When you’re a sustainability director or manager, you need to make change happen. In this ‘how to’ guide, we unpack why change can be so hard and then set out five steps that you can use to turn colleagues into active allies who work with you to make change happen.

Why is making change hard?

There are many reasons why making change is hard. The biggest problem is that conflicting priorities block progress, even when everyone involved has shared goals.

This is what’s happening when you hear “yes, but…” 

“That’s really important, but we don’t have the budget”, “I agree, but we’re already working on this other plan”, “I’m up for that, but it’s not part of my day job”.

What’s holding back change isn’t that people don’t believe in climate change or sustainability. And it’s not that their organisation doesn’t have a commitment to sustainability. 

Conflicting priorities block progress

The problem is that for most people and most teams, their objectives, priorities and KPIs aren’t aligned with sustainability. This means there are conflicts between their immediate priorities and your priorities as a sustainability leader.

There’s also a more subtle kind of conflict that holds back progress, and that’s different perceptions of sustainability. 

We have all heard colleagues equating sustainability with recycling or waste minimisation. This can lead to conflict if they want to prioritise actions that don’t reflect the depth and breadth of action that’s required to genuinely tackle sustainability. 

Collaboration is better than conflict 

Conflict and competition can sometimes spark innovation and drive change but generally it wastes time and resources, often in a race to the bottom. 

If you want to make progress, collaboration is better than conflict – not least because sustainability is too big a task for one person or one team, even in a small organisation.

Collaboration simply means ‘working with’. To make change happen, we need to collaborate with colleagues across the organisation, with people in our supply chain, and with other stakeholders.

Turn colleagues into your allies

Ideally, we want everyone across the organisation to have sustainability as part of their job and to work with the sustainability team in some way. 

But that’s rarely our starting point — even where there’s a strong commitment to sustainability from the top, this isn’t cascaded through the organisation effectively, so there are still conflicting objectives at other layers of management.

So, where do we start? The way forward is to find people who will be active allies and work with you and support you in different ways to make change happen. You need different kinds of allies:

• Senior leaders who give permission for the sustainability agenda across the organisation, and providing space and resources.
• Operational managers who are actively involved in developing and delivering projects, who share data, etc.
• Advocates, people with influence who stand up for sustainability and your work when it’s being questioned.

To be effective, allies don’t need to work with you day-to-day, but they must all be active — stepping up and supporting the sustainability agenda when and where it’s needed. 

Find your potential allies

To find the people who could be your allies and to turn their potential support into reality, you need to take a structured approach. Looking back at our work in this area over 20 years, we identified five key steps:

Step 1: You need to make sense of the system you’re working in and identify key stakeholders and gatekeepers.

Step 2: Discover what really matters to these key stakeholders and gatekeepers as people, in and beyond their job.

Step 3: Once you understand what matters to them, connect over the common ground between what matters to them and the change you want.

Step 4: When you’ve built that connection, invite them to join you and others in working together to make change that matters happen.

And, then you’re ready for step 5: Work together for change with your growing network of engaged and active allies.

Key skills to find and develop allies

This approach is very different from the ‘command and control’ that is the norm in management. Working through these five steps therefore requires ways of thinking and working that may be unfamiliar.

With this kind of sustainability leadership you need to understand how systems work and be able to develop relationships with other people. The framework we use is the Inner Development Goals.

1 Being

Relationship to self

Inner Compass

Integrity &
Authenticity

Openness &
Learning Mindset

Self-awareness

Presence

2 Thinking

Cognitive Skills

Critical Thinking

Complexity
Awareness

Perspective Skills

Sense-making

Long-term
Orientation &
Visioning

3 Relating

Caring for Others and the World

Appreciation

Connectedness

Humility

Empathy &
Compassion

4 Collaborating

Social Skills

Communication Skills

Co-Creation Skills

Inclusive Mindset
& Intercultural
Competence

Trust

Mobilization Skills

5 Acting

Enabling Change

Courage

Creativity

Optimism

Perseverance

The IDGs can seem like a lot of jargon – but once you strip that away, they are a powerful set of skills and behaviours developed by practitioners and academics based on research and experience. We talk about getting beyond the jargon in the companion podcast to this guide.

How to get started

If this all seems a bit overwhelming, you don’t need to do it all in one go. You can get started by just having different, more inquiring, conversations with your colleagues. 

Ask open questions, like “What are you working on and why?” and “What are your priorities?” Listen carefully to the answers, looking for connections with your sustainability agenda and potential common ground.

And if you want to get cracking, don’t worry about getting everything in place and getting it right first time. Instead take an ‘action learning’ mindset: Give it a go and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. Reflect, adjust your approach and try again. Repeat.

Finally, lots of high quality research shows that four out of five people do care about climate change, nature and sustainability. They want to do something to help but don’t feel able to. 

So as you go into your conversations, remember that most people will already be on your side. You’re not trying to convince them that sustainability is important, you’re looking to find ways where they feel able to work on it.

The post Make Change Happen – a how to guide appeared first on Realise Earth.

