The world’s escalating climate crisis challenges all of us. We, at Miller Consultants, are proud to work with companies that accept the responsibility of seeking solutions. While I have always been engaged with environmental concerns personally, my company changed direction to focus more squarely on how we could make a valuable contribution to sustainability when one of our best clients asked us for help.
We got a call from a client approximately eight years ago asking us if we could help them figure out how their company culture was influencing their ability to set and meet more aggressive environmental sustainability goals. They suspected their organizational culture was holding them back. Yet their board of directors, as well as many of their employees and customers were clamoring for them to do more to address the climate crisis. We had worked with them for many years on issues related to culture and leadership. And they knew that we had been researching the impact of corporate culture on sustainability for a couple of years. Thus, we seemed to be the right partners for this challenge.
Even though we had been researching culture and sustainability, we did not yet have a tool for targeting the exact nature of their need. Furthermore, upon searching for such a tool, we came up empty handed. So we decided to develop the tool ourselves. Though I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, this decision became the first step in transforming our company to focus on sustainable cultures and leadership.
We started our work with our client by gathering some opinions from people throughout the company on what might be standing in the way of their sustainability commitments. They attributed the complications to:
- Lack of understanding of what sustainability implied for their business
- A cautious culture that tended to be passive and reactive
- Lack of time for learning and reflection which hindered innovation
We combed through a massive number of studies, reports and articles containing information about what corporate leaders were saying about their own challenges in reaching their sustainability goals. While we found many references to culture as the culprit, most were not very specific. Thus we decided that it was up to us to identify the essentials.
In order to design a test instrument, we brought together a team of sustainability experts and organizational culture specialists to brainstorm. What an experience! This team collaboration provided us with many hypotheses about the particulars of how culture might help or hinder a company in achieving its sustainability goals. Based on these outcomes, we developed an assessment that we administered in our client organization. The results told the culture story and helped us help our client develop a plan for leveraging their cultural strengths and addressing their cultural weaknesses.
Shortly thereafter, we became very serious about testing the tool to ensure that it was identifying the exact aspects of culture that made a difference in supporting sustainability strategies and outcomes. We were fortunate to catch the attention of some colleagues on the faculty of the Harvard Business School who joined our team for testing the tool. First, we interviewed over 200 executives and experts in order to refine the tool. Then we administered it to the companies which showed up in the top 20% and the bottom 20% on the Thomas Reuters Asset 4 index. We chose this index because of its objective, relevant and systematic environmental, social and governance (ESG) information based on 250+ key performance indicators (KPIs). We analyzed the data and, voila, we had a picture of the exact nature of the cultural differences between the two groups! Our SCALA instrument was born.
Over the subsequent years we have administered the SCALA (Sustainability Culture and Leadership Assessment) tool within many companies across the globe. These companies have used the results as input to their sustainability, corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship strategies.
And what are the results? One of our SCALA client companies recently reported that they are delivering breakthrough innovation for sustainability-related products and are more than 25 percent of the way toward the goal of being the first company to achieve $1 billion in value primarily through avoided costs from projects that are good for business and better for ecosystems.(1) Another set a zero waste to landfill goal and now sends 99% of materials from one of their distilleries to be reused or recycled.(2) I could fill a book with stories of these client companies’ successes!
And speaking of books, Routledge press just published my book Leadership and Purpose: How to Create a Sustainable Culture. The book is based on what I have learned from my decade of research on sustainable and purpose-driven cultures. And the SCALA has been central to all the work that I described in the book.
So what is the bottom line? I believe that you deserve information about your culture that you can act on with reasonable assurance that those actions are connected to your company’s purpose-driven, sustainability and CSR strategies. Our goal is to help you achieve your goals with the support of an organizational culture that is not only healthy but also strong in those areas that are most likely to make a difference in company performance and results.
Question? Comment?
Or just want to learn more about developing a Sustainable Culture?
(1) https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/science-and-sustainability/reporting
(2) https://www.brown-forman.com/environmental-sustainability/