Have you ever pondered how to further embed sustainability into your organizational culture? How does an organization get this to be a core value?
With growing pressure on organizations to ensure their practices are sustainable, one option is to put sustainability skills front and center in the leadership traits you look for. Let’s take a look at the pressures organizations are facing to implement sustainable practices and then outline how our leadership recruiting and training practices can be a core part of the solution.
2025 Trends: Sustainability Pressure
While it’s not new, we anticipate sustainability pressure to remain a trend in 2025. Sustainability pressure comes from many directions:
- Consumers want to see that companies are not being wasteful and are not utilizing harmful practices.
- Legally, there are increasing regulations that impact how companies operate in terms of sustainable processes.
- Competitors may use any misstep to their advantage – companies need to be seen as better than others in their industry.
- Investors can even choose an investment profile that focuses solely on sustainability, which means that if an organization wants to be considered by individuals who care about sustainability, they need to make their sustainability practices public.
- Employees are often looking for an employer who cares about the environment and shows it through how they operate.
Putting all of this together shows that incorporating sustainability into the organization’s long-term planning and vision makes strategic sense. To make it happen, the leadership within the organization needs to not only be on board, but also have skill sets that are in alignment with sustainability goals.
Emerging Skills for Leadership: Focus on Sustainability
What type of skills will future leaders need to ensure sustainability? A few worth mentioning: systems thinking, responsible innovation, and environmental awareness. Let’s take a look at each of these and see examples of how they align with sustainability goals.
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking refers to looking at issues as part of a whole. Every component of the organization affects the rest – no action or choice is taken in isolation.
For example, in an organizational sustainability context, a systems thinker will look not only at which supplier gives the best price, but also which ones have sustainable practices. This may mean researching where a supplier gets their materials or what transportation methods are used for their deliveries, for example. This is just one example of the way a systems thinker will need to view their decisions in the broader context of sustainable development.
Responsible Innovation
We all understand the concept of innovation, but responsible innovation puts the added component of ensuring that innovation does not come at the expense of sustainability. This may mean prioritizing innovation that is environmentally friendly, for example. It could also mean ensuring that everyone involved in the product development process is well-versed in the company values and commitment to sustainable practices.
Environmental Awareness
Environmental awareness is at the heart of all of this. Changing processes, vision, training, and communication can go a long way to ensuring that the company culture practices and embraces environmental awareness.
Nearly every decision an organization makes will have an impact on something external to itself. Changing this mindset in leadership is the first step to ensuring that environmental awareness is achieved throughout the organization.
Putting it All Together: Redefining Leadership Potential and Integrating Sustainability into Leadership Training
How can you shift the definition of high-potential traits for leaders? To shift the focus of both existing and new leadership in the organization to more environmentally focused and sustainable practices, the entire process for recruiting and training leaders may need to be assessed. Performance metrics may need updating to include sustainability and environmental measures. Job descriptions may need to be updated to include sustainability factors and leadership traits that take it into account.
Here’s how to start integrating sustainability into leadership:
- Update job descriptions to add sustainability components
- Analyse the wording of your company’s vision and mission: ensure sustainability is appropriately represented
- Train your hiring team to look for sustainability-related skills like those outlined above
- Update all of your leadership training to incorporate sustainability concepts and goals
- Update the performance measures for leaders to include concrete sustainability-focused metrics
In the long term, by shifting the core skill set of leaders to include sustainability components, the transition to a sustainable company will be more straightforward and have less friction along the way because the leaders are already on board and promoting sustainable ideas every step of the way.
Your Turn: What Steps Will You Take First?
Armed with knowledge about how to focus on leadership traits that emphasize sustainability, and a list of ideas above to get started, which steps will you take first to improve the sustainability focus of the leaders in your organization? By implementing these changes, future leaders will drive both profit and planet-positive change. We can all make a difference!