At some point, nearly every company has been
unconsciously reactive to sustainability. Employees
might be unaware of the threats and opportunities in-
volved until something happens that brings the issue
onto the senior leadership’s radar screen. The trigger
has often been explicitly reflected on the C-level
dashboard (impending regulatory action or media ex-
posure from environmental disasters, for instance) but
increasingly it is rooted in more gradual trends (such
as the growing scarcity of a key manufacturing input
or the evolution of comparative product metrics). Ei-
ther way, the organization begins to engage with
sustainability but lacks a shared and consistent under-
standing of what it means. As such, an important task
in Phase 1 is the early identification of important but
as yet ill-defined risks and opportunities. This pro-
cess can be difficult because senior executives might
not yet fully appreciate the significance of the issue.
“The thing we struggle with is engaging the general
managers, who actually run businesses,” says the
head of sustainability at a major educational pub-
lisher. “Without them it’s very difficult to move our
agenda forward. This is really the key challenge.”
Accordingly, the paramount competencies of the
sustainability leader in Phase 1 are twofold: 1) collab-
oration and influencing and 2) change leadership. The
leader must communicate a compelling vision and
gain buy-in from key opinion formers in the organi-
zation. To do so, the leader must be able to understand
the motivations of different stakeholders, and engage
and partner with managers to weave sustainability
into the fabric of the organization. In addition, the
leader must possess the ability to understand and
overcome the barriers to adopting sustainability.
Leaders must help identify, define and develop a spe-
cific set of business processes geared to manage
previously unquantified risks and capture new op-
portunities. The initial mandate for the sustainability
leader might be surprisingly vague, expressing only
the general sense of a need to act. Consequently, the
leader must be able to deal with ambiguity and still be
effective in guiding the organization through Phase 1.
Consider Owens Corning, an innovator in fiberglass technology. In some ways, the company has
been environmentally friendly since 1938, when it
launched its first insulation product. But the first
phase of its real engagement with sustainability began
in 2002 with Dave Brown, then the CEO, and Frank
Egon Zehnder International’s comprehensive model of leadership, which encom-passes the core competencies of senior executives, is based on the company’s
experience working with senior management teams across industries and on
more than 25,000 senior management appraisals conducted over the past five
years. That work, combined with recent executive search and management appraisals for senior-level sustainability professionals, suggests that six leadership
competencies are central to the success of sustainability initiatives: 1) change
leadership, 2) collaboration and influencing, 3) strategic orientation, 4) commercial
orientation, 5) results delivery and 6) team leadership.i Other competencies, such
as customer impact and market knowledge, were found to be relevant in individual cases, but our research focused first on the general profile of sustainability
leadership and second on the two key competencies found most prominently in
leaders successfully navigating each of the major phases of sustainability initiatives. Although any individual who leads a sustainability effort will need a baseline
of all six leadership competencies, each phase benefits from specific strengths in
certain capabilities, as described in the main text of this article.
O’Brien-Bernini, then the head of research and development. (O’Brien-Bernini would serve in a dual
role as the company’s head of R&D as well as chief
sustainability officer, or CSO, for two years before relinquishing his R&D responsibilities altogether.)
Leveraging the explicit support he had from Brown,
O’Brien-Bernini created a sustainability council
composed of the most influential executives and
managers at Owens Corning, including representatives from all businesses and functions. “I was not
looking for evangelists,” he recalls. “I chose them primarily for their ability to influence the organization.”
O’Brien-Bernini selected council members
based on three criteria. First, he wanted to maximize the impact of the council, and he realized that
doing so required decision makers. Second, he was
aware that — as a corollary — if he merely assembled a team of “tree huggers,” the credibility of the
effort would immediately be in question. Third, he
believed that having leaders of different products
and geographies on the council would enhance the
company’s ability to cross-pollinate successful initiatives across the entire organization.
With its sustainability council in place, Owens
Corning began focusing on seven critical issues: energy use, greenhouse gases, particulate emissions,
volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, water
use, waste and nitrous-oxide emissions. These priorities were communicated to the different plants, and
capital was set aside for the best projects. The competition fostered widespread participation to reduce
energy consumption, decrease greenhouse gas emissions and so on. “It was a good deal for the plants as
