Put Into Practice
Corporate Sustainability – Whose Job Is It?
The problem is that not enough companies have yet figured out how to link their employees’ values and support for sustainability with the employees’ daily work and the company’s operations.
In other words, it’s not in the why but in the how of embedding sustainability where the gap lies.
– Paul Polman & CB Bhattacharya
When it comes to sustainability, who in the organization is responsible for synthesizing context into actionable steps? Is it the Board of Directors? Executive Leadership? Functional Leaders? Central EH&S? Engineering? Manufacturing? Facilities? Sales? Customer Support?
The answer is ‘all of the above’—they all have important roles to play. The opportunity lies in the fact that all staff can offer unique sustainability perspectives from their distinct positions within the organization.
Innovation is fueled by constraints and sustainability introduces many. We need to see sustainability challenges as opportunities for both personal development and gaining new useful knowledge in all functions. We can only build a sustainable world on the back of its well understood constraints.
Finance needs to understand how their policies, processes and tools assure that capital spending is aligned with sustainability goals. Business Cases must reflect relevant intangible benefits in ways that influence investment decisions.
Business Development and Engineering must see sustainability’s imperatives as drivers of innovation with methods for integration and success criteria considered in gate reviews. New product or service offerings must reflect and address newly gained impact reduction insights.
Supply Chain must ensure that regional risks and impacts are minimized, and suppliers are fully aligned with company sustainability goals. Logistics must seek to reduce related material and energy demands and accommodate reverse logistics when warranted.
Board members must not see sustainability only as a means to continue and expand business as usual. Rather it must first be well understood (an oft skipped step at the board level) and be seen as an imperative for deep and lasting change across the enterprise.
What should your people know?
All staff need to understand the value connections between the primary goals of the organization and its role in assuring a sustainable future (i.e. why must we do this?).
Value creation by the organization must be found within planetary boundaries and the bioregional thresholds for the locales in which they operate and rely on for primary resources. Contextual awareness and long-term perspectives must permeate the day-to-day.
In a sustainable company, everyone should be encouraged to be reflective practitioners and given the means to actualize their insights. This is where a people-development system like Lean becomes vitally important. No business process can be left unquestioned and then be expected to contribute to more sustainable outcomes. Everyone can, and must, contribute in the course of their day-to-day activities.
A growing number of people are in fact looking for ways to add sustainability to their careers. There is really no reason why every employee shouldn’t feel at the end of their day that they helped move the company closer to sustainability.
Transformation is not automatic.
It must be learned; it must be led.
― W. Edwards Deming