“We had to be careful because you don’t engage and energise and empower people with bad news, but at the same time, you have to make people aware of the realities.”

Daniella Vega is Senior Vice President of Health and Sustainability with Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch-Belgian multinational retail and wholesale holding company.

Daniella talks with me about this unusual role and the synergies between reducing emissions and improving health. She also talks about leading on Project Ocean, getting rid of single use plastic, as Group Director of Sustainability at the UK retailer Selfridge.

Listen for insights you can apply in your sustainability work including:

• Making sustainability something people care about by connecting to issues important to them
• How making big bold moves can be more effective than starting with the easy stuff
• How to look after yourself and keep going when things are tough

Highlights from the conversation

Here are five insights that Daniella shared on making sustainability something people care about, where I’d like to go a little deeper and encourage you to think about how you could apply these in your work:

Connecting sustainability and health

I want to start with the connections between sustainability and health. Having them both in the same role is really interesting given the positive correlation between eating healthier and climate impact. 

Often the sustainable choice is seen as more expensive and/or inconvenient, and sustainability is sometimes seen as doing the right thing by denying people what they want.

But here, sustainability is connected to something that many people want – to eat more healthily.

I really like the way this idea has been extended right through to programmes that help customers make better choices and reward them with discounts on fresh food when they buy healthier products.

Are there similar correlations between climate or other aspects of sustainability, and the choices your customers make? How could you leverage this to make sustainability something people care about? How could you make it easier and more attractive for your customers to make the sustainable choice?

Big bold moves

Daniella talked about the impact of big bold moves, like banning single use plastics long before it became a hot topic.

What could be the equivalent in your organisation? Something that’s do-able in principle, but seriously challenging, and that makes a genuine environmental and or social impact?

Working with others

Project Ocean succeeded because it made a complex issue – plastic pollution – emotive and understandable. And equally crucial, even though it didn’t shy away from pretty overwhelming statistics, staff were able to get involved and take real action.

I also think it’s really notable that these weren’t a short list of actions developed by the sustainability team – staff were genuinely involved, were able to work together to come up with creative solutions and then put them into practice. 

How can you work with others to find the stories that can make the big issues you’re wrestling with, less technical and more emotive? How can you involve colleagues in finding ways forward?

Powerful allies

Project Ocean was instigated by the Chairman and supported by the Chief Executive. This really highlights that if you want to make big bold moves, you will need powerful allies across the organisation.

Who are your allies, people who will support you to move the sustainability agenda forward? If you don’t have many allies yet, what’s your plan for finding them and building your connection with them? Have you explored how to build support for sustainability among directors and senior managers?

Looking after yourself

Moving on from big bold moves, let’s finish with looking after yourself and keeping going when things are tough. Daniella explained how important spending time in nature is for her and also the importance of her network of peers.

Both of these really resonate with us here at Realise Earth, they’re really important to us too. 

If you’re not already spending time in nature, I really encourage you to do so on a daily basis if you can. It does’t have to be especially wild, what’s important is being in green spaces and especially paying attention to nature and the changing seasons. 

We also know from our own experience how important it is to have a group of peers you meet with regularly to talk about the stuff that matters, and to have someone to listen to you. If you don’t already have group like this, talk to other people in similar positions to yourself and discuss the idea of meeting together regularly.

What’s your take?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about suggestions and questions – do they hit the spot? Have I missed something? Are you doing any or all of these already – and do you have experiences you’d like to share with other listeners?

Let me know your take – DM me on LinkedIn!

Links

Connect with Daniella Vega on LinkedIn

Sustainability at Ahold Delhaize

For your BookShelf, Daniella recommends:

A brilliantly written book which makes the connections between climate and colonialism,
And the history of how we got to the mindsets that we have today with nature as an endless resource that can be used for free and thrown away.

Daniella Vega, Senior Vice President of Health & Sustainability, Ahold Delhaize

Buy The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh at the Realise Earth Bookshop.

The post Making sustainability something people care about appeared first on Realise Earth.

“It’s no longer sufficient to think about sustainability through the climate lens. The challenge and the exciting thing now is really grappling with the interconnectedness of the biodiversity crisis and the opportunity and necessity of the circular economy.”

In this episode I interview Sam Gardner, Head of Climate Change & Sustainability with ScottishPower, and formerly Head of Policy at WWF Scotland.

In both these roles Sam has been closely involved in the climate and sustainability agenda in Scotland. In the conversation Sam talks about:

• The transformation of ScottishPower from oil and gas to entirely renewable energy sources.
• The importance of continuous engagement with staff and stakeholders, ensuring everyone in the organisation connects their work to climate goals.
• The need for a fair transition to net zero, and to deliver on biodiversity and the circular economy.

Listen for great insights into the challenges of accelerating the pace of change while bringing colleagues with you, maintaining public support and ensuring a just a transition.

Sam also talks about how he has kept motivated over many years of working on sustainability, offering useful ideas we can all apply ourselves and with our colleagues.

Highlights from the conversation

Here are five insights that from my conversation with Sam that I think are especially important and helpful:

Move beyond climate

Discussion and action around sustainability in business must move beyond climate to embrace issues like biodiversity and the circular economy. 

