Why building support is crucial to the success of your sustainability initiative

if you want to deliver results and make a real difference.

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In this guide:

Why lack of support is the biggest barrier to success
Why you need different kinds of support at different phases of your initiative
Why people might not support sustainability initiatives
Two kinds of supporters every sustainability initiative needs
Action: Identify your collaborators and allies

By “sustainability initiative” I mean any project to get sustainability on the agenda and then embedded in the organisation. This includes embedding sustainability in business strategy, in operations, in products and services, in the supply chain. It also includes sustainability-related community projects. The same principles apply to climate change, biodiversity, etc.

Lack of support is the biggest barrier to success

Over the years we’ve spoken to hundreds of people setting up and leading sustainability initiatives, and carried out several surveys. We discovered that the biggest barrier to success is a lack of support from colleagues and others.

Sometime the lack of support was upfront:

“My senior management aren’t interested“
“My colleagues just don’t get sustainability“

And sometimes, the lack of support was a bit more subtle:

“They’re happy to support it until they actually have to do something”
“People say they’d like to help, but then they say it’s not part of their day job“
“It’s fine until the project needs some investment or staff time away from their desks for training“.

It’s pretty obvious why your sustainability initiative will struggle to succeed, if these kinds of attitudes are common in your organisation.

You need different kinds of support at different phases of your initiative

When you’re thinking about the support you need, you can think of three phases to developing a sustainability initiative. You need different kinds of support at each phase.

1. Developing the idea

Scoping out the initiative, doing initial research, working out how would it actually work.

For developing the initial idea and scoping it out, you need colleagues who are interested and willing to get involved.

If they’re not interested, unwilling to get involved or unable to make the time, your initiative will suffer. As well as their practical input, you’ll miss out on valuable perspectives and experience that will make for a better initiative.

2. Pulling the initiative together

Gathering the people and resources to develop the idea into a concrete plan.

As the idea evolves into a plan and becomes an active project, it will need investments of staff time, finance or both.

So at that point, as well as enthusiastic support of colleagues, you will also need the support of relevant budget holders to access funding. And the support of managers to get staff participation in the project, in training and so on.

3. Delivering the initiative

Rolling out the initiative and leading and managing it once it’s in operation.

And then finally, when the plan is live, it will only really succeed if the people you need to take action don’t just participate, but they do so with enthusiasm.

Looking at it like this, it’s easy to see why lack of support is so often cited as a major barrier to success.

Frustration affects you and your initiative

It’s easy to be frustrated by the resistance and disinterest that you come up against. To you and I, to people working on sustainability, the need for action seems so obvious and so important.

And when you come up against that kind of disinterest or lack of support, it’s really easy to slip into believing that other people don’t care. Or they aren’t aware of the issues.

That frustration can lead you to respond badly to the resistance, impacting working relationships, and leading to poor decision making.

It can also cause you lose empathy with other people, which isn’t healthy for you and or for them.

Why people might not support sustainability initiatives

Let’s try and understand why people like your colleagues maybe don’t support sustainability initiatives.

Part of it is simply that people generally resist change unless they have a compelling reason to support it. And most organisations have structures and management systems that are carefully designed to actually prevent change. That’s how bureaucracies function!

But there are also some more specific reasons why people are sometimes unwilling to support sustainability initiatives.

Professional reasons

And with their professional hat on, they just don’t see sustainability as being relevant to the organisation. Or perhaps, they sometimes think it conflicts with profitability or some other measure of success.

And quite frankly, they’ve often got enough on their plates already and they don’t want to get embroiled in yet another initiative. Especially if it might turn out to be yet another flavor of the month initiative that will take time and then disappear in a couple of months.

Personal reasons

And then with their personal hat on, they just might not really get the connection between big global issues like climate change and their own lives in the here and now.

Or, they might actually be concerned about sustainability, which is probably the case for most people but they feel uncomfortable talking about sustainability or climate change in a professional context. And perhaps also, they just don’t believe that an organisational initiative on sustainability, will actually really be genuine or make a significant difference.

