As a leader at your company, you probably aren’t looking for
more to add to your to-do list, but you should always be seeking ways to
improve your leadership and your company. And while there are many
benefits to working in and around management — like peer insight and
guidance from mentors — the rest of your workforce has a lot to offer as
well.
Here are five reasons why you need to spend time in the trenches with your employees:
1. Gain Empathy
Great leaders are able to inspire and incentivize people to be their
very best. This requires the ability to see the world through the eyes
of your team members. Understanding their professional challenges and
aspirations comes easier if you’ve “been there.”
A fantastic example of a leader who dove into the trenches to uncover
the challenges facing different roles in his company is Frontier
Airlines CEO Bryan Bedford, who appeared on an episode of “Undercover Boss.”
While working in several low-level roles within the airline, he
discovered huge flaws in the company’s operations, from employees having
only seven minutes to clean an entire plane between flights to
cross-utilization agents shifting between checking in patrons to
manually loading luggage onto the plane in 104-degree heat.
Without having shared your team members’ experiences, or at least
witnessed them, it’s hard to motivate them. You also gain respect by
demonstrating your willingness to humble yourself, your motivation to
learn from them and your ability to value their efforts for the company.
2. Improve Leadership
If you want to direct an orchestra, you have to learn at least the
basics of every kind of instrument. You can’t tell the string musicians
how to make a sound you want if you don’t have a firm understanding of
how they play their instruments.
It’s the same in business. You need to know the ins and outs of each
department so you can direct them. Understanding what makes a sales
professional successful allows a business leader to better mentor those
in sales who need help.
3. Grow in General Knowledge
Being a generalist means understanding what makes your company tick.
Knowing a little bit about a lot of things enables you to know what
results the company needs from each department or team member.
Great business leaders understand financial requirements, supply
chain challenges, talent needs, marketing strategies, product
development cycles, legal matters and market pressures. They then use
that broad, general knowledge to connect the dots and successfully
execute winning strategies. Spreading your time across multiple
departments will give you more knowledge about many different parts of
your company.
4. Grow in Expertise
Most leaders “grow up” in one department before they’re elevated to
management. They may have been great at sales or excelled as an attorney
or software developer. There’s great value in being an expert, but once
you attain a leadership position, you’ll likely run into situations
that require expertise you don’t have.
It’s important to recognize this and reserve time and resources to expand your repertoire. In the book, “The Corporate Lattice,”
Cathleen Benko and Molly Anderson discuss how careers are built by
gaining new skills and explain that an “options-oriented” organizational
approach lets professionals achieve better results. The best way to
expand your expertise is to talk to another expert.
5. Learn More about Interconnections
Businesses are complex machines with many moving parts. What happens
in one department affects another department, and it’s your job to know
what will result from every decision you make. The more you hone this
skill, the better you can manage.
A strong leader understands how a last-minute “product design change”
might influence costs, delivery dates, copyright law considerations,
raw material requirements and marketing creative.
I’m not suggesting that you go all “Undercover Boss” and try to
expose gaping issues within your company. But if you spend quality time
with each department, you’ll gain essential knowledge and experience.
While you may think you don’t have time to do this, you really can’t
afford not to. Your job as a CEO depends on it.
Author: Michel Koopman
Bio: Michel Koopman is the CEO of getAbstract Inc. getAbstract’s
mission is to find, expertly compress and provide universal access to
critical business knowledge in a format that learners can absorb quickly
and easily. This allows customers to stay current and competitive and
to become leaders who can make better decisions. Today, their solutions
include a library of more than 9,000 business book and TED Talk summaries, in text and audio format, which more than 10 million subscribers use, including 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
by Andrew Winston
Somehow it’s already year-end, a time to look back and try to
make sense of what’s happened. Creating any “top” list of stories from
12 months is nearly impossible. But as I’ve done for the last 4 years,
I’ll attempt to summarize some of the latest stories about the big
environmental and social pressures on business, and how some innovative
companies are dealing with them.