The good news is that these are issues that people care about and can see how they are relevant to themselves and to their organisation. (Listen to our Roundtable: Getting Beyond Net Zero for more)

Winning support isn’t a one off-project 

In order to achieve change, of course you need the support of your employees and other stakeholders. But a key point Sam makes, I think is that winning this support, isn’t a one-off project. That support has to be continually renewed and built upon. 

Work must connect to sustainability

If your organisation’s going to make real progress on sustainability, all employees need to see how their work connects to sustainability. If you listened to the episode with Jaime Blakely-Glover, that was a key point he made when he was talking about the Most Sustainable Workplace Index.

Build on what’s already happening

When you’re developing a sustainability strategy, whether or not it’s the organisation’s first sustainability strategy, it’s essential to recognise all the work that was already happening, not just so that you can celebrate that, but so that you can link to and build on what’s already been achieved. 

Maintain motivation

It’s important to maintain your motivation, and your colleagues’, by celebrating wins, not just final achievements, but of all the important steps along the way, because sometimes it’s a long journey.

Only for large businesses?

Even though ScottishPower is a huge company all these points apply to sustainability leaders working in any size of organisation. 

But Sam also talks about how ScottishPower supported COP26 in Glasgow, including by making their offices available for delegates and campaigners. (They also supported young film makers, seen in the header image, to be part of COP TV.)

Doing that kind of thing might seem easy for big corporations when there’s a major climate event happening, but is it relevant to smaller businesses and at other times? I believe that with a bit of imagination, any organisation can support NGOs, community groups, and others working on climate and sustainability. 

Many of these groups are doing hugely important work, often on a shoestring. Many relying heavily on volunteers, not just at big events, but day in, day out, right throughout the year. 

How can your organisation support groups working and sustainability?

I encourage you to think about how your organisation could help them. Perhaps you could offer office or meeting space, technical support, professional skills, and more. Why not talk with NGOs and community groups working on climate and other aspects of sustainability near your organisation’s locations? Why not reach out to your staff and ask them? Some may already be members of volunteers and be able to make connections. 

Links

Connect with Sam Gardner on LinkedIn.

Sustainability at ScottishPower

Jaime Blakely-Glover on the Most Sustainable Workplace Index

For your BookShelf, Sam recommends:

I suggest two different books, neither of which I suspect will be new to a lot of listeners, but in their own way, they do two very different things, but both of them are incredibly motivating and really, really important.

“How a rewilding ambition has brought biodiversity back in a bountiful, incredibly encouraging and inspiring way. It’s just a fantastically written, brilliant story. Ultimately it’s a really positive, with this huge sense of optimism about what’s possible

Sam Gardner, Head of Climate Change and Sustainability with ScottishPower

Buy Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm
by Isabella Tree at the Realise Earth Bookshop.

This is the story of climate change writ large, without pulling any punches, and just setting out the science in a way that makes it incredibly compelling and urgent.

Sam Gardner, Head of Climate Change and Sustainability with ScottishPower

Buy The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells at the Realise Earth Bookshop.

The post Grappling with climate, biodiversity and the circular economy appeared first on Realise Earth.

Libby Kerman stepped into the newly created role of Sustainability Manager with Lincolnshire Housing Partnership, just a year after university. Now, two years on, I interviewed Libby and she shared her experiences of how to succeed as a new sustainability manager.

In this episode, Libby talks about what she’s achieved and learned. She told me about:

• The achievements she’s most proud of
• Who and what helped her succeed
• Tackling her next big task: sustainability reporting

Listen for ideas and inspiration to help you make greater progress on sustainability:

• Why you sometimes learn most from people who resist change
• How relationships with colleagues across the business have been crucial
• How external networks of peers are so important
• Why you shouldn’t worry that you don’t have all the answers
• Podcasts that Libby has found useful on her journey 

Achievements

Libby Kerman has achieved significant milestones in her role as Sustainability Manager at Lincolnshire Housing Partnership (LHP). Key accomplishments include:

Application to Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund:

• Coordinated data collection, facilitated discussions, and garnered senior leadership support.
• Secured over £8 million in joint funding, enabling a £16 million project.
• Oversaw the installation of external wall insulation for 730 properties and air source heat pumps for 82 properties.
• The project is expected to reduce carbon emissions and lower customer energy bills by around £380 per year.

Development of a New ESG Framework:

• Recognized the need to refresh the existing ESG strategy.
• Engaged with colleagues across the business to create a comprehensive ESG framework.
• Successfully launched the new strategy, fostering improved engagement and communication within the organization.

Promotion of Green Spaces:

• Advocated for the value of green spaces alongside property management.
• Introduced KPIs to enhance biodiversity, including setting up five new biodiversity sites annually.
• Collaborated with organisations like Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust to improve and maintain these sites effectively.

