Wherever you look, across whatever market you operate in, no matter what sector, environmental and social governance parameters and the wider demands for sustainability management practices in business now influence organisational purpose. Now is the time to consider investing in a programme of team coaching for sustainability!
A sense of team purpose is a powerful driver in performance leadership and employees respond well to an opportunity to define their contribution to both the company’s and their own sustainability ideals. Allowing teams, the time to interpret their role and messages to both internal and external networks yield valuable results that contribute to the organisational bottom line as well as its corporate responsibility and sustainability branding.
Sustained team coaching, or mentoring, aligned to existing team function and performance demands is a more effective driver of performance than artificial team-building exercises, external consultancy reports or online training. Below are five practical reasons why as a leader or HR development specialist you should invest in team coaching for sustainability.
How aligned is the team with its wider stakeholder community, how close is their integration with other internal teams or with external stakeholder sustainability interests? What is their awareness of external stakeholder sustainability data, performance and actionable outcomes that will have a growing impact on the way the business operates?
How does the team position itself, its messages and language with other stakeholders? And importantly, what is the strength of that working relationship and is it valued by your stakeholders?
Team coaching for sustainability focuses on the team’s awareness of the sustainability issues surrounding their role, functions, and interactions. It provides a strategic space for the team to reflect on the aspects they can control areas of sustainability influence and their alignment with wider corporate sustainability goals and allows the team to develop a shared purpose in how they strengthen the value of key stakeholder relationships.
By enabling dialogue and providing an opportunity for the team to examine the key sustainability issues impacting on the business, a sustainability leadership coach can skillfully re-focus a team on what is required for future performance and success. What does the team know about current and future sustainability issues influencing their market sectors and the future drivers of sustainability performance? What strategic questions are the team asking themselves in advance? Are these the right sustainability questions for both the organisation and their customers?
One of the sought outcomes for team coaching for sustainability is an enhanced team ability to assess and respond to business-critical sustainability trends and themes in the world around them.
All teams need psychological boosts to help maintain focus, organisational engagement and to take that next step up in performance.
Team coaching for sustainability helps re-affirm the latent innovation that exists within most organisations, but which often gets set aside during times of short-term focus. The depth and breadth of ESG, ethical and sustainability issues – as well as the fact that they are matrix and system-based challenges across most organisations – gives teams an opportunity to explore new ways of working, to revisit pinch points within systems and to identify blockers to success. As problem solvers, this stimulates thinking, the exploration of options and the multi-group perspective on how to tackle an obstacle.
CEOs constantly demand more innovative thinking from within their organisational functions, exploring sustainability in business issues is a proven way of promoting a wider range of options, the application of both soft and hard transformative leadership traits and stimulating team communications for better decision-making. Stepping back from existing issues and ways of working and revisiting them from a sustainability perspective open new ideas, options, and strategic approaches.
Research constantly reveals that organisations, where staff feel that their own personal values and beliefs are reflected within the purpose of the business, possess a greater degree of motivation and engagement in ensuring business success. Investing in team coaching for sustainability establishes and gives structure to that alignment. Many managers make the mistake of viewing performance through a simple matrix of performance targets, salary rewards and contractual terms. These transactional leaders repeatedly fail in motivating teams towards transformational and flexible ways of working in business, losing their team’s engagement and opportunities for business growth along the way. They may feel successful and important, but overall, they often deliver decreased performance, and their teams lack resilience.
One of the key advantages we have observed amongst teams undertaking sustainability in business coaching is that the solutions that emerge are often team-inspired rather than manager commanded. The opportunity through sustainability to express, explore and debate the many intangibles surrounding modern business practices allows team members to re-engage and bring their perspective to events. Team coaching for sustainability seeks to support and strengthen the quality of inter-relationships within a team, giving an opportunity for team members to contribute new skills and perspectives into group debates, and often teaching managers to guide rather than dominate strategic discussions.
In Leading Green, we expect team coaches for sustainability to bring a strong sense of challenge into debates, aligned with an outcome-focused approach that creates a strong action pathway that turns enhanced motivation into outcomes.
One of the final, and most valuable corporate reasons to invest in team coaching for sustainability is that it provides the coach with an opportunity to work closely with the team leader, helping them develop, revisit, and explore their leadership mindset.
Helping the leader to become to see the inter-relationship between themselves and the team, and the wider relationships that they must influence within organisations to deliver greater sustainability business models provides a new perspective on leadership. Sustainability leadership demands new approaches and leadership traits outside established business ‘norms. Sustainability coaching for business provides an excellent way to provide the psychological safety that many leaders require as they learn, develop, and explore new concepts. As sustainability concepts demand new organisational responses, leaders being coached are often more receptive to exploring new ways of working and accepting that sustainability issues cannot be simply addressed through previous command-and-control approaches.
Coaching for sustainability in business introduces a new dimension into leader-team dynamics and once embedded allows team members to be more open with their ideas and opinions, leaders being more receptive to asking for help or in accepting a wider team leadership approach to sustainability issues, and critically a more open dialogue and forum for team interactions.
Working with the team leader, we see team coaches providing career support and development opportunities, that create a learning and more self-reflective culture within leaders.
These are five strong reasons to capitalise on team coaching for sustainability in business. Centring coaching activities around a central concept – sustainability in business – allows a wider team developmental focus such as managing inter-communication, stakeholder relationships, decision-making, systems analysis, strategic planning and on occasion conflict resolution. Ultimately the prime outcomes are to align a team’s performance with the wider corporate business purpose and sustainability objectives. The secondary goals are utilising a proven coaching route to improve how the team operates, faces challenges, and utilises its combined energy and resources to be a better performing team.
Our approach to coaching has at its core three simple objectives – promote a sustainable culture within an existing business, improve current capabilities and energise future performance.
If you are interested in exploring how team coaching for sustainability can help develop your team and organisational culture, contact us, and start a conversation.