Let’s equip leaders to address the climate crisis

In this unprecedented era of climate change, we need leaders in all sectors to take smart, wise actions, quickly. Yet how many leaders possess the skills and knowledge to address the complex, fast-changing challenges that the climate crisis presents?

And, if your organization seeks to fundamentally retool operations, products and services to minimize climate harm — or, even better, to pursue climate-positive solutions — how well equipped are your leaders to do that work?

However robust your current leadership-development portfolio is, I suggest that it’s not optimized to build climate leaders within your organization. Consider what may be required to rise to the climate challenge:

• Leaders may need to think and act in wholly new ways.
• They may require a new body of knowledge, even new language, to inform decisions.
• They will need to innovate.
• They will be called to design and enact significant changes within the organization. 
• They will need to take action, often with incomplete information and amid changing circumstances.

We owe it to leaders to help them build the knowledge and skills to guide their organizations and communities through the climate crisis. In turn, it’s time to rethink and redesign leadership development.

A new framework for leadership development

Calling on my 25-plus years in corporate and nonprofit leadership development, and my prior experience in examining macro-level development needs for leaders across sectors, I’ve created a Framework for Leadership Development in an Era of Climate Change.

In this framework, I identified 12 development areas I consider especially potent to grow climate leaders inside and outside organizations. The areas emerged from my analysis of the fast-evolving demands on leaders to build climate-positive solutions, to redirect organizational and community priorities, and to make changes and place bets in ambiguous circumstances.

I had chief learning officers in mind as I drafted this framework and its components. The 12 development areas I propose for emergent climate leaders span “hard skills,” process skills and personal enrichment:

1. Deepen leaders’ personal connections to nature, to inform and guide leadership actions in support of a healthy climate and vitalized planet.
2. Build leaders’ systems intelligence, so they understand how natural and human-made systems operate, how to sustain healthy systems, and how to apply systems intelligence to decisions and actions.
3. Teach leaders basic climate science, so they understand and accurately communicate the core elements of climate science, and apply this knowledge to leadership strategies, decisions and actions.
4. Enlarge how leaders learn and apply ethics in service to the greater good of a healthy climate and healthy planet.
5. Expand leaders’ capabilities to use facts and data to make smart, defensible, climate-positive decisions and to sustain responsible climate leadership.
6. Strengthen leaders in equity leadership to provide opportunities for disadvantaged and disenfranchised populations in support of healthier communities and a healthier planet.
7. Guide leaders to apply agile scenario planning so they can imagine, strategize, and prepare for different potential futures related to climate change.
8. Equip leaders to leverage mechanisms of finance to advance climate-positive agendas.
9. Grow leaders’ abilities in collaborative innovation so that, in partnership with colleagues, stakeholders and even competitors, they can develop new ideas and plans that result in fresh, climate-positive solutions.
10. Enhance leaders’ effectiveness in communication and influence through multiple channels, and with varied audiences, to focus and improve actions that are positive for the climate.
11. Develop leaders’ abilities to propel successful change to transform organizations, teams, products, and services into responsible contributors to climate health.
12. Prepare leaders to take urgent, courageous action, summoning the best of who they are to lead effectively and quickly in this challenging crisis.

This framework can help identify key knowledge and skills for each development area, and demonstrates how each area informs and reinforces the others — creating a robust system to build climate-leadership capabilities. Importantly, every area in the framework is presented through the lens of the climate crisis, so even familiar leadership-development topics look different in this context.

An invitation to examine how you develop your leaders

As you examine your organization’s leadership-development portfolio, I invite you to consider how to infuse new focus areas, or redesign current ones, to build climate-leadership capabilities. I hope this framework helps you.

We will be asking a lot of our leaders in the years ahead as we confront this existential crisis. As leadership-development professionals, it’s our job to help them build the skills and knowledge they’ll need to succeed.