Success factors

Factors that have enabled Libby to deliver these achievements include:

• Supportive Leadership and Teams: The arrival of the Corporate Head of Property with a strong passion for sustainability, along with supportive colleagues in the asset team and culture team, provided Libby with confidence and backing to push sustainability initiatives.
• Development Programs and Networks: Participation in development programs like the top 30 under 30 program and joining external sustainability forums offered Libby confidence, peer support, and continuous learning opportunities.
• Internal Relationships: Building strong relationships with colleagues across different teams enabled effective collaboration and the formation of a sustainability ambassador group, fostering a supportive and engaged internal community.

How to succeed as a new sustainability manager – Libby’s advice

Libby offers the following advice to other early career sustainability managers:

Lean into colleagues and create internal networks:

• Understand different service areas within the organization.
• Build relationships with receptive colleagues.

Don’t worry about unanswered questions:

• Recognise that having many questions is natural and makes the field exciting.

• Use unanswered questions as motivation to drive progress and learning.

Continuously learn and build external networks:

• Seek networking opportunities with individuals in similar positions.

• Leverage the expertise available within the sector for guidance and collaboration.

The post How to succeed as a new sustainability manager appeared first on Realise Earth.

Why courage is a key skill for sustainability leaders

Before answering the question of how to be a courageous sustainability leader, it’s worth examining why courage is so crucial to making genuine progress.

Courage is identified by the Inner Development Goals as one the key skills needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.  This is because sustainability, by its very nature involves challenging the status quo, questioning business as usual and doing things differently.

When not rocking the boat is so much easier, it takes courage:

• to go against the flow.
• to say things others don’t want to hear.
• to innovate and do things differently.

That’s why, if you’re leading on sustainability, you need courage to make genuine progress.

The unspoken side of sustainability leadership

In sustainability, when the focus is so often on the science, the metrics, the processes and the reporting, the human and emotional side of sustainability leadership is rarely discussed.

To shine a light on this often unspoken side of sustainability leadership, we invited a number of sustainability leaders to discuss their experience of being courageous in their work – in construction, healthcare, engineering, public service, education and more.

While our leaders work in very different sectors and come to sustainability leadership with very different skill sets, as we explored the question of how to be a courageous sustainability leader, common themes emerge.

Through exploring what has worked, and equally importantly, what hasn’t worked, the group share powerful insights and practical advice that you can apply to answer the question of how to be a courageous sustainability leader in your own context.

LIke to Join A Roundtable

to share your experience and learn from your peers?

Apply via our events calendar…

The post How to be a courageous sustainability leader appeared first on Realise Earth.

At Realise Earth we’ve always been focused on helping sustainability leaders build support for, and catalyse action on, sustainability across their organisation. But when it comes to embedding sustainability in your organisation’s culture, how exactly do you go about it?

To answer this question, we’ve partnered with the Most Sustainable Workplace Index (MSWI), which can help you do just that.

I recently sat down with Jaime Blakeley-Glover, creator of the Index, to hear his story. Listen to learn:

• Why Jaime believed the Index needed to exist
• The challenges Jaime faced developing the Index and how he overcame them
• The importance of seriously shifting the culture in organisations 

Whether or not the Index is relevant to you and your work, in itself this a fascinating story of sustainability leadership. 

Why the Index?

Jaime explains the origins of the MSWI, recounting his early experiences in sustainable development and the pivotal moment when he recognised the crucial role of cultural sustainability within organisations. 

I was working for the Sustainable Development Commission probably back in 2009, 2010. I was working with some climate psychologists, which just completely blew my mind, that there was even such a thing.

The index emerged as a response to the need for a comprehensive framework that prioritises the cultural conditions that drive meaningful organisational change.

The challenges

The development of the MSWI was marked by challenges that tested Jaime’s persistence and creativity. From defining the Index’s parameters to crafting effective communication strategies, Jaime faced a variety of obstacles. Advice and support from others, and drawing on academic research on motivation and organisational change, enabled him to overcome them.

The first bit of the journey really was saying, “Well, actually, what do we need to measure?”

Then how you take the multitude of ways that people relate to sustainability in different terminology, and simplify that to create a set of questions that can be universally understood – whether you’re thinking about it in terms of net zero or circular economy or any of these things are out there at the moment.

How do you embed sustainability in your organisation’s culture?

A vision of transparency, employee engagement, and continuous improvement emerges. The index aims to develop a sustainability culture within organisations that enables and empowers employees to take action in line with their concerns about climate and sustainability.

And what I kept seeing within organizations was central sustainability teams were frustrated because they were trying to engage people and not much was changing.

So I felt there’s a real need to go okay, well, how do you take some of the learnings from that research project around the real importance of motivation, then thinking about, how do we really support sustainability teams to unlock that frustration?

The missing metric

With plans to expand into various sectors and strengthen partnerships, Jaime envisions a future where the MSWI put organisational sustainability culture at the heart of corporate sustainability reporting.

What I’ve been really seeing over the last 10, 15 years, we have a lot of focus on the technical side of sustainability. And it always felt like the people cultural bit was almost a bit of an afterthought in some ways.

The power of collaboration

The journey of developing the Most Sustainable Workplace Index showcases the power of collaboration, innovation, and a steadfast commitment to sustainability. 

