December 17, 2024
Creating a Sustainable Culture: The Sustainable Leader
Ultimately, sustainable leadership is about fostering an organizational culture that prioritizes long-term impact over short-term gain, protecting natural resources, promoting social equity and ensuring economic prosperity for all. The CEO plays an especially pivotal role in shaping the culture as a leader and a role model for desired behaviors and values.
The skills required of a CEO or any other senior leader to drive sustainability include visionary thinking, a systems perspective, adaptability and resilience, stakeholder engagement and unquestioned integrity — all referenced in the article Leadership for a Complex World: Planning for the CEO of the Future. However, while many CEOs and other C-suite leaders with these skills are committed to sustainability on principle, they might not be the best people to lead a sustainable culture.
At a deeper level, leadership is about having power and exercising it. Research by psychologist David McClelland and his colleagues demonstrated that contrary to popular opinion, the best leaders are the ones who are not only attracted to power but use it to influence others. Based on this work and our observations of leaders who are highly effective but in different ways, we offer four leadership types according to how they use power and influence, their reasons for doing so, and their impact on their organization’s culture.
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The Expert. These leaders are typically high achievers whose power comes from their position and authority and their influence comes from their deep experience, knowledge and technical skills. They have high standards for quality and performance and find it difficult to delegate to those they believe are less capable than they are. Since they focus primarily on their expertise, they often go exclusively to their teams for answers and may be resistant or less open to ideas and solutions that fall outside their area of understanding. By concentrating too heavily on their specific domain, functional experts may not understand broader sustainability issues and how different functions interconnect. Expert leaders also struggle with a culture of inclusion and empowerment and are less adept at leading teams that require a broader range of skills and perspectives.
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The Autocrat. These leaders like to be in charge and are motivated to accumulate power to fulfill their agenda. They typically rise through the ranks by seeking positions where they can increase their influence, control and visibility. They tend to view leadership as a tournament with winners and losers; consequently, their style is direct and competitive, and they are less likely to collaborate or compromise unless it furthers their goals. By relying on their judgments and minimizing the value of different perspectives, they might overlook valuable insights from others, resulting in missed opportunities for holistic sustainability strategies. Their ability to navigate organizational politics helps them build relationships with people who can help them, but the downside is that they can be viewed as manipulative or self-serving, undermining trust. In sum, the culture they shape is generally unfavorable to sustainability.
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The Institutionalist. These leaders are less invested in having power for themselves than in exercising it for the benefit of the enterprise. They recognize that influencing the people around them rather than through their personal achievements is the way to get things done. Their career path is often characterized by cross-functional experience in a series of bigger jobs and first-time assignments that required them to be highly adaptable, quick learners and to depend on others for their success. Consequently, they developed a comprehensive understanding of the business, the interconnectivity of things and the broader impacts of their decisions. Many built relationships with advisers and mentors along the way, increased their capacity for collaboration among diverse teams, and learned the value of openness and the humility that came with not having all the answers.
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The Integrator. These leaders use their position and influence to bring people with different objectives together. They are adept at navigating complex political environments, understanding and appreciating interdependencies among stakeholders, and building consensus among parties by merging different perspectives and ideas to achieve common goals. Their career trajectory may be like any of the other leader types, but their motivations are different: their drive for getting things done is strong but is expressed by empowering others and building productive collaborative relationships among competing factions. Emotional intelligence – the ability to sense and use unspoken issues to appeal to different parties – is one of their strong suits. Approachable, adaptable and calm in the face of challenges, they are especially adept at creating a more inclusive and united corporate culture.
Do you recognize yourself or someone you know in any of these descriptions? Are you committed to sustainability as a strategy for long-term viability, but your leadership style may not be a perfect fit for a culture that supports it? If so, there are still actions you can take, behaviors you can practice and roles you can play that fit your leadership profile. In our last installment, we will offer practical advice to help you move your organization and its culture in a more sustainable direction.