Leadership Actions for a More Sustainable Future

Selection and succession

Rewards

Development

Invest in talent

Team Effectiveness

Ensure boards and CEOs apply sustainable leadership potential and track records as key criteria when selecting leaders.

Integrate sustainability into the objectives, incentives, and remuneration of CEOs and other executives.

Make sustainable mindset and leadership attributes a core focus of leadership development and crucible experiences.

Make long-term disruptive investments in talent and leadership. This may require creating new positions or investing in new tools. 

Invest in understanding the expectations, priorities and personalities of your leadership team to harness their collective capabilities in service of sustainability.

Connect to the core

Drive for value creation

Engage the board

Get specific

Orient your sustainability strategy around your company’s core business and areas of current or future competitive advantage.

Begin with impact reduction but strive for goals that create added value both commercially and environmentally or socially by offering new solutions for entrenched problems.

Ensure the board has an active stake in setting priorities and a clear role in achieving them.

Translate enterprise-wide sustainability goals into concrete actions and measurable objectives that leaders and employees alike can feel in their day-to-day work.

Measure culture and engagement

Center on your people

Tap into employees to drive innovation

Treat employee engagement as a strategic imperative

Go beyond typical engagement surveys and use advanced culture analytics tools to get a deep scan of how connected the employees really are to the organization’s purpose and whether the right behaviors and values are manifesting.

Make “people” central to communications and engagement strategies; consider bottom-up, not top-down, approaches to mobilizing employees. 

Ensure you are leveraging the diversity of perspectives and solutions that employees of all backgrounds, and across the networks, can provide.

Strategic goals (sustainable or otherwise) are harder to achieve when workforces are not engaged. Pay attention to issues of diversity, equity and fairness—and don’t fall into the trap of managing perception. Instead, identify and tackle the root causes.