Don’t focus so much on ESG goals that you forget the larger business purpose.
A sustainability professional without a sense of purpose is never going to succeed in influencing corporate culture, similarly, a leadership team without a sense of purpose will soon lose its way. Purpose gives you and your colleagues a sense of personal fulfilment, inspires greater achievement, and promotes well-being by answering that internal voice with ‘I know what I am doing here. A personal or collective leadership sense of purpose also helps withstand the difficulties, trials and tests of modern corporate life, providing proven benefits to your resilience, physical health and wider relationships.
But while some sustainability professionals find purpose there, others struggle to direction within the profession and fall back onto a reliance on systematic ESG lists or ISO management structures to give their work a direction.
The good news is that leadership coaches and psychologists understand this dilemma and often collaborate with individuals and teams to help them discover that necessary sense of purpose, one that is unique to their workplace setting, and one that acts as a foundation for developing short- and long-term corporate goals to pursue as their contribution into a wider company mission. In doing so, you are likely to find greater professional satisfaction, achieve better-focussed sustainability leadership, and align ESG issues into necessary priorities. The bonus is that you will create a form of sustainability in business that is more rewarding for you and all those you interact with within the workplace.
Sustainability Purpose is the organizing principle that informs and shapes the sustainability decisions that you enact in the workplace, guiding how you set and prioritise corporate sustainability goals, interact with other colleagues, and what decisions and values you will select when faced with difficult choices. Sustainability Purpose has a higher sense of altruism, it extends outward from the organisation into a company’s wider supply chains and communities, changing the way business is conducted, promoting a do no significant harm philosophy, and in exceptional cases creating new business opportunities that supply jobs or benefit people and their environments.
But too often many sustainability professionals focus only on achieving short-term goals that aren’t connected to any overarching sense of corporate purpose. (“Toastmasters International”) They often chase ESG parameters that have little traction or reflection on their company’s existing business and can be viewed more as a ‘nice to have’ sustainability policy but with little corporate culture traction. Achieving a short-term sustainability goal such as this can give a temporary high or a box tick in your CV of achievements but there is little joy to be found in box-ticking and I often meet dissatisfaction amongst those who lack real achievement of delivering sustainability actions that align and with and influence the overall direction of the business.
“Most human beings get lost in a sense of action and don’t have a higher sense of purpose,” says Marshall Goldsmith, executive coach and author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Triggers. “Many of the leaders I coach tend to be so focused on achieving goals they forget why they are achieving them in the first place. But purpose or aspiration doesn’t have a finish line. Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking about our larger purpose.” (“Toastmasters International”)
This is a powerful message and a lesson that often is slowly learnt by sustainability professionals. Often working in a world where established standards, reporting criteria and external auditing there is pressure to constantly ensure improvement by continually pushing out evidence of continuous action across the checklists of others and their ‘performance’ rankings. Purpose is at heart is highly specific to an organisation and personal to its sustainability leaders, something is chosen by those within the organisation rather than being continually set by others looking across a wider spectrum of industries, sectors and global contexts. I am a big fan of ESG criteria, but it should be led by organisational purpose and sustainability priorities, and something dictated by you, not by external parties who—often with good intentions—try to create your purpose and goals for you.
When working with organisations I prefer those who understand why they are going for certification or accreditation with a particular standard, rather than those who have set it as a corporate target without any clear idea of how it aids the business. Badge collecting is a poor driver of corporate culture and value.
“The more that your purpose and goal achievement are aligned the more satisfied and happier you’ll be with your life.”
—Marshall Goldsmith
There is a mass of guidance out there telling you how sustainability should be reflected, what attributes must be visible and what ESG elements you should next be working on. It is a continual bandwagon of improvement and the mechanics of topics such as ‘Net Zero’ are easy to become lost in without understanding the long-term goals of how a business must adapt and change to accommodate them. There is no shortage of consultants telling you what you should be. Sustainability practice in business with its wide spectrum of tangible and intangible parameters presents a wide bandwidth of issues that can be tackled at an organisational level, in fact for those that are constantly watching out for what the sustainability or ESG issue will be it can be like getting a daily dose of 360-degree feedback on what out next performance improvements should be. While feedback can be highly beneficial, if you let it guide all your actions without first taking time out for personal reflection, you start to lose your own uniqueness and particular strengths as a sustainability professional, which is your purpose.
