When you’re a sustainability director or manager, you need to make change happen. In this ‘how to’ guide, we unpack why change can be so hard and then set out five steps that you can use to turn colleagues into active allies who work with you to make change happen.

Why is making change hard?

There are many reasons why making change is hard. The biggest problem is that conflicting priorities block progress, even when everyone involved has shared goals.

This is what’s happening when you hear “yes, but…” 

“That’s really important, but we don’t have the budget”, “I agree, but we’re already working on this other plan”, “I’m up for that, but it’s not part of my day job”.

What’s holding back change isn’t that people don’t believe in climate change or sustainability. And it’s not that their organisation doesn’t have a commitment to sustainability. 

Conflicting priorities block progress

The problem is that for most people and most teams, their objectives, priorities and KPIs aren’t aligned with sustainability. This means there are conflicts between their immediate priorities and your priorities as a sustainability leader.

There’s also a more subtle kind of conflict that holds back progress, and that’s different perceptions of sustainability. 

We have all heard colleagues equating sustainability with recycling or waste minimisation. This can lead to conflict if they want to prioritise actions that don’t reflect the depth and breadth of action that’s required to genuinely tackle sustainability. 

Collaboration is better than conflict 

Conflict and competition can sometimes spark innovation and drive change but generally it wastes time and resources, often in a race to the bottom. 

If you want to make progress, collaboration is better than conflict – not least because sustainability is too big a task for one person or one team, even in a small organisation.

Collaboration simply means ‘working with’. To make change happen, we need to collaborate with colleagues across the organisation, with people in our supply chain, and with other stakeholders.

Turn colleagues into your allies

Ideally, we want everyone across the organisation to have sustainability as part of their job and to work with the sustainability team in some way. 

But that’s rarely our starting point — even where there’s a strong commitment to sustainability from the top, this isn’t cascaded through the organisation effectively, so there are still conflicting objectives at other layers of management.

So, where do we start? The way forward is to find people who will be active allies and work with you and support you in different ways to make change happen. You need different kinds of allies:

• Senior leaders who give permission for the sustainability agenda across the organisation, and providing space and resources.
• Operational managers who are actively involved in developing and delivering projects, who share data, etc.
• Advocates, people with influence who stand up for sustainability and your work when it’s being questioned.

To be effective, allies don’t need to work with you day-to-day, but they must all be active — stepping up and supporting the sustainability agenda when and where it’s needed. 

Find your potential allies

To find the people who could be your allies and to turn their potential support into reality, you need to take a structured approach. Looking back at our work in this area over 20 years, we identified five key steps:

Step 1: You need to make sense of the system you’re working in and identify key stakeholders and gatekeepers.

Step 2: Discover what really matters to these key stakeholders and gatekeepers as people, in and beyond their job.

Step 3: Once you understand what matters to them, connect over the common ground between what matters to them and the change you want.

Step 4: When you’ve built that connection, invite them to join you and others in working together to make change that matters happen.

And, then you’re ready for step 5: Work together for change with your growing network of engaged and active allies.

Key skills to find and develop allies

This approach is very different from the ‘command and control’ that is the norm in management. Working through these five steps therefore requires ways of thinking and working that may be unfamiliar.

With this kind of sustainability leadership you need to understand how systems work and be able to develop relationships with other people. The framework we use is the Inner Development Goals.

The IDGs can seem like a lot of jargon – but once you strip that away, they are a powerful set of skills and behaviours developed by practitioners and academics based on research and experience. We talk about getting beyond the jargon in the companion podcast to this guide.

How to get started

If this all seems a bit overwhelming, you don’t need to do it all in one go. You can get started by just having different, more inquiring, conversations with your colleagues. 

Ask open questions, like “What are you working on and why?” and “What are your priorities?” Listen carefully to the answers, looking for connections with your sustainability agenda and potential common ground.

And if you want to get cracking, don’t worry about getting everything in place and getting it right first time. Instead take an ‘action learning’ mindset: Give it a go and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. Reflect, adjust your approach and try again. Repeat.

Finally, lots of high quality research shows that four out of five people do care about climate change, nature and sustainability. They want to do something to help but don’t feel able to. 

So as you go into your conversations, remember that most people will already be on your side. You’re not trying to convince them that sustainability is important, you’re looking to find ways where they feel able to work on it.