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Sustainability is like a game of football. It’s complex with a combined need for collaboration, teamwork, progressive and strategic thinking. Your players need to know what direction to run in, who to pass to and try new strategies and ways of winning the game.
As a team, everyone has a role and vital part to play, on and off the field. Each match has an overall plan and strategy. In football, the goal is to get the most goals in the net and ultimately win. In sustainability, it’s about establishing your goals, aims, and ambitions together and working towards building a more sustainable business, for both society & planet.
Setting a strategy that everyone’s involved in, playing to people’s strengths and knowing each player’s weaknesses, and having the right support (i.e. other companies, networks, sponsorships, consultants and tools). Ideally, each team member knows what they have to do to achieve the team’s goal. No individual can play football alone.
Football and sustainability are similar in that things don’t always go to a pre-conceived plan. One game result may not be what was desired. Sometimes, the team needs to regroup and revisit the strategy. However, the manager/coach is ultimately responsible when the team is on the losing side, not the players.
What if the players were going in different directions on the pitch, executing random actions and moves? In such chaos, the team has little chance of victory. Sustainability functions in a similar method. Like football, sustainability professionals need to look at, and understand the business system and follow the rules of the game in order to win. Similar to football, mechanisms, and tools can be used to help choose appropriate actions as part of the sustainability manager’s overall strategy to be successful within the business system.
Football managers need to give players a sense of doing something for the greater good; just like sustainability managers need to give their colleagues a sense of purpose beyond maximizing financial returns for the business. People are incentivized when they feel an emotional connection with a club or company and their teammates. If it’s just about money, then something is missing. Players and employees need to feel joy in what they are doing.
Changing the underlying culture and approach of any sports team or business is among the hardest challenges for a manager. Like reputation, culture is intangible and hard to address and/or measure. Unfortunately, there is no universally standard definition for sustainability making it harder for sustainability professionals to coach using a standard manual. While one can’t have a standard sustainability definition for each company, this certainly creates the opportunity for dialogue.
A key strategy is to try and build a sense of urgency that will inspire people to move, and clear communication to get staff and directors, buy-in. Then showing persistence and resilience to make change stick and reinforcing the approach through the executive team and Board.
You cannot start long term planning without some early successes. That means immediately focusing on your strengths, and differentiating your strategy with each game or market that you operate in.
A sustainability manager’s entrance into a business is like an underdog football team playing away against one of the big clubs. Their goal should be to impress with the quality of their work, build momentum and a positive mood in their respective teams.
A sustainability manager entering a new business, or a football manager entering a complicated team, should ignore any ideas of sophistication or showing off, but focus on getting the job done.
A sustainability manager often inherits a “shoestring” budget relative to other divisions, like a football manager entering a team facing relegation. Too many corporate leaders fall prey to the latest fad or to a desire to separate themselves clearly from their predecessors or peers. Better, perhaps, to stick to the basics, the tried and tested, which you know from experience will work.
In any business, you must differentiate between hiring someone and getting them to perform. A manager cannot assume that they will immediately click – they must fit with the team’s culture or style of play.
You also might like to read our article, Top 10 Mistakes to avoid in Sustainable Business Practices. If you haven’t already, then Join our Tribe here.
Dr. Kaushik Sridhar is the National Sustainability Manager at Regis Healthcare. Prior to joining Regis, Kaushik has worked (over 14 years) at KPMG, EY, Macquarie University and Unisys Australia in various sustainability roles. Kaushik is an Adjunct Lecturer at Kaplan Business School and Monash University, and is widely published in Australian and international peer-reviewed journals. He has presented at conferences in Australia, Asia, and Europe. He holds a PhD and MBA in sustainability and a first-class honours degree in management.
Sustainability Tribe has been bringing you specially curated articles from ‘Sustainability Industry Experts’ since 2009. This is not a sponsored post and the views expressed in this article are the author’s own. If you are a sustainability expert, have years of implementing sustainability in any industry sector and want to submit an article, contact us here.
Amruta Kshemkalyani, an expert sustainability professional turned social entrepreneur, is the founder of the Sustainability Tribe, AK Sustainability
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