© istockphoto.com

Last week I attended the Manufacturing Leadership Summit at New College Durham. The agenda was dominated by recruitment and skills, not surprising when it was co-hosted by a further education college and a recruitment agency, but I was very surprised, given wall to wall news on the subject, that there was barely a mention of energy (I think the only time I heard the word uttered was in response to a question from… well… me).

One of the keynote speakers quoted a stat that 90% of millennials would sacrifice salary for a values-led job. So, during the following session, a panel Q&A, I stuck up my hand and asked if any of the panelists had actually felt pressure from existing or potential employees for their job to be values-led? Of the four, it was clear that only one – kudos to Sharon Lane, Managing Director of Tees Components – seemed to understand that values-led meant meaningful in a social and/or environmental sense. The other three panelists talked about creativity and empowerment – all internal factors.

Am I being harsh? Is the phrase ‘values-led’ only meaningful to those of us in the Sustainability/ESG world? Well, I used the exact phrasing that the keynote speaker used (reinforced by a slide) and he was talking about general leadership. While I believe there is an intent-action gap in such statistics, I know from my own experience that many businesses are feeling this pressure. Of course it may be that my sample is biased towards values – maybe businesses whose employees are asking for action are the ones that ask me in!

But if business doesn’t understand its social/environmental context and how this is perceived by external stakeholders, then that is a worry.