Why building support is important

When I started working on this guide, the importance of building such support seemed obvious to me. After all, as I wrote above, we’ve had years of feedback from people telling us that lack of support was that biggest barrier.

But I realised that the feedback was from people who have experience of developing sustainability initiatives.

Then I remembered other conversations with people developing and leading sustainability initiatives for the very first time. And for them – perhaps you – this kind of resistance and lack of support was often a real shock and surprise to them.

So, we’ll look at this resistance and what to do about it in a future guide, but for now, whether this is old hat to you or a revelation, hopefully it’s reassuring to know that any resistance or lack of support is almost certainly not about you personally.

And that when we understand the reasons for resistance, it’s easier to work out how to get the support you need for your sustainability initiative.

Two kinds of supporters every sustainability initiative needs

Above I talked about the three phases of developing an initiative. Firstly, developing the idea, the scoping and initial research. Secondly, getting the time and resources together that are needed to turn that idea into action. And thirdly, getting involvement from participants.

In our experience, there are two groups of people who are essential to successful sustainability initiatives.

Collaborators

The first one, we call collaborators. These are people who are actively involved in developing and delivering the sustainability initiatives.

They may be members of your team or managers or specialists from across the organisation, and possibly, depending on the type of initiative you’re doing, there could be external stakeholders.

Allies

The second group who are really important are what we call allies. These are people who aren’t necessarily be actively involved, but whose support will be invaluable.

They can open doors, give permission and provide access to resources. They’re often senior managers, but they can also be anyone at any level in the organisation who has influence, formal or informal.

Who are your allies and collaborators?

So, where are you at with your sustainability initiative at the moment? Is it just the germ of an idea? Or is it something actively in development? Or is it up and running?

Take a moment to think about who your collaborators are or who they could be. Who’s actively involved? And who would you like to get involved if they aren’t already?

And who are your allies? And who would you like to have as an ally? What resources and influence do they bring or could they bring? Not just budgets or formal approval, but who will speak up for the initiative at a board meeting? Or who will vouch for you when it matters?

Who are these people really? Not just their job titles, but what skills and expertise and insights do they have that they could bring to the initiative?

Do you have these people in mind?

So you might be thinking, “As well as my direct reports, my ideal collaborators will be Jules in HR. Jim in marketing and it’d be great if Joanna in operations as part of the team.”

And then your allies: “I really need to get support from Kevin, the director of finance and Kate, the head of procurement. And it would make a huge difference if Kirsty from the union was on board.”

And you may be thinking, “OK, those are my potential allies and collaborators, and yes, it would be cool if they were up for it“.

Passion and enthusiasm

Let’s go a bit deeper into what difference it would make if they weren’t just up for it, but they were fully behind the initiative with passion and enthusiasm.

Imagine what it would be like if these people, your ideal collaborators and allies, were really committed to your initiative. In fact, they were fired up and fully invested. They saw it, not as your initiative, but as a collective effort, that you’re all working on with real commitment and real enthusiasm.

Take a moment to imagine what that would be like and how it would feel.

How would meetings be different?
How would informal conversations about sustainability with people like that be different?
And how would the development of the initiative be different?
How would the results of the initiative be different?
And how would you feel differently from now as you lead to this work, supported by your allies and collaborators with commitment and enthusiasm? How would it feel different?

Turning your vision into reality

In this series of guides we’ll be exploring how you can bring together collaborators and allies in ways that will maximise the success of your initiative, and make leading the initiative a really positive experience for you and your colleagues.

While it’s fresh in your mind, and in preparation for one of our next guides, make a list of your collaborators and allies.

Action: Identify your collaborators and allies

Take your notebook and make two lists: a list of collaborators and a list of allies. Include people you consider to be your collaborators and allies now, and also people you’d really like to have involved in the future.

Keep the list safe, in a future guide we’ll help you build support for your initiative with this people.