On April 3rd, 2024, Green Economy Canada kicked off our new national sustainability events season with Sustainability Leadership: Setting the Tone for Change. A big thanks to Coro Strandberg (Strandberg Consulting) and Tom Ewart (Associate Vice-President of Sustainability, Co-operators) for a lively and insightful discussion on what sustainability leadership looks like, what drives it, and how to cultivate it within your organization.

Missed the event? We’ve recapped some of the key takeaways below, and provided links to the event recording and some suggested resources on this topic. If you’re interested in accessing on-going content like this and a variety of other sustainability topics, reach out to talk about how you can join our community to grow your knowledge and advance your sustainability efforts no matter what stage you are at.

Sustainability Leadership: Key Takeways

• Sustainability leadership starts with getting your own house in order. This includes understanding your own social and environmental impacts, setting sustainability targets and reporting on them, having sustainability policies in place and understanding how you can conduct your operations in a low-carbon, sustainable way. Taking these steps is already leading compared to the vast majority of organizations in Canada, and going through this journey internally sets the stage for more advanced sustainability leadership.
• Advanced sustainability leadership goes beyond managing your own environmental impacts to look at how to align your business model and mission with creating positive social and environmental change. It ties staff performance to sustainability metrics, has a focus on embedding sustainability ownership throughout the organization, and collaborating for greater impact. Those who are advanced sustainability leaders have developed or are developing the following five competencies:
  1. Sustainability literacy: Building an understanding across all levels of the organization of what sustainability is, how it connects to the organization, what you’re trying to achieve, and people’s role in the success of that outcome. Working to build sustainability literacy across job functions and all role levels helps to not only create shared ownership, but it can unlock innovation and productivity to drive business and societal value.
  2. Activating values: Enabling employees to bring their positive social and environmental values into the workplace. Creating a workplace culture where sustainability values are not just housed on a website, but an active part of what people live and experience in their day to day will keep the organization aligned and connected to drive sustainability forward, in addition to creating a more engaged and energized workforce.
  3. External collaboration: Having an outward facing mindset to understand stakeholder needs and priorities, and actively working with them around common goals to create positive social and environmental change. Learning how to collaborate effectively to influence peers and lead change outside of the organization is one of the most important competencies organizations can develop to advance their sustainability leadership.
  4. Innovating for impact: Innovating products and services, business models, and how you approach challenges and opportunities in alignment with sustainability. Organizations that harness innovation can move from reactive problem-solving to co-creating a sustainable future with shared value.
  5. Systems thinking: Thinking about how your sustainable work is interdependent in order to truly understand your organization’s sustainability issues and the levers you need to pull to enact broader scale change. Organizations with a ‘systems-thinking’ lens look at how to work across government, business, and civil society to advance sustainability issues, and join forces with industry peers and competitors to address common regulatory, market and other systemic barriers to sustainability.
• What do you do if you face resistance to adopting more of a sustainability focus? When starting out, look at both the business risks from inaction and the business opportunities that can come from embracing sustainability more fully to help justify moving in this direction. Tom shared that taking the next step to embed sustainability throughout Co-operators increased engagement and felt liberating. They were able to exponentially multiply the number of people in the organization who were now acting as a catalyst for change, and the shared ownership of sustainability has helped to spark innovation and drive new business value.

Want to learn more about this topic? Take your learning further with these resources suggested by our speakers.

Books and Papers

The Five Sustainability Competencies are elaborated in this paper:
Sustainability Competencies and Talent Management, Coro Strandberg

Other materials include:

• Business-led ESG Collaboration: How to Guide for Business, MaRS Discovery District
• Deep Purpose, Ranjay Gulati
• Future of Business in Society: Global Thought Leader Study, Coro Strandberg
• Net Positive, Paul Polman and Andrew Winston
• Qualities of a Transformational Company, CBSR
• Strength in Numbers: Accelerating Sustainability Through Sector Collaboration, Sustainable Brands
• Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook, Bob Willard

Courses

• Graduate Diploma in Social Responsibility and Sustainability, University of Toronto

Online Resources

• B Impact Assessment
• Canadian Purpose Economy Project

Want to get support for your sustainability journey but aren’t yet a member of our network? Contact us to learn how we can help.

Thanks to our event season sponsors, Co-operators and TD Bank.