This year, like recent years, saw some continuation of big trends: with a few exceptions, the international policy community keeps failing to come to a meaningful agreement on climate change; carbon emissions just keep rising; transparency
is increasingly unavoidable and keeps gaining technology-enabled
traction; pressure from big companies on their suppliers keeps going up.
So what’s really new this year? Let’s dive in.
The Big Picture
1. The science of climate change gets clearer: the IPCC lowers our carbon “budget.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its wonky, but readable, Summary for Policymakers
(a precursor to the full 2014 report). The report expresses “near
certainty” that humans are causing climate change and calculates how
much more carbon we can “safely” put in the atmosphere and hold to the
2-degree warming threshold that the world’s leaders have agreed to (and
some scientists are suggesting that even the 2-degree threshold is too high).
The short story is that we have less room than before. PwC’s annual Low Carbon Economy Index
report concluded that we must lower global carbon intensity (the amount
of carbon produced for every dollar of GDP) by 6% per year until 2100, a
percentage point lower than last year’s report recommended. On the
upside, similar calculations from WWF and McKinsey suggests that this
pace of change –they endorse a 3% reduction in absolute emissions per year through 2020 – will actually be very profitable.
2. The reality of climate change and pollution get scarier:
Australian heat, Philippine devastation, and Chinese air pollution all
break records.
The models and carbon budgets aside, the weather this year got even
more extreme, helping make the case for action in a more visceral way.
In January, Australia’s meteorologists had to add new colors to weather maps
to deal with temperatures ranging up to 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees
Fahrenheit). And in November, after the Philippines faced the most powerful storm ever recorded to hit land, some climatologists suggested we add a “Category 6” to the top end of the storm scale.
While it’s impossible to tie any single weather event to climate change, the complicated correlation got clearer this year.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that
“high temperatures, such as those experienced in the U.S. in 2012, are
now likely to occur four times as frequently due to human-induced
climate change.”
In parallel, China’s air became, at times, dangerous and unbreathable. Several cities experienced days with small-particle air pollution running 25 to 40 times higher
than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit. This may seem
like a regional story, but it has global ramifications for
manufacturing, consumer goods, the energy industry, and much more. The
world’s most populous country is taking increasingly drastic action,
such as slashing Beijing’s new sales quota for cars by 40%.
3. The clean tech markets keep growing fast: three of the world’s
biggest economies — the U.S., Germany, and Walmart — add lots more
renewable energy.
In October, 99% of the new energy added to the grid in the U.S. came from renewables (solar alone was 72%). Germany keeps breaking its own records, with wind and solar providing 59% of the country’s energy one sunny day in October. And America’s wind power has quadrupled over the last 5 years; wind is now generating enough electricity to power the state of Georgia.
In addition, electric and hybrid cars are about 4% of US auto sales
now, a doubling of market share in the last couple of years. Companies
are increasing investments as well. Walmart, already the largest private
sector buyer of solar power in the US (with more solar capacity than 38 U.S. states), committed to a 600% increase in renewable energy by 2020.
4. Deep concerns about labor conditions, wages, and equity
take root: From tragedies in Bangladeshi apparel factories to minimum
wages in the U.S.
Travesties like the death of more than 1100 workers at the Rana Plaza apparel factory
in Bangladesh are increasingly unacceptable to the buying public. And
it’s getting harder to hide how connected we all are to these workers.
When the news hit about the loss of life, front pages around the world
included the names of major brands that depended on the factory to make
their goods. A startup called Labor Voices is now collecting information
on working conditions in Bangladesh and elsewhere in a shockingly
simple way: by giving workers a number to call from their cell phones,
which everybody now has.
European companies are doing more than U.S. peers, at least publicly, to commit to higher safety standards. Swedish retailer H&M recently said it would pay a “living wage” to 850,000 workers
in its supply chain by 2018 – a somewhat vague, but important
announcement. And to be fair, while U.S. companies haven’t been as
clear, Walmart has contracted with Labor Voices to gather data on its 300+ Bangladeshi suppliers and subcontractors.
