While watching a speech that President-elect Barack Obama gave a few days before the election, I was struck by two things that he said: First, that while his administration would develop a comprehensive renewable energy policy, we as individuals need to reduce our own energy consumption. And while the Obama administration will work to improve our educational system, he said, we parents have an obligation to shut off the television and help our children do their homework. And so began my rumination on the politics of personal responsibility and its relationship to sustainability.
As consultants whose mission is to promote sustainability, we often chide companies for dragging their feet—as if they somehow exist apart from their management and employees. In truth, it is up to employees at all levels of the organization to move their employer toward greater sustainability. In order to do so, it has to be personal.
An example: We recently facilitated a task force meeting for a client that is embarking on a wonderful journey: to instill environmental stewardship throughout its operations, from product development to sales to logistics to corporate operations. The company, whose environmental efforts heretofore have been mainly compliance-driven, had assembled fifteen or so middle managers to generate big ideas for environmental initiatives. The energy and excitement in the room was palpable. Here were employees who had been asked to take on an effort that would undoubtedly increase their workload by as much as 30 percent over the next several months, and they were thrilled—and not just because their participation presented a career opportunity. The project allowed them to personally influence the organization’s direction and performance, perhaps for the next several decades. Some of their ideas were surprisingly simple, such as stacking boxes a different way so as to fit more on a pallet and reduce shipping costs, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions; and engaging with property managers to ensure that cleaning crews put recycling in the recycle bins rather than tossing it in with the garbage. Others were hugely complex and potentially expensive but were thrown in for consideration nonetheless.
If that one meeting could energize those fifteen people, imagine engaging every single employee in every company, every student in every school, and every entrepreneur and retiree to generate ideas for us to live our lives in more environmentally responsible ways, and to really, truly act on those ideas. For far too long we’ve not been asked to come together to address any of the very real challenges we face: not the Iraq war, not our fragile and failing economy, not climate change and dwindling resources. But what if we did?
What if we all used CFLs or, better yet, LEDs? What if we recycled everything we could and composted? What if we turned off our lights every single time we left the room (my kids have to give me a dime every time they leave a light on, and I pony up when I do). What if we weatherproofed our homes and turned the AC two degrees warmer in summer and wore sweaters in winter? The impact of our collective action would be staggering. And so very gratifying.
But who will get us to do what needs to be done? It could be President-elect Obama; he has asked us all in a general sense and has the political capital,ability, and will to inspire so many of us to do our part as individuals. But the CEOs of the world must also inspire their employees to commit personally to living greener, healthier, less consumptive, and more fiscally prudent lives.
Imagine the response if, instead of layoffs to reduce labor costs, your CEO announces that he’ll take a 20 percent annual pay cut and asks each employee to take a ten percent pay cut for just the next year. I’ll wager that employees would take a 10 percent pay cut over a 100 percent pay cut any day of the week, and that both morale and productivity would rise, along with a renewed sense of purpose, as a result.
Imagine that, in a performance review, you ask “what have you done at your home to reduce your personal consumption?” And as your direct report struggles to come up with one thing, you shake your head and make a note in his file.
Maybe I’m still basking in the glow of last Tuesday. But I feel so strongly that, if we look not only to our leaders but our neighbors and ourselves to find new and unusual ways to approach the myriad problems we face, we can achieve amazing things.