You need friends who you can call on, who’ve been marketing directors, and you can say, “I’m really struggling. Can you really help me just work out our messaging? “

And then you need your mate who’s going to really challenge you and go, “look, Jaimie, look, is there something really in this? How are you going to be really brave about it? How are you going to really try and turn this into something that…” and challenge the scope of your own thinking.

Transforming sustainability practice

Jaime’s vision for a more transparent, engaged, and sustainable workplace sets the stage for a transformative shift in organisational sustainability practices.

I really hope is it doesn’t become a tick box exercise. There’s some amazing movements out there, some great stuff coming out of the B Corp movement and things like that.

But equally I speak to companies who have done their B Corp and they’ve done nothing for the next two and a half years until it’s time to re accredit.

And I think I’d really hate for it to become something that is just that tick box exercise and someone goes, “yeah we’ve done that”.

The post Embedding sustainability in your organisation’s culture – the missing metric appeared first on Realise Earth.

Climate isn’t the only planetary boundary

Climate is only one of the planetary boundaries we need to work on. And we also need to tackle a whole range of social issues.

That’s why item four of our sustainability leadership manifesto is: “develop and deliver initiatives that offer multiple benefits for people and nature”.

We invited sustainability leaders across a variety of sectors, to a roundtable to reflect on their experience of trying to move the agenda beyond net zero in their work.

Listen for insights from the sharp end about how to help colleagues to see the bigger picture and start engaging with the rest of the sustainable development goals – click the player above or use ‘Follow’ to find the episode in your podcast app.

The post Roundtable: Getting Beyond Net Zero appeared first on Realise Earth.

Collaboration is essential for sustainability

In our last episode – Better collaboration for better sustainability leadership – we shared our experience and advice about how to collaborate better. In this Roundtable event, we discuss collaboration with our guests:

• Sandrine Ricard, Deputy Director Sustainability & Responsibility with Pernod Ricard in the UK
• Michael Solomon, Founder of Responsible 100
• Sarah-Jane Littleford, Head of Responsible Business: Global Delivery with Fujitsu.

These sustainability leaders reflect on their experience of collaboration:

• in their organisations
• across industry
• and to bring businesses and NGOs together.

Listen now for valuable insights to help you collaborate better in your sustainability work – click the player above or use ‘Follow’ to find the episode in your podcast app.

The post Roundtable: Collaboration – What Works? appeared first on Realise Earth.

Collaboration and cooperation is essential to making greater progress on sustainability within organisations, supply chains and sectors – and across society globally. In our Sustainability leadership and collaboration – a how to guide, we explore the skills and strategies you need.

The importance of collaboration is recognised by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in SDG17 ‘Partnership for the Goals’. Collaboration is also one of the five dimensions identified by the Inner Development Goals as essential to achieving the SDGs.

And the fifth call to action in our sustainability leadership manifesto for 2024 is “Seek out opportunities to collaborate and cooperate”.

Identifying the need is one thing, doing something about it is another. 

Here’s Alan Hendry, Sustainability Director, at Mott MacDonald talking about the challenges of delivering sustainable and net zero infrastructure in Scotland:

There is a huge frustration that we can’t seem to get our hands around the good stuff. In the last year or so, there’s the Institute of Civil Engineers’ report we did, Committee on Climate Change did a report, Edinburgh Centre for Climate Innovation did a report, the Net Zero Committee of Scottish Parliament did a report. And key themes are we need better collaboration.

The need, even hunger, for more and better collaboration also came up a lot in our recent Roundtable where we discussed the Sustainability Leadership Manifesto.

So, all of that is to explain why we decided to make collaboration the focus of this guide.

To prepare for this podcast and guide I sat down with Morag and Rich, my Realise Earth co-founders, to discuss how we could draw on our collective experience to offer you some really useful guidance on collaboration.

Here’s what we came up with:

• First I’ll talk about what we mean by collaboration in the context of sustainability leadership
• Then I’ll get into the skills required for successful collaboration and the characteristics of effective teams
• And then we’ll explore the nitty gritty of collaborating better, ending with specific actions you can start taking tomorrow – whatever your current experience.

What do we mean by “collaboration”?

According to the dictionary collaboration simply means “the act or process of working together or cooperating”, so it covers a wide range of activities and situations. 

In terms of collaboration and sustainability leadership, a two by two matrix is useful to think about contexts for collaboration:

My thinking about collaboration has been very influenced by psychologist and creativity expert, Keith Sawyer’s book: Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. His message is that working collaboratively isn’t just a way to get stuff done, or that is more efficient and effective than working alone, he also demonstrates how collaboration is absolutely essential to innovation.

In his view, which I subscribe to, collaboration isn’t really about plans and procedures (although they can be relevant), instead collaboration is essentially a creative process. 

Sawyer highlights two kinds of collaboration: problem finding collaboration and problem solving collaboration.

For sustainability leaders “problem finding collaboration” would include bringing people together to explore how the organisation impacts, or is impacted by, climate change or the various Sustainable Development Goals. 