On the other side of the ocean, though, Walmart, McDonald’s, and many others are facing increasing challenges about minimum wages. Watch this space, as it seems unlikely that this debate will go away.
5. Food and food waste gets more attention, debate, and innovation: Can cows save the world, or should we make meat in labs?
The level of concern about how we’re going to feed 9 billion people
by 2050 is rising. Food waste also got more attention: a UN report
estimated that the world throws out $750 billion worth of food annually. Food is too big a topic to summarize, but a few stories grabbed my eye this year. Fenugreen,
a smart startup that won the Sustainable Brands Innovation Open in
June, sells sheets of paper made with natural ingredients that fight
food decay – they can keep fruit and veggies from going bad 2 to 4 times
longer than they would last normally.
On a different front, Biologist Allen Savory made a splash with a much viewed TED talk
about how grazing cattle in a way that fertilizes land and sequesters
carbon can fight desertification and climate change. His theory is under attack, at least to the extent that his method could make a significant
dent in our climate problem. Wherever the science on this ends up, it’s
an important discussion that brings more focus to systems thinking and
to the nexus of food, energy, and water. Finally, a quirky, totally
different meat story was fascinating. Billionaires Bill Gates and Sergey Brin are funding experiments
to grow meat in labs, a process that – once people get past any “ick”
factor – could greatly reduce the footprint of producing meat-based
protein.
What Companies Are Doing
6. (Some) businesses get off the sidelines in the climate policy fight: Hundreds of companies sign onto the Climate Declaration.
Started by the NGO Ceres, as part of its Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP) initiative, the Climate Declaration
is a broad statement of intent that acting on climate will be good for
our economy and society. A large range of leading companies have signed
on including Diageo, ebay, EMC, Gap, GM, IKEA, Intel, Microsoft,
Nestle, Nike, Portland Trailblazers, Starbucks, Swiss Re, Unilever, and
many more. The Declaration itself is directional and not as specific as
what Ceres and a subset of these signatories advocate for as part of BICEP’s work
(like pricing carbon and aggressive energy efficiency programs). But
it’s a very good start and demonstrates that the business community is
not against tackling climate change.
In related news, Accenture produced a fascinating survey
of 1000 CEOs around the world, in which a surprising 83% agreed that
government should play a critical role in enabling the private sector to
advance sustainability. And 31% even supported “intervention through
taxation.” In a world where business generally fights all regulations
and government interventions, it’s astonishing that one third of global
CEOs basically said, “tax us.”
7. Companies are aiming higher, for themselves and their
partners: Dell, Coca-Cola, Lego, and many more set very aggressive
environmental and social goals.
Goals are not the same as outcomes but they matter a lot – they set
the bar within sectors, driving competition and performance. As part of
its 2020 Legacy of Good Plan,
Dell said that it’s aiming to get a 10-fold multiple of good (reduced
footprint, for example) from its technologies versus the impacts of
making them (mimicking BT’s earlier 3:1 “Net Good” goal). More
specifically, the company pledged to reduce its greenhouse gases by 50%
and product energy intensity by 80%.
Coca-Cola launched its own 2020 goals
including reducing value chain carbon emissions by 25% (per drink),
recovering 75% of bottles and cans, and replenishing 100% of the water
the company uses. And Lego just announced its intention to use 100% renewable energy by 2016. A few companies have already made incredible progress, including Diageo, which, I reported earlier this year, cut its North American GHG emissions by nearly 80%.
In fact, 75% of the world’s largest companies now have multiple environmental and social goals in place (see my new website, www.pivotgoals.com,
a searchable database of 2500 environmental and social goals set by the
world’s largest companies). In addition, my research shows that more
than 50 of the top 200 companies have even set carbon goals in line with
PwC’s 6% per year reduction recommendation.
