucially, lastly, it requires you as a leader to actively change an organisation’s existing business culture! Be strategic and set aside time to work through the and steady is the name of the game. Follow the eight steps above and you will be off to a strong business-focussed start.
Call us to discuss your first steps towards sustainability as a leader or leadership team. We can help you work through the first stages if you would like help setting your business’s move towards greater sustainability, set up a call to discuss the coaching or active support that is on offer.