Having the courage to fully understand how your organisation truly operates, what the operational managers truly believe in, and how decisions are truly made out of the head office line of sight and listening to the reasons behind them will throw you into a much different range of sustainability challenges than some of the more esoteric ‘S’ in ESG issues. At a personal level, it challenges you to find solutions that will resonate with both the C-suite and the wider management and workforce and to define solutions that truly reflect future organisational purpose.
I was given two great pieces of advice through my career, the first ‘you only gain experience through by not being afraid to demonstrate a lack of experience at times“ and similarly ‘We learn the way on the way”. The message is simple – follow your curiosity and do not be afraid of trying out a wide range of personal or leadership strategies that help expand your worldview, understanding of the business and own determination of sustainability priorities. Have confidence in yourself as a sustainability leader, some of those experiences you explore will feel right and become part of your leadership mindset, others won’t and some you will incorporate into your leadership toolkit to be brought out in specific scenarios. It is only through trying and then reflecting that you will find out where the real priorities lie, and how to pursue your sustainability purpose from a place of excitement and inspiration rather than one of obligation or a desire to treat safely through corporate life.
There can also be pitfalls in making your quest to develop a sustainability purpose too much about ourselves as sustainability leaders. You can easily fall into the trap of thinking about purpose only as a self-focused pursuit of organisational direction. Be careful when you are tempted to say, ‘these are my sustainability goals?’ or ‘what I want the organisation to do’ too many times. From experience, I would suggest that many factors that give us the most purpose as sustainability professionals are about stimulating others to act and lead towards greater sustainability.
Sustainability Purpose arises from contributing positively to the development of others and in seeing corporate sustainability improvements slowly arising within other business functions to take their place within the corporate culture. As one example, I have always enjoyed working with the engineering functions within organisations, watching them accept sustainability concepts and turn them into practical realities has always been a treat. Watching innovation move from concept to actionable outcome is when sustainability becomes real, and we are likely to feel a greater sense of purpose. Finding ways to connect with others and help them contribute towards the corporate purpose is a proven way to boost your own sense of sustainability purpose – but without the ego trip!
Goals are an important part of running any successful business. Sustainability goals can give a clear focus, motivate employees and set targets for the organisation to work towards. Having clear, well-defined sustainability goals can help you take control of the business’s sustainability direction and increase the chances of achieving your target priorities for sustainability improvement or risk management. However, it is important to set specific short- and long-term goals that are clearly tied into your organisation’s wider sustainability purpose. If you do not set sustainability goals that align with business or organisational purposes, you can end up with a scoreboard of measures that are misalignment of sustainability or ESG targets and operational reality. Executives are often accused of inhabiting ivory towers, do not make your one the most sustainable ivory tower in the organisation!
Constantly look to tie sustainability goals to a larger organisational purpose and ask yourself how these sustainability goals will help others to avoid falling into the self-focused trap.
A previously set sustainability purpose can change with time as markets flex, change direction or are influenced by social trends and preferences. What matters most, is that sustainability professionals continue to seek improvements in overall sustainability performance across a range of priorities and are prepared to accept that new ones will inevitably appear. One of the key sustainability purposes that all sustainability professionals should work hard to achieve is that the organisation continues to grow, learn, and act in a responsible manner.
One of the main differences that can be seen between the two is in the time factor. Companies seek to reach their sustainability goals by setting actionable deadlines, on the other hand, deadlines are rarely applicable in the drive towards a greater corporate sustauinability purpose. Sustainability Purpose is directly influenced by the values and beliefs that a sustainability professional seeks to instil within the workforce and leadership, it would be a brave corporate edict to state that by a set date all individuals must hold these views as personal values.
I am grateful for a recent article in the January 2022 Toastmasters magazine, written by Dave Zielinski for stimulating thoughts on sustainability goals versus sustainability purpose in my mind
Ross Marshall, CEO leading Green
Jan 2022-