Change management in practice: a focus on sustainability
The requirements of successful change management are often described in broad terms. The details, however, also matter, and invariably differ from field to field. For example, the integration of sustainability into companies in recent years has involved substantial change efforts. The experience of P&G and UPS illustrates the process of applying broad rules in particular circumstances.
Leadership and communication to create a sense of urgency: Successful change requires a widespread belief within the organisation that action is necessary. This requires a consistent message from senior executives—otherwise employees will assume that the issue is not important within the business. UPS and P&G start their sustainability efforts with an unambiguous commitment from the CEO and the Board. Both also have extensive internal educational and communication efforts to explain the concept.
So far, this does not vary noticeably from the general template for change. For companies seeking to become more sustainable, though, success does not depend so much on winning people over to individual initiatives as convincing them of the need to embrace sustainability more broadly. Here developments in the outside world certainly help. UPS vice-president, sustainability, Scott Wicker, says that increasing awareness of climate change has made it far easier to win hearts and minds. "The emergence of climate change as a business issue is driving sustainability," he notes.
Yet P&G's Dr White points out that sustainability can be managed in terms of corporate behaviour. This approach requires greater corporate change, but once employees have been won over to its logic, these flow more easily.
Building support for particular initiatives: A sense of urgency must be converted into a willingness for the company to provide resources to any given programme. With companies carefully shepherding resources, it can be difficult to advocate sustainability
ventures in which the benefits are partly intangible. Mr Wicker therefore stresses the need to blend environmental with financial gains clearly, as both are a part of sustainability. Similarly, Dr White says, "You need a clear line of sight for sustainability to the company's purpose." This ideally should include social and environmental, as well as financial elements, and P&G changed its formal statement of purpose to do so. The strong link between sustainability and efficiency frequently helps here as well.
Planning: Effective change requires a good roadmap, including clear delineations of responsibility and steps, preferably with initial easy wins to boost morale and momentum. This is as true in sustainability as other fields, but those working in this area face particular complications. Mr Wicker notes that initiatives tend to involve multiple departments and sometimes even external stakeholders such as communities or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Co-ordinated planning and execution are therefore typically more difficult than for initiatives relating to single departments.
Selecting the appropriate metrics for success may not be as straightforward as initiatives focused on money saved, or a company might not even measure them before a given initiative begins. The accurate measurement of carbon emissions related to a given activity, for example, can be highly complex. Yet such measurement can provide additional business opportunities: UPS, for example, finds it valuable to be able to give customers information related to the carbon produced in their shipments.
Focus of change: Although in parts of the business the focus of changes has varied with the economic cycle, sustainability provides an example of one that has not. It certainly could have fluctuated between concentrating on efficiency initiatives that reduce cost and those that focus on preparation for the future. Yet Dr White says that the downturn and recovery brought "no real change" to the balance between these two. Similarly, Lynnette McIntire, who heads sustainability communication at UPS, says that recently, "We've not been shifting efforts from cost cutting to opportunity; it is more of everything."
