Creating a Culture of Green Leadership

Creating any new culture in an organisation can feel daunting, particularly for industries recovering from the impact of the pandemic.

The Four Leadership Types

Professor Christina Edger from Birmingham City Business School highlighted 4 types of leadership from the Covid crisis:

• Deniers: angry, denied how the crisis affected their business
• Opportunists: used Covid-19 as an excuse for poor performance with other factors at play i.e. poor leadership
• Pragmatists: accepted different stages of the crisis, addressing issues speedily
• Inspirers: able to see the bigger picture, care for their people as the crisis affected society as a whole

The questions remain: how do we inspire our team, how do we encourage trust? How do we share our green values?

Essential Leadership Skills 

There are several leadership models and theories, but Brené Brown has highlighted 4 key skill sets every leader should possess and develop:

1. The ability to be vulnerable, to have the hard conversations.

2. Share one’s values clearly and outline what behaviours support those values. This includes holding oneself accountable as a leader.

3. Building trust

4. Knowing how to reset effectively after failure or setbacks.

A good leader needs to find the right balance between business, performance and character. This can be a fine line, but it comes down to management’s choices, which will benefit their team and their organisation.

What Makes a Good Green Leader

Here are the qualities and tools we use for Green Leadership:

• Good leaders have a vision and they understand that strategic planning needs to be coupled with the cooperation of their team for successful implementation.
• A Green leader assists with problem solving and finding solutions to help the rest of their green team; “inclusive leaders demonstrate availability, accessibility, and openness, thereby fostering creative and innovative behaviour among their followers” (Bhutto et.al. 2021).
• Transparency is important as sharing environmental data in your messaging will build trust. Being open to communicating what is working/or not can feel vulnerable but it enables clear dialogue with all stakeholders. Inspiring leaders “think act and communicate” their belief (Simon Sinek) to everyone across their organisation.

Messaging

One area we can look at in our quest for green leadership is our messaging - how do we relay messages to our work colleagues and other stakeholders meaningfully? By giving a broad outline of the impact that actions will have; what it will mean for your team in their roles and the impact on the environment, trust will be built. This type of communication will resonate more and will result in real actions.

Meetings

Meetings are important to give time for the sharing of ideas, positive feedback, relaying any challenges, arising issues etc. When looking at ways to communicate your green messages, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of your audience.

Providing training and spreading sustainability awareness amongst every single person at your workplace will further instil the new way of doing things.

It is vital to create a safe space for communication. The limbic brain, which controls decision-making, doesn’t control language, therefore encouraging loyalty, trust and co-operation is driven by the way you make people feel, not by what you say to them. This is important for leaders to know as the environment, culture or ethos of the business is created by the manager. “If you get the environment right, every one of us has the capacity to do remarkable things” (Simon Sinek management theorist).

Self-Leadership

It is important to remain open to learning, to being taught and maintaining humility. Safety, trust and co-operations are feelings, people cannot be instructed to trust their leader or to feel safe with them. However, they can be instructed to follow their orders - but this is authority not leadership. We cannot force our opinions on anyone else, but we can share with them what we know and the things which brought us to this role of leadership, to becoming a Green Manager.

Self-awareness, self-reflection and self-regulation are important for green leaders, as they need to be able to manage themselves before they manage others (Lars Sudmann). Strategies for self-leadership are such things as:

1. creating a character trait check of the best & worst leader you ever had, what did they do to be the best/worst leader – then score your own behaviour from 1-10 in comparison with theirs
2. reflect daily for 5 minute, on challenges, triumphs etc.
3. reframing problems that your team bring you: on a scale 1-10, take a breath and give it a level of importance, step back and reframe it

This will improve your own compassion with your team.

Leadership all comes down to a duty of care for those around you, leaders do not manage people, they look after them.

Thank you for reading our piece today.

Here is a useful resource for you to Download

Don't forget!

Our 1st ever live show took place March 1st and is available to watch in full here.

We met with Donal Minihane - GM of Hotel Doolin, Ireland's first Carbon Neutral hotel, to discuss the importance of leadership when it comes to greening your business.

Stay tuned for our next live taking place early next month!

The FSG Team 💚

Sources:

1. Simon Sinek, https://youtu.be/lmyZMtPVodo
2. Simon Sinek, https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4
3. Lars Sudmann, https://youtu.be/vlpKyLklDDY
4. Brené Brown, https://youtu.be/HqetWsb28
5. Mo Otolo, How leadership impacts the Hospitality staff shortage | LinkedIn
6. Bhutto, T.A., Farooq, R., Talwar, S., Awan, U. and Dhir, A., 2021. Green inclusive leadership and green creativity in the tourism and hospitality sector: serial mediation of green psychological climate and work engagement.
7. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29(10), pp.1716-1737.