The ONE thing you MUST do to secure commitment for sustainability
If you’re like me, you’re always bemused by all those snake-oil-selling blog posts which claim to have the ONE, single secret to health, wealth, happiness etc. And you usually have to read through pages and pages of build up guff until they give that ‘secret’ away. And when you read it, you go “huh.”
But here’s one cure all for commitment that’s genuine. And I’ll get straight to the point – no salesman’s spiel.
If you want to get commitment for sustainability from anyone – employees, customers, suppliers, members of the public, board members, anyone, then you need this one magical ingredient:
Involvement.
Yep, it’s that simple, get ’em involved. Get them to roll their sleeves up and take part. Challenge them to work out what sustainability means to their day job for themselves.
You will find cynicism and apathy fall away and people get enthused, get a deeper understanding of the issues and work out what it means to them. I’ve been making a good career out of ‘secret’ for the last few years, so believe me it works.
Case study: I ran a sustainability workshop for directors of a major UK company before Christmas – I still have the post-it covered templates on the floor behind me as I write this. When I rang my main contact the following week for some feedback and he said “You know that guy who was a bit stand-offish in the session? He’s never been convinced about the whole sustainability agenda. Well, he rang me the day after the workshop and asked what he needed to do to move this forward in his section – I couldn’t believe it!”
Trust me, this magic elixir works!