I’ve long argued that Leadership is the difference between the best at sustainability and the rest. Leadership is responsible for two critical sustainability issues:

• Strategy: all the goals, objectives, projects and resources required to deliver change for sustainability;
• Culture: the attitude of employees to the sustainability programme.

Arguably the second outweighs the first – “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” as the quote attributed to Peter Drucker goes.

Towers Watson’s Global Workforce Study 2014 gave an interesting insight into the relationship between the effectiveness of leadership and management and the engagement of employees (which in turn is related to how likely those employees are to deliver on strategy) (see below).

In other words, to get employees effectively engaged you need both leadership and management. The remarkable thing is how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. While this is for general engagement with the job, there is no reason to think it is any different for sustainability in particular.

It also gives weight to my views on the critical importance leadership – and my description of middle management as “the place green projects go to die.” So we need to get the whole line management aligned to sustainability.