The question, the inquiry is: “What really is the problem here?”

“Problem solving” would include working together to develop a strategy in response to the problems, and opportunities, that have been identified.

The question, the inquiry is: “How do we solve this problem?”

There’s also a third type of collaboration that Sawyer doesn’t mention; we can call this “solution delivery”.

In this example, working together to actually implement the sustainability strategy or initiative to bring about real change.

The question or inquiry here is: “How will we deliver this solution?” And this is an ongoing inquiry as you deliver the initiative, adapting and evolving over time.

Each of these three types of collaboration will have their nuances, but in terms of the skills and approaches needed, they have a great deal in common.

The Inner Development Goals and the skills needed for collaboration

We’ve talked before about the Inner Development Goals, but in case you’re not familiar with the them, the IDGs sets out the skills and qualities that are considered essential for delivering the Sustainable Development Goals. 

The Inner Development Goals framework has been developed by over a thousand researchers, experts and practitioners in leadership development and sustainability, including names you might recognise like Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer and Renée Lertzman. The IDGs are supported by companies such as Google, Spotify, IKEA, shipping company Stena, and renewables developer OX2.

Collaboration is one of the five dimensions of the IDG framework, because: 

“To make progress on shared concerns, we need to develop our abilities to include, hold space and communicate with, stakeholders with different values, skills and competencies.”

The IDG framework identifies five skills and qualities that are needed for effective collaboration:

1. “Communication skills: Ability to really listen to others, to foster genuine dialogue, to advocate own views skilfully, to manage conflicts constructively and to adapt communication to diverse groups.”
2. “Co-creation skills: Skills and motivation to build, develop and facilitate collaborative relationships with diverse stake-holders, characterised by psychological safety and genuine co-creation.”
3. “Inclusive mindset and Intercultural competence: Willingness and competence to embrace diversity and include people and collectives with different views and backgrounds.”
4. “Trust: Ability to show trust and to create and maintain trusting relationships.”
5. “Mobilisation skills: Skills in inspiring and mobilising others to engage in shared purposes.”

It’s important to note that these skills aren’t intrinsically positive – they can be used for both good and evil. 

For successful collaboration towards sustainability, these skills need to be underpinned by other skills and qualities, like empathy, compassion and a sense of service – collaboration needs to be guided by a moral inner compass.

So those are the skills needed for collaboration. 

This list of skills can seem a bit overwhelming, and imply that we need endless study to collaborate successfully. Study and intentional practice are definitely useful, but there are a number of simple steps we can take to make a real difference in the quality and effective of our collaborations.

Seven characteristics of effective creative teams

I’ll come to those steps shortly, but they’ll make a lot more sense once we understand more about the process of collaboration.

Earlier I mentioned Keith Sawyer’s book Group Genius: The Power of Collaboration. In it he describes the “seven characteristics of effective creative teams”.

I think his insights are really helpful because, by definition, collaboration is a team, or group, process.

Don’t be put off by the term “creative” – he’s using it in the sense of innovation. And collaborating for innovation and new, creative ways of doing things is exactly what we need as sustainability leaders.

Although Sawyers talks about seven “characteristics”, they are really the attitudes that the team shares, and their awareness of how innovation really happens.

Let’s dive in.

1) Innovation emerges over time

New solutions and new ways of doing things aren’t just invented in a vacuum, they are the result of long series of incremental ideas. And this takes time.

And from our point of view as sustainability leaders, starting to build more effective collaborations, it takes time to build the necessary levels of trust between everyone involved.

2) Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening

I often think deep listening is the fundamental skill for sustainability leaders – get this right and everything else will flow from it! 

As Sawyer puts it: “most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others”.

3) Team members build on their collaborators ideas

This is why deep listening is crucial for effective collaboration – new and better ideas and solutions are the result of building on each others ideas, and we can only do that if we’re actually listening to the other people we’re working with.

And this also means creating a space where everyone involved in the collaboration feels able to contribute fully.

Regardless of their position in the hierarchy, they need to feel confidence not just to put forward their ideas, but also to question other people’s assumptions.

4) Only afterwards does the meaning of each idea become clear

What Sawyers means here is that when the team is exploring ideas, it’s often not obvious which ideas will turn out to be useful. Very often someone will come up with an idea, but it’s only when another member of the team combines it with a different idea, that it makes sense or is useful.

5) Surprising questions emerge

This might seem a bit of a weird statement. But remember that Sawyer is talking about how we think about collaboration and innovation.

What he means is that the process of collaborative innovation may take us to places we simply weren’t expecting. 

He says: 

“The most transformative creativity results when a group either thinks of a new way to frame a problem or finds a new problem that no one had noticed before.”

And 

“The most creative groups are good at finding new problems rather than simply solving old ones.”

6) Innovation is inefficient

This can be a difficult pill for some managers to swallow. In cultures obsessed with efficiency, spending time on coming up with some ideas that don’t yield obvious results is an anathema.

But the reality is that innovation – whether you’re developing a sustainability initiative or designing low carbon infrastructure – isn’t a series of simple steps that can known in advance.

