Harness the passion of your colleagues and create meaningful opportunities for your people to co-own the agenda, contribute ideas and take action.
In step 2.3 we talked about the need for leaders to prioritise sustainability to ensure it is seen as important within the agency. The feedback from many agencies that we spoke to, however, was that a lot of the time, work had been kick-started by a passionate group of individuals without formal approval.
As leaders, it’s vital to identify those that are passionate and harness their energy – directing it towards the priorities identified in step 2.5. Ensure there is an executive level sponsor (ideally someone on the board) for the group, and then give them licence to drive change and build momentum within the organisation.
Find the people in the organisation who really care and then work with them to get everyone involved.
Agencies manage the governance around this in different ways, according to their culture, size and structure. It’s important that there’s a clear way of working that encourages and reassures everyone that their input matters.
The internal groups could be based on location, discipline or sustainability topic – depending on how big you are as an organisation and how you are structured.
It’s crucial that you give the group time and recognition to be able to execute on tasks. If it is simply an additional task on top of their day job it will inevitably get pushed down the priority list and progress will stall. AMV BBDO have developed an interesting model whereby their sustainability group are acting as an internal consultancy to the rest of the organisation – providing guidance and inspiration for client work (see step 3.1: The work you do).
You’re likely to find that within your agency, as with society at large, you can apply a 10–80–10 rule. This is where ~10% of your workforce will be passionate about this topic, will be taking proactive steps in their personal life to reduce their environmental impact and may have expressed an interest for the agency to make changes too.
There are then the ~80% who on a scale from indifferent to mildly interested (the moveable middle) will be happy to get involved if you can make the actions clear and easy for them.
Then you’re likely to encounter ~10% of the employee base who are completely uninterested and, in some cases, resistant to action.
The key is to identify and harness the passionate ~10% to help you mobilise the middle ~80%. The ~10% of detractors will be dragged along with the tide, but it’s unlikely you will be able to change their opinion either way.
This split plays out in broader society and should be considered when seeking to influence and change behaviours (see step 3.1: The work you do). The moveable middle is referred to as the ‘persuadables’ in this report from Media Bounty.
Next: Ambition checkpoint