A Brighter Outlook: Leadership for a Better World

While it remains true that there is no “silver bullet”, our decades of experience advising the industry leaders in transforming their organizations has enabled us to discover the following five dimensions of leadership for successful transformation:

• Orchestrating Creativity is the ability to create a mindset and framework of action enabling an organization to generate, validate and implement truly innovative ideas. Here, leadership needs to communicate a clear direction ahead, while admitting that it might not have all the answers as to how to get there. This is the chance to invite the broad organization to come up with suggestions and open up company-wide dialogues. It is important that both conservative and progressive employees receive the same voice and attention and that no one is excluded from this dialogue. In particular, both groups – sustainability enthusiasts and skeptics – need to come together to create something great and new together. As Griffith points out, “At Sasol, we’ve made it clear that we have an aspirational culture for everyone, and everyone has a place on that journey. We have to understand everyone’s purpose. At the end of the day there’s no magic formula, but that journey in itself can be rich and valuable; you can learn a lot on the journey itself.”

• Growing Emotional Commitment refers to the ability to create a “call for action”, thereby allocating a greater emotional meaning and deeper commitment to change. And what could cause a greater emotional impact right now than positioning your own organization not as part of the problem, but as part of the solution to the world’s biggest challenges – climate change, environmental pollution and resource scarcity? To engender the necessary commitment, top management needs to create an inclusive environment and one of psychological safety. Fyrwald, for example, fosters an open corporate culture across the Syngenta Group. “In the past, the headquarters in Basel used to make decisions for the countries and regions. We’ve stopped that. We now have 48,000 people around the world who are empowered to come up with their own ideas and solutions about how to best serve our customers. We do coordinate major new products and active ingredient production globally, but the decisions are based on bottom-up input. How we then take these products and turn them into solutions occurs on a local market basis.”
   

• Anchoring in Society is about connecting the company’s business purpose to a long-term mandate of creating social value. In other words, chemical leaders need to position their companies even more as part of the solution, not the problem, with governmental bodies and regulators, and to find the right access to the public and the political community. Chemical companies should continue to collaborate even more here, and their participation in initiatives like the Business for Inclusive Growth or the Alliance to End Plastic Waste are prominent examples.

• Building Next Level Leadership is the ability to identify, energize and develop the next generation of leaders. The green economy offers a superb chance to reframe the industry as an employer of young talent. Moreover, leaders need to boldly bet on potential rather than simply competencies, and promote diversity and inclusion among next level leaders. It is not about “us and them” but about creating something new together. “Young people believe that the sky’s the limit, and they don’t have our inhibitions,” acknowledges Stern.

• Mastering Complexity is the ability to value and integrate multiple influential factors critical to a company’s success, thus redefining an organization’s mandate and making complex issues simple. We recommend not treating green economy, sustainability or circularity standalone topics in isolation, but combining them with other transformational topics, such as digitalization and innovation. Transformation is not simply yet another initiative but a comprehensive reinvention of what an organization believes in and how it functions.

In summary, the challenges facing the chemical industry are both numerous and complex, but not insurmountable. They may even prove to create a competitive advantage in global markets in the coming decade. To tackle these challenges, European chemical companies need to be bold and transform their cultures with a clear purpose into something new and irresistible. Start now.