As Sawyers explains:

“Some ideas are just bad ideas; some of them are good in themselves, but the other ideas that would be necessary to turn them into an innovation just haven’t happened yet.”

And 

“the key to success is the ability to improvise a new path, one that wasn’t in the plan, one that, honestly, couldn’t have been known when you first started.”

7) Innovation emerges from the bottom up

Here’s another aspect of innovation and effective collaboration that can be a challenge to the culture of many organisations. 

You can create the conditions for collaboration, you can foster and encourage collaboration. But you can’t control it. And collaboration will only achieve its potential if everyone involved feels able to participate fully.

This is obvious if we think back to some of the other characteristics of effective collaborative teams that I’ve just listed:

• team members build on each other’s ideas
• only afterwards does the meaning of each idea become clear
• surprising questions emerge

These kinds of results will only happen if everyone, whatever their position in the hierarchy, feels safe putting forward their ideas, and everyone’s ideas are genuinely listened to by others.

Sawyers adds:

• “Allowing space for this self-organising emergence to occur if difficult for many managers because the outcome isn’t controlled by the management team’s agenda and is therefore less predictable. Most business executives like to start with the big picture and then work out the details.”

How to collaborate better

So we’ve looked at the skills for collaboration from the Inner Development Goals, and we’ve looked at the approach and ways of thinking that lead to successful collaborations, with the help of Sawyer’s book Group Genius.

It’s a lot to take in.

As well as needing to make sense of it all, we’ve just finished with Sawyers saying the conditions for effective collaboration are fundamentally at odds with the management style and dominant culture of many organisations.

So how do we actually go about collaborating better in what are often less than ideal conditions?

When Morag, Rich and I were developing this episode and guide, everything up to this point was pretty straightforward. It was here it got tricky, as we tried to combine theory with our experience, and distill it all down to clear, practical steps to help you lead and shape collaborations so they deliver real results for your organisation and the wider sustainability agenda.

But before we get to those practical steps, we realised there are three attitudes and assumptions that we’ve found really helpful. Here they are:

First: Collaboration is simply working with other people towards a shared goal. 

It’s easy to see collaboration as something different and outside our normal experience. 

Sure, collaboration might involve complicated processes and sophisticated project management tools, but at heart, despite all the bells and whistles, it’s about working together, cooperating to achieve a shared goal.

And this means we can start to consciously practice collaboration skills and so on, in our day to day work with our team and other colleagues. We don’t need to wait for a specific project to apply them. Working with other people is collaboration.

Second: Collaboration is a natural human skill

Humans are social animals. Working together with others is what we do, it’s the secret to our evolutionary success.

It comes naturally to us as humans, but all too often it’s trained out of us at school and university where the system is focused on individual results, and in the workplace, even though team working is often talked about, it’s frequently held back by individual targets, competition and distrust.

When you look at the skills listed by the IDGs it may seem like there’s a whole lot of new stuff to learn. But another way of looking at it is that all we need to do, is reclaim and consciously practice these natural human skills that have been suppressed by our culture.

Third: Most people want to be part of effective, worthwhile collaborations

Working well together, with other people who you trust, to achieve something worthwhile is a truly amazing experience.

You’ve probably come across the idea of “flow” developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is when your skill level and the challenge are equal, and you’re completely absorbed in the moment – you’re in the zone. 

Flow applies to groups as well as individuals, and the insights from group flow inform Sawyer’s book, Group Genius.

I’ve often experienced group flow, but many people find it hard to believe it’s possible – because their experience of working in teams and groups is one of clashing egos, frustration and confusion.

But despite this, most people are hungry to be part of a group where people respect each other, support each other and work well together to achieve something worthwhile.

As sustainability leaders, we have a rare opportunity to work on stuff that genuinely makes a difference in the world. If we can also create the conditions where people work well together, we’re offering something that’s really attractive, something that people will want to be part of.

If, working on sustainability, you and your collaborators can create group flow, you’ll have something amazing.

In our experience, these three assumptions and attitudes make collaboration much less daunting than seeing collaboration as something technical and complicated.

Here they are again:

• First, collaboration simply means working together, cooperating to achieve a shared goal – so remember, we’re all already collaborating all the time
• Second, collaboration is a fundamental human skill – so we’re building on our natural instincts and abilities
• Third, most people want to be part of effective, worthwhile collaborations – so we can invite them to join us

If you keep these assumptions and attitudes front of mind, you can start to consciously develop your skills and experience of collaborating, right away without waiting for a formal collaborative project.

Where to start and what to do?

Collaboration is not what you do for, or to, other people; it’s what you and other people do, together. 

And all the skills and so on I talked about earlier, will enable you to create the conditions where you and others can collaborate successfully.

The best way to develop your ability to create these conditions is to make this part of how you work and who you are.

So start with your team and other people you work with regularly. Use your position and influence to create the conditions where you can work together better. Essentially, this means modelling the attitudes and behaviours that are needed for effective collaboration.

