Sustainability is an HR Issue

What’s the first image that pops into your head when you hear the word sustainability?

Reusable bags? Electric vehicles? Composting? Quite rightly, our discussion of sustainability has focused on the environment, with devastating images of bushfires, disappearing ice sheets and catastrophic flooding beamed onto our screens daily. The message is unmistakable. Change or face the greatest existential threat of our time.

The economy has also become a major sustainability agenda, with short-term capitalism and pure profit motives increasingly called out for their hand in driving gross inequalities and human misery. Here too, the message is clear. Change or risk widespread disruption to jobs, customers, investment, incomes and livelihoods.

But sustainability is broader than just the environment or the economy. It’s the social element of sustainability – the long-term wellbeing within an organisation’s members – which is now gaining more attention. It’s also one of the single most significant forces that will shape organisational performance and success for the foreseeable future. So, what’s the message we need to hear as leaders and HR professionals?

It’s a huge question, so let’s start with chickens.

CEO and leadership speaker Margaret Heffernan has a fascinating talk about a scientific study of chicken productivity. The study took a flock of average chickens and left them alone for six generations. Alongside, it bred a group of ‘super chickens’ – placing the most productive chickens together in a flock, with the superstars leading the breeding, for six generations.

After the study, the average chickens were happy, healthy, and productivity in egg output had increased. As for the super chickens? All but three had been pecked to death.

The lesson here for building resilient and sustainable teams and organisations is obvious. Cultures of excessive internal competitiveness are detrimental to the long-term wellbeing of organisations and the people inside them. Work is, and never should be, a talent contest where people rise by suppressing the productiveness of their peers. Work is deeply social, and it’s high time to end the professional pecking order.

Heffernan simplifies this lesson down to the importance of social capital. The key to having competent, motivated and dedicated people working together with trust and confidence comes down not to individuals but the bonds that are formed between them. Those bonds are not created by competitiveness, jealousy or fear. They’re formed by helpfulness, by being involved, by sharing empathy, support and a common purpose.

One can argue that every organisation still needs its stars, people who inspire others to do better. But as any movie director worth their salt will tell you, it’s the on-screen chemistry that really counts. Even big-budget films with star-studded casts can flop without it and routinely do.

Teams that can thrive and survive with long-term wellbeing are those that can spend time with each other, not only on work-related tasks but also to relate as equal social beings. As Heffernan notes, the highest achieving teams are not those with the greatest aggregate IQ or individual excellence but those with the highest social sensitivity. They are more likely to involve all members equally to harness their differences in skills and knowledge.

Here’s where another thinker I admire deeply has a relevant message. Harvard Business School’s Linda Hill has a brilliant concept that she calls ‘collective genius’. Hill spent nearly a decade understanding why some organisations have been successful in building the kind of teams that Heffernan has referred to. She says while leadership remains the ‘secret sauce’, it’s a very different kind of leadership than many of us would imagine. Rather than creating a vision for others to follow, leaders in these organisations “unleashed the power of the many, by loosening the stranglehold of the few”. In other words, the leaders of these organisations were aggregators rather than dictators of viewpoints. They created space for people at all levels to speak up, misspeak, make mistakes and engage in the process of ‘creative abrasion’.

In my words, it’s about empowering people through leadership by involvement, rather than management by engagement. Team members work out the best thing to do next without needing to be told. In organisational cultures like this, leaders create an environment where every worker feels empowered to make decisions that will improve performance.

These are the messages we need to hear. Whether we’re talking about environmental, economic or social sustainability, everyone is required to help address the challenges we face. It’s our job to unleash the imagination, energy and potential of our organisations to thrive not just today but well into the future.