A few companies have begun to extend their goals to their suppliers, a
form of what I’m calling “de facto regulation.” Walmart is phasing out 10 toxic chemicals in the products on its shelves, and HP set a carbon reduction goal of 20% for its supply chain.
8. Sustainable companies are winning the talent wars: Unilever ranks 3rd in LinkedIn’s list of in-demand employers.
Just consider LinkedIn’s top 20 most in demand companies
(in order): Google, Apple, Unilever, P&G, Microsoft, Facebook,
Amazon, PepsiCo, Shell, McKinsey, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, BP, GE,
Nike, Pfizer, Disney, Coca-Cola, Chevron, and L’Oréal. The tech
companies make sense given the platform (and they’re cool brands). But
the rest are perennially in-demand employers, such as big consumer
brands and top destinations for MBAs (McKinsey) and engineers (Shell).
But what’s surprising is Unilever’s rank — for a company not nearly
as well known as the others, it came in just behind two of the hottest,
most valuable companies in the world, and ahead of much better known
brands like Disney, Nike, and Coca-Cola. Executives at Unilever credit
their ranking to the company’s known leadership on sustainability. It’s
hard to argue the point.
9. Systems innovation starts to take root: NIKE, NASA, USAID, and the Department of State create LAUNCH.
LAUNCH is an initiative to
identify and accelerate innovations that help solve global problems with
water, health, energy, waste, and systems. This program is new so it’s
unclear what the impact will be, but it’s an interesting and indicative
story for two reasons.
First, look at the partners — what a weird,
wonderful mix of business, government, and scientific organizations.
Second, the goal is really systems change, and if we’re going to solve
the mega challenges in our midst, we need to work across value chains
and traditional lines.
10. Better tools for companies to assess “materiality” get closer: SASB releases its first sustainability accounting standards.
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board has been plugging away,
drawing together executives from the world’s largest companies to
develop the right sets of questions – specific to each sector – that
will help leaders identify which environmental and social issues are
really material to their business. We’re very early in this journey, but
SASB produced the first set of guidelines for one sector (health care). Watch this space.
2014 and Beyond
- Will the divestment movement
continue to gather steam and put significant pressure, either financial
(unlikely) or moral (much more intriguing), on fossil fuel companies?
- Will all the talk about building a circular economy gain mainstream acceptance?
- Will we get better at valuing natural capital (and will companies
and markets care)? It certainly garnered lots of attention this year,
with new estimates of the damage the global economy does to natural assets (trillions), new tools to measure natural capital, and an important new book from former Goldman partner and CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Mark Tercek.
- Can challenges to our consumption-driven model go gain currency?
Patagonia continues to launch programs like its Responsible Economy
initiative and a backlash to Black Friday, “Worn Wear,” which suggests that we should enjoy what we already own.
- Will the resilience push take hold? New York City released a $20 billion plan
to get the city ready for more extreme weather — will companies embrace
the risk-reduction benefits of different thinking and planning?
- Finally, why haven’t more companies followed some of the recent
sustainability leaders? Paul Polman at Unilever stopped providing
quarterly guidance a few years ago so the company could focus on real
value creation. And Microsfot and Disney remain really the only two big
companies charging their own divisions a carbon fee (yes, as CDP
recently reported, and the New York Times put on the front page,
29 large companies now use some kind of internal pricing for
carbon. But most of these are “shadow prices,” in use for years, not
actual fees. Why has the pace of change lagged the urgency of our mega
challenges? Will more than a small number of companies embrace a much
deeper change to business as usual?
So it’s been a mixed year, as I suppose all years are, but I remain
optimistic that greater stories of change are coming. Have a very happy,
healthy, and sustainable 2014!
Andrew Winston is the co-author of the best-seller Green to Gold and the author of Green Recovery. His forthcoming book, The Big Pivot,
will be released in April. He advises some of the world’s biggest
companies on environmental strategy.
