Does it sometimes feel as if your colleagues treat their sustainability actions as a favour to you?

I'm working with a couple of in-house sustainability teams at the moment, whose situations have strong similarities, despite one being a global brand and the other a public sector agency. The teams have hats which are familiar to most in-house sustainability specialists:

in-house expertise - on issues from climate to modern slavery
monitoring and reporting - collating information from other parts of the organisation to help it understand how it's doing
supporting colleagues to meet the targets or reach the goals the organisation has committed to.

But the ownership and responsibility aren't working as they should. Formally, ownership of targets and goals sits in the wider business. Managers and leaders have KPIs related to sustainability. There may even be bonuses related to meeting them. And yet the teams I'm working with have the sense that their colleagues don't take them seriously. It's the sustainability teams which seem to care whether targets are met or not. When colleagues take action to reduce waste, develop circularity in use of materials, improve biodiversity impacts, understand human rights in supply chains - it's as if it's being done as a favour to the sustainability team, on top of the day job, rather than because these things are part of the day job.

What's going on here?

It's useful to look at the situation from another angle. Say the person who owns the sustainability target, but isn't taking it seriously, is a Head of Division. What does the Head of Division take seriously? What do they see as part of their day job? And why: what makes that thing worth taking seriously?

The answer for each organisation, or even each person within that organisation, may be different. But it's likely to include the signals they get from people around them, whether those people are customers, investors, peers, direct reports or boss. How closely is progress watched? What happens if targets aren't met? And if they are?

How do people in the organisation know that rather than being a passing fad, 'they really mean it'?

Whatever the answer is, sustainability needs some of it.

Who cares?

Of course the sustainability team will care about sustainability impacts. It would be strange if they didn't. The point is that if they are the only people who do, they'll soon find themselves exhausted and ignored.

Colleagues may care because they have a personal interest in environmental or social issues - it's related to their values or identity. Or they may care because sustainability success is intimately bound up with professional success and the things which are related to it - things like progression, pay, reputation among their peers. This latter can only be a motivator if the system they are working in does actually reward sustainability success.

How to find out what the barriers are

You will already have some assumptions about what will motivate your colleagues. The assumptions may be unconscious, but they will have guided what you already do to influence your colleagues. It's time to scrutinise your assumptions: do they hold? Can you replace them with actual data - ask your colleagues what matters to them, and why that matters to them. Go as deep as they'll let you. This could be in a workshop (a variation on the five whys could be useful: tell me more about why that's important?) or in an informal one-to-one where you can ask and get franker conversation: we're coming up against a bit of a brick wall. Can you see what's getting in the way?

Here are a few possibilities.

Competing priorities - there are other things which the organisation sees as more important. This can be hard to spot as an outsider, because the strategy gives them equal billing. But everyone inside the organisation just knows that when choosing how to spend their time or what to really push on, it's something else rather than the sustainability goals. And if the sustainability stuff actually conflicts with the other priorities, you already know what's going to win.
Short terms vs long term - if the sustainability target is a long way off, then it's possible to argue for putting off action too. We know that this is a false economy. One look at how climate mitigation curves have steepened over the decades since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed tells us this. But it's very tempting without rock solid interim milestones. Competing priorities which are short term are even easier to put ahead of long term sustainability goals.
Too ambitious, not ambitious enough - perhaps the goals feel unrealistic to people in the organisation. The leadership are seen as having hammered a stake into the ground, without a clear plan of how to get there, and without providing the resourcing or structures the organisation needs to experiment and work it out. Conversely, perhaps the goals feel unrealistic for the opposite reason, as they don't come close to tackling the core impacts, like an airline pledging to get rid of single-use plastics. (This is not one of my clients.)
Unclear asks - there's a lot to be said for flexibility, and setting the direction and then letting the people who understand the nuts and bolts of the organisation develop the specifics. But in some organisations this uncertainty is unwelcome and feels like lack of leadership. What do people need to feel confident in their leaders in this situation?
Not invented here - the flipside of the unclear ask, is the ask which is clear, but has been developed without the people who are being expected to implement it. Classic 'DAD' approaches to decision-making risk triggering this response. 'What do they know about it?' 'Who are they to tell us how to do our job?'
Attention - is anyone they care about paying attention? It's likely that if people whose opinion they take notice of are asking them about sustainability topics, listening to the answers and responding to them by taking some meaningful action, then those topics assume more importance.

Once you understand more precisely what's getting in the way, you can adjust your approach accordingly. Maybe you need more awareness raising (easy to deliver, but not often the most important lever). Maybe you need a tough conversation with senior leadership. Maybe you need to ask colleagues what their biggest problems are right now, and find sustainability-related ways of helping solve them. You'd be doing everyone a favour.

This was first published in my Making the Path by Walking newsletter. Scroll right down to subscribe.