For too long, humans have treated planet Earth as an infinite resource to plunder. In very recent years, however, humans are finally beginning to understand that if urgent action isn’t taken, we are headed for environmental catastrophe. The business world must play a critical role in leading the charge when it comes to tackling the environmental crisis because it has the capacity, capability and resources to drive positive change.
Charged with nurturing and developing responsible business leaders of the future, chief learning officers and those who lead the learning and development arm within organizations are perfectly positioned to positively impact environmental and social sustainability. The challenge, however, is how to develop — at all levels — bold, exceptional leaders with the awareness and skills to deploy environment-saving solutions.
A CEMS survey of 4,206 alumni revealed the environment was the greatest concern facing modern-day business leaders. This overtook technological advancement, which was identified as the greatest challenge when we ran the same survey in 2018. These findings prompted us to seek a range of perspectives from leading academics and business professionals, from our global network of business schools and corporate partners on the topic of how to develop leaders capable of tackling the environmental crisis. These were collected and published in our new report, “Leading for the Future of Our Planet,” and summarized below.
What does the environmental crisis mean in practice for the skills and competencies future leaders will need? And how can L&D professionals help leaders to develop these skills?
Leaders must have a double competence in business and sustainability
Professor Lars Jacob Tynes Pederson, head of the Centre for Sustainable Business at the Norwegian School of Economics, shared that for too long, the relationship between business and the environment has been simplified. Instead, integration is required of the competencies and skills from the core fields (accounting, finance, strategy, marketing) with sustainability competencies and skills.
“For some time, the environment has dominated the conversation around sustainability as it relates to business,” Pederson says. “More recently, however, other important environmental issues are coming to the fore — biodiversity, for example. This is a sustainability problem and the environmental elements to sustainable business that organizations need to address are proliferating when it comes to the number of issues and the many different features of those challenges.”
“Many organizations are quite open when it comes to saying they have a competency gap when it comes to sustainability,” he adds. “I am seeing graduates with this double skill set being fast-tracked as the current generation of managers were never taught these skills. I believe in having a combined set of skills and competencies — a double-competence in business and sustainability. While you can hire people with sustainability skills to do specific sustainability jobs, we need people who understand how they can impact the sustainability agenda to effect real change.”
“It is not enough now to be able to draw up a commercial strategy or make sense of a P&L,” says Alexandra Palt, executive vice president and chief corporate responsibility officer at L’Oréal. “Today, it’s also about how you interact with the world around you — with the communities, organizations and public authorities; with nature and with the planet.”
Leaders must be trained to take a collective long-term view
Dirk S. Hovorka, professor at the University of Sydney Business School, says that “current business thinking is deeply embedded in a system of goals and ideology that restrains and constrains a business’ willingness to act, because they have much more immediate concerns. We are all part of a big fragile system of living things and nonliving things that work on timescales that we don’t intuitively comprehend. Until we grasp and really understand that, it will be difficult to effect real change.”
Leadership philosophy must change into something far more collective to avoid climate catastrophe, Horvorka says. One common mistake made during leadership development, “is the promotion of the ‘guru’ leadership philosophy — the great leader who has a clear vision, can stand on stage and motivate people.”
“In fact, everyone’s activities are interconnected and there are consequences to our collective activity that we may not see,” Horvorka says. “If individuals and executives adopt the ‘collective’ leadership philosophy, we can affect positive change more quickly. As individuals (acting collectively) we can lead this agenda, adopt positive behaviors, buy from ethical companies and elect conscientious politicians.”
Ultimately, Horvorka says, we must look to the primary goal of being good “ancestors” – something which can be taught through L&D programs. He argues that being a good ancestor is to look out for the wellbeing not only of people but of the entire biosphere. Creating capital and wealth and institutions and workforces are only intermediate goals which should serve the ultimate goal of human and animal wellbeing.
Dr. Camille Meyer at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business says leaders need to take a temporal perspective on decision-making. “A decision made today, based on an outcome within the next quarter, may have implications for the environment in the long-term,” he says. “The damage that can be done in one day may take centuries for affected ecosystems to recover — if they indeed do.”
Training in self-awareness is key
Andrew Delios, professor in the Department of Strategy and policy at NUS Business School National University of Singapore, believes the world needs leaders who are trained to be in touch with their personal values and use these values as the basis for their tough decisions. In an increasingly complex world, he says, it is vital to be self-aware, as this will drive your decision making.
“Such self-aware leaders will naturally be drawn to organizations whose vision, mission and strategic objectives espouse their values,” Delios says. “Equally, leaders will need to value the importance of introspection, continually reflecting on how they’ve handled challenging situations and how they could do better. This process creates truly authentic leaders that people are willing to follow. Talented people everywhere will be drawn to these leaders, and their organizations, and work collaboratively to achieve shared goals.”
Bold leaders who can set strong organizational objectives that drive the cultural change needed for a greater focus on ESG issues are needed. They must empower employees to develop this change, support it, fight through complacency, build coalitions and martial stakeholders.
As Professor Delios mentions in the report, “They need the courage to push the rock to the top of the mountain and then let it roll down.”
The pivotal role of CLOs
Contributors we spoke to for the report recommended that deep knowledge of ESG issues be incorporated into leadership development to develop a double competency in business and sustainability. Innovation happens in the space between, so this topic should be woven throughout L&D programs, not just taught in specialist modules.
Leadership development programs should ensure that learners have a deep understanding of the complexity of natural systems and the natural environment (biodiversity loss, climate change) and how decision-making impacts that in the long-term and for future generations. Leaders need to be aware of the complex links between socioeconomic inequalities and the environmental crises.
It is also vital for learners to practice theory and bring “lived experiences” from the business environment into L&D programs, in order to develop boldness and self-awareness. This ensures organizations are producing responsible future leaders who are able to keep pace with change.
“Given the complexity of the challenges we face, there are no perfect solutions available to us,” Palt says in the report. “That means that our future leaders have to be comfortable trying out different approaches, accepting they are imperfect and experiencing failure. They need to have courage and the capacity to innovate and keep driving change.”
Nicole de Fontaines is the executive director of CEMS.
