Leadership for Sustainability
Enhancing Personal Effectiveness
In March, Core ran a leadership workshop for those working in sustainability roles in organisations. Delivered by Core Associate Liz Rivers, with support from Associate Jamie Whittle, it was offered in collaboration with Scottish Business in the Community.
The workshop was attended by leaders from a variety of organisations, including BT, Royal Mail, Scottish and Southern Energy, Standard Life, The Met Office, Edinburgh Airport, Church of Scotland and the Sustainable Development Commission.
The workshop was tailored to address some of the particular challenges that those working in this sector face, such as “lateral leadership” – how to get others to follow you when you are not in charge, and “personal sustainability” – how to stay motivated and fresh despite the enormity of the task they face.
Sustainability professionals are highly motivated and action oriented and tend to be focussed on achieving behaviour change in others. A key message of the workshop was that in order to be truly effective over time, it is vital that we are in touch with our own sources of nourishment and inspiration. Like a tree, if we do not feed the roots it will eventually die. If we are in touch with what sustains us intellectually, emotionally, physically and spiritually and we act and communicate from that awareness, we will have greater impact and influence on those around us.
This in turn will counteract some of the current pitfalls in sustainability communications – either being exclusively rational, ignoring the emotional dimension where our decisions are actually made, or, engaging with emotions at the level of fear and guilt, which tends to alienate people rather than engage them. To inspire others we need to be in touch with our own sources of inspiration.
Participants expressed a desire for further workshops on topics such as emotional intelligence for organisations, organisational change, how to inspire others, influencing and verbal communication and engaging with senior managers.
Feedback included:
"learning something new is inspirational"
"we have different backgrounds but face similar challenges"
"it was good that we avoided having a "moaning" session - tempting when we get together"
Further sessions are being planned.