LEADERSHIP 101

How can we convince more companies to signup for the five-stage sustainability journey, portrayed in the above figure? What if you are an internal sustainability champion without the position power to just make it happen? How can you lead change from the middle in a way that mobilizes the whole organization in the transition to a more sustainable business model? Help is at hand.

The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook

The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook  is a practical, easy-to-follow leadership guidebook. It helps sustainability champions at any level in a company lead a transformation to a smarter, more successful, and more sustainable enterprise. An expert on leadership, culture change, and organizational development, Bob distills lessons learned about cultural transformation and provides guidance on how to embed sustainability into corporate cultures.

This guidebook is exceptionally easy to use, read and consult. Each tip is self-contained within two pages. A change tip is presented on one page with a supporting sidebar or figure on its opposite, facing page. It is organized around four frameworks for easy reference:

  • A seven-step sustainability change process
  • Seven leadership practices to use during the change process
  • Seven paradoxes that complement the seven leadership practices
  • Seven derailers to avoid

This book is an indispensable tool for sustainability champions who are transforming their companies into more sustainable enterprises.

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The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook – video

In this 53 minute video, Bob takes you through the highlights of The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook. The video creatively overlays Bob on the animated slides, making it an engaging and professional presentation. It was previously for sale as a DVD, but is now sold out. In the interests of dematerialization and ready access to useful tools, it is now freely available on Vimeo for anyone to view, using the password “willard“.

Additional Leadership Resources

In The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook, above, one of the seven change steps is “Assess current realities.” This white paper looks at the three concurrent clusters of sustainability-related crises that we are experiencing. Then – if we were made leader of the world for a day – it proposes seven high-leverage strategies / bold stokes that we would use to address them. There is a blog about the whitepaper and it can be downloaded here.

Leadership and the One Minute Manager, by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi, is a classic guide to leadership styles. It stresses that there is no single, best style of leadership. In fact, there are four leadership styles: directing, coaching / selling, supporting and delegating. This 2-page summary  explains that whichever style is employed by the manager depends on the situation / task that the other person is to undertake and their developmental level for that situation / task.

As suggested in the Situational Leadership model, above, there are times when a leader needs to coach / mentor / give feedback and advice to others. John Whitmore’s book, Coaching for Performance, provides guidance on how to do this.  This book summary  explains the key aspects of an effective coaching session and the GROW model: Goals, Reality, Options and Will. This one-page Grow Coaching Guide is a handy cheat sheet of questions to ask during a coaching session.

If you are be called upon to facilitate a workshop to build consensus on an inspiring vision, to agree on current realities, and/or to strategize on appropriate actions, this facilitator guide may be helpful.  It suggests how to facilitate three workshops to accomplish steps 2, 3, and 4 in the 7-step sustainability change process as described in The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook.

We often use the terms “Leader” and “Manager” quite interchangeably. They have different characteristics. We do not need leading or managing – we need both. As explained in this paper, we need both in the same Manager-Leader.

Leading Change slides 

The Master – Leading Change slide deck is one of the six slide decks available to Master Slide Decks subscribers.  The deck includes:

    • 7-Step change model
    • 7 Leadership practices
    • 7 Leadership paradoxes
    • 7 Derailers
    • Leadership attributes and styles
    • Handling objections

The master decks are updated quarterly. The slides can be used to build your own slide decks for presentations, and are excellent micro-courses / tutorials / refreshers on key aspects of sustainability topics. They are Bob’s most valued resource.