Sustainability

To deliver both quick wins and long-term success, sustainability leaders need the backing of strong, cohesive teams with the right competencies. Based on our research at Egon Zehnder International, six key competencies govern the success of sustainability teams: balance, alignment, resilience, energy, openness and efficiency. But the relative significance of these team skills shifts as companies move through the various phases of implementing sustainability initiatives.

The optimal composition and focus of sustainability teams thus varies significantly depending on the challenges faced by the company. Group dynamics play a key role in a team’s success: it is not enough to bring together professionals with the relevant individual skills, they also need to complement each other to maximize collective impact. Based on our extensive experience of working with senior management teams across industries, the Global Sustainability Practice at Egon Zehnder International has developed a model of team effectiveness in the context or corporate sustainability.

During phase 1, which involves creating a sustainability vision, teams face the challenges of cultivating receptiveness and building a business case for sustainability. This primarily calls for teams displaying energy and openness. At this point it is important that teams proactively conceive of and pursue productive initiatives promoting a long-term sustainability strategy, and are also able to enlist support from the broader organization. Critical thinking and debate are encouraged among team members during this phase, but can become a problem if the team lacks the ability to prioritize needs and decisions as a result.

In phase 2, when the vision must be translated into action and sustainability needs to be embedded across an organization’s divisions for operational impact, resilience and efficiency become the core team competences. During this stage teams must remain united under pressure and be able to overcome resistance to sustainability initiatives. The ability to turn sustainability ambitions into quantifiable results becomes a key success factor. Despite their regimented working patterns, however, teams need to avoid bureaucracy, which can make them slow to see change and respond to critical needs.

In phase 3, as sustainability becomes part of the fabric of the organization, many teams will be working together on a broad range of initiatives. Their task is now to build long term partnerships and foster innovation. This calls for openness in terms of engaging with the broader organization and external stakeholders and alignment, or the team’s ability to understand sustainability in the light of the company’s overall strategy. At this stage the main challenge facing teams with a shared history is a tendency towards consensus that blocks out fresh perspectives and new ideas.

Working together: Success in sustainabilty

Synergy, derived from the Greek word syn-ergos or “working together,” forms the basis of all successful sustainability leader-team relationships. At every stage in the journey towards sustainability as a path to value creation, synergies between leaders and their teams should move the organization forward as fast and effectively as possible. Companies that lack leaders and teams with the requisite complementary competencies are likely to make slow progress on the path towards sustainability, which will be a key corporate issue in years to come.