Making progress on sustainability is in large part a matter of leadership capability and culture. To drive sustained action, organizations must build a robust talent management framework that embeds sustainability into how leadership talent and reward decisions are made as well as how the leadership team operates.
Selection and Succession |
Rewards |
Development |
Disruptive Talent Investments |
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. |
Who is on your board matters. Having board members with experience in driving sustainability-related transformations is hugely valuable. Not all board members need to be experts in the space, but a diversity of perspectives across the group that is relevant to the sustainability issues at hand, is a must.
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 |
The sustainable mindset: purpose-driven belief that business is not a commercial activity divorced from the wider societal and environmental context in which it operates. Culture analytics are crucial: Traditional engagement and culture survey methodologies often produce flawed results which are overly positive and unable to reveal substantive, high-impact issues. New and more sophisticated culture analytics are able to reveal beliefs, experiences, and behaviors at a much sharper level of contrast. To drive a sustainable transformation, this level of clarity is crucial for leaders.
Measure culture and engagement |
Center on your people |
Tap into employees for innovation |
Engage employees strategically |
Go beyond typical engagement surveys and use advanced culture analytics tools to get a deep scan of how connected employees really are to the organization’s purpose and whether the right behaviors are manifesting in the organization. |
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. |
Achieving strategic goals (sustainable or otherwise) is significantly harder without an engaged workforce. Pay particular 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. |
Explore the "Divides and Dividends" survey themes
UK organizations are behind the curve when it comes to embedding sustainability across business strategy.
Are UK organizations ready to meet net-zero targets, or are they at risk of greenwashing accusations?
Do leaders have the skills they need to pivot their organizations towards a more sustainable future?