In practical terms, what might that look like? Here are three things to get you started:

• Listen deeply and check you understand
• Enable to people to disagree
• Disrupt normal patterns and places of behaviour

Get these right and most of the rest will flow naturally.

Let’s get into each of these quickly:

Listen deeply and check you understand

Listening deeply is so rare in our culture it can seem like magic when it happens. But it’s really as simple as going into a conversation to understand where the other person is coming from – instead of the common default of trying to persuade them to do what you want. 

And when they speak, shut up and give them your full attention. Don’t think about what you’re going to say next. Just listen. Ask open questions. Listen for what’s not being said. Pay attention to body language.

Of course, even if you think you’ve heard what someone said, it’s easy to misinterpret what they mean or make incorrect assumptions about the implications. So check that you genuinely understand by using your own words to reflect back what you heard and asking if you’ve got it right.

It’s not rocket science, but few of us do it often enough.

When you understand where someone is coming from, you’re both in a better position to work out how you might work together more effectively.

Enable to people to disagree

Remember, successful collaboration relies on everyone involved being able to contribute their ideas, even if they challenge the status quo, or seem opposed to what someone more senior has put forward.

If we’re confident doing this ourselves, it’s easy to forget how difficult it can be for some people to say what they think, rather what they believe more senior people want to hear.

One way to encourage and support this is to start by inviting people to disagree on the small things that it’s pretty each for people to say ‘no’ to – for example, ask if there’s enough time in the agenda to discuss a particular topic.

Over time people will realise they can disagree without comeback, and that their ideas are listened to and taken seriously. They’ll become more confident about saying what they genuinely think about more high stakes issues.

Disrupt normal patterns and places of behaviour

We know we need to do things differently to collaborate more effectively. We can evolve our normal ways of working by introducing new approaches like I’ve just described.

But sometimes accepted practices are just so engrained that it’s an uphill struggle. People are comfortable with what they are familiar with, even if they acknowledge it’s sub-optimal. And it can be easy to fall back into the old ways. 

The way around this is to disrupt these normal patterns of behaviour more radically.

For example, instead of allowing anyone to jump in to respond or ask questions, introduce speaking in rounds, where each person in turn shares their thoughts. This kind of approach brings a much richer diversity of voices and views to the discussion – not just the usual suspects or those with the loudest voices.

And instead chairing regular meetings yourself, switch to a more facilitated style, with a different member of the group facilitating each session in term – or better yet, a different pair of co-facilitators for each meeting. Of course, training and confidence building will be important. 

Places matter too. If you’re in a meeting room, it’s difficult not to behaving in the normal ways you’re expected to behave in a meeting room. 

This is why off-site strategy days and so on, when well designed and led, can be so successful. And they don’t have to be in the usual hotel conference suites. We’ve had great success in unconventional venues like farms and rural AirBnB’s where not only can do a lot of your meetings outside, you can hang out and cook together. 

Being in a physically and psychologically different space like these breaks the normal patterns of behaviour, and makes it easier to work together in different, more effective, ways. 

If you can do these things:

• Listen deeply and check you understand
• Enable to people to disagree
• Disrupt normal patterns and places of behaviour

you’ll start creating a space where collaboration can flourish. 

Action learning for better collaboration

There’s one more thing that will make a real difference and help you make more progress more rapidly.

That’s approaching collaboration as an inquiry, deliberately applying the action learning cycle, both as a reflective tool for yourself, and as a process that the group uses together.

Here are some additional questions specific to getting started with collaboration:

• What would successful collaboration look like?
• What are we already doing that’s working well?
• What do we need to keep, or have more of, what’s working well?
• If anyone feels uncomfortable or unable to commit, what would make it easier for them to come on this journey with us?

In all of this section, the context has been collaborating more effectively with your team and other colleagues. What about when you’re starting to work with a new group of people, or entering a formal collaboration?

What you can do will depend on the circumstances and the level of control and influence you have. But everything I’ve talked about so far can apply, you may just need to adapt it slightly. 

The most important thing, as early as possible in any formal collaboration, is that you don’t take the default arrangements and assumptions for granted – and that you ask these questions of the people involved:

• What does success look like for this collaboration?
• How should we work together to maximise the chance of success?
• What shall we do now to make sure we work together in that way?

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by people’s enthusiasm for consciously exploring how you can work well together.

The post Sustainability leadership and collaboration – a how to guide appeared first on Realise Earth.

What kind of approach to sustainability leadership do we need in 2024?

In this Roundtable event, our guests reflect on their experience as sustainability leaders and give feedback on the draft sustainability leadership manifesto that Osbert talked about in the last episode.

The topics discussed include:

• Deeply listening to understand people’s needs
• Embedding care in the sustainability agenda
• Building a culture of sustainability leadership across the organisation
• Getting beyond a carbon tunnel vision to a just transition
• The need to create collaborative spaces to drive forward positive change.

Listen now for valuable insights, encouragement and hope – click the player above or use ‘Follow’ to find the episode in your podcast app.

The post Roundtable: Discussing the sustainability leadership we need in 2024 appeared first on Realise Earth.