Rodgers’ career experiences and reflections, which I share in this piece, should help you learn more about how your own corporation/organization can draw in, inspire, nurture, engage, and reward its sustainability change agents and leaders (male or female).

And, if you are seeing similar “sustainability as beacon” patterns in your own organization, please let me know!  I’ll follow up on with another article later in the year.

Here’s an excerpt:

To put the three sustainability-encouraging themes Rodgers and I discussed in a nutshell, the advice to other sustainability-striving corporations might most simply be: question assumptions. Don’t assume a particular and set definition of sustainability. Don’t assume your employees/leadership teams leave their home values at the office door (instead, hope and pray they don’t!), and, finally, go way outside of the obvious bounds when brainstorming about potential partners.

Looking back on the past ten years,  I’d say we’ve seen a significant increase in business awareness of the importance of “emotional intelligence.” No longer a topic only for the geeky social scientist or armchair psychologist, smart businesses are starting to put the wisdom of “EQ” into play, both in serving their customers and toward becoming stronger, more resilient organizations overall.

As behavioral scientist and author Daniel Goleman put it in the subtitle of his book, Emotional Intelligence, it can matter more than IQ.  And this is seeming to be the case in sustainable business.

To be clear, Goleman does not think that IQ and EQ are opposing competencies.  Instead, his point, which I find incredibly relevant to sustainable business thinking, is that cognition is simply not enough. What Goleman wrote in this partiucular book (first published in 1995, mind you) seems advanced for its time.

So, let’s first take a look at what the four core abilities of emotional intelligence are:

• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Social awareness
• Relationship management

Now, when those abilities are considered as sequential phases of learning, it gets interesting.   Seen as phases, these abilities provide a type of map for an organizational (or personal) evolution toward sustainability:

Phase I, Self-awareness: The ability to realize that you are part of the problem.  While many businesses have gotten to this point with regard to sustainability, I suspect there are still plenty of companies that remain willing to sit with it, deny it, and so not move on to…

Phase II, Self-management: The ability to see, control and process thinking and behavior in a more healthy, responsible way.  For instance, seeing and taking control of energy efficiency and working toward healthier employee engagement could contribute much to a business’s success/development, but it must first have realized the need to work on those things.  For a few years now, the green business press has covered both newly formed and long-established companies that have made it at least this far in their journeys. (Let’s hear it for that!)

Phase III, Social awareness: The ability to allow empathy to influence business decisions.  Companies at this phase understand that doing well is not only about them, but that there are also many other human relationships involved – and in a wide range of ways.   As it stands, tackling the environmental/operational issues first in a sustainable business’s journey seems to be the most usual route, while  the raised awareness of how people interrelate with all decisions (hopefully) comes in time.  Tending to diversity, community engagement and social justice, for instance, is likely a lesser corporate priority due to inherent complexity (i.e. it is not the lowest-hanging fruit).  If I were to predict, I’d say this Phase will start to get much more emphasis over the next few years (so check back in 2017, and monitor conference session topics for their attention to the “social” in the meantime).

Relationship management: This is the ability to use the empathy you’ve been practicing at the Phase 3 level to better understand all stakeholders and see/tend to interconnections and innovative teamwork to tackle problems that may even go beyond any one corporation’s borders.  Better communication and more creative partnering and collaboration are heavily in play at this point.  Patagonia is one company leading the way on this front (their recent “Don’t buy this shirt” ad campaign and their founding member status with the Textile Exchange are two examples).

***

So, here we are.  2011 closes with wrap ups and best cases, and 2012 begins with hopeful predictions for the sustainable business movement.  While such lists can certainly inspire, your company may more effectively advance its sustainability action and training practices by examining its unique set of circumstances through the EQ lens.

Wherever you find your business currently rests within the four EQ-related phases, think about how to bring it, sustainably, to the next phase.  If your company is resting comfortably in “self-management,” what do you need to work on to achieve, and get comfortable with, “social awareness,” for example?  Perhaps more importantly, are you willing to not concern yourself with any New Year’s reflection or prediction list for at least a few years? I ask this because having longer-term vision is part of your emotional intelligence learning process.  There is no need for you to get distracted by what everyone else is doing, or not.

So, for 2012, and for the sake of helping to further the sustainable business movement, why not work on your company’s emotional intelligence?  If you do, you will be building, in wise, deliberate phases, toward the dramatic sustainability shift we all want our kids and grandkids to thank us for in the decades to come.

The above quote from Jeff Sommer’s New York Times piece on Nobel laureate economists Christopher A. Sims and Thomas J. Sargent holds universal wisdom.  What if today’s business leaders were willing and became practiced at questioning the assumptions of the models they themselves helped create?

Imagine how much sooner the benefits of  sustainability might have emerged – in terms of operational efficiencies, employee engagement and community relations (to name three) -  if businesses had been thinking the way Sargent and Sims do.  Instead, our economy – up until now – has mainly rewarded people and corporations for doing things generally in line with the way they have always been done, and then… resting on their laurels.  As the sustainable business movement gains momentum, we can clearly see that many an opportunity has been missed, as so many rested.

You may have noticed the continuing theme in what I’ve written in this blog, and for SustainableBusinessForum, HuffingtonPost and The Solutions Journal over the past year or so.  I believe that in order to question assumptions and become the sustainability vanguard, businesses and their big thinkers must get out of line, and gain experience getting “all relational” instead.

Only when we can acknowledge/accept that we may not have seen or addressed the whole picture initially, will we be able to notice how various business systems  relate to, around and through one another.  This is when we will get o the linear + relational solutions, with more emphasis on co-creation and collaborative partnerships being but one example.

This way of considering sustainable business inspires and drives my research and writing explorations.  I have truly appreciated your readership and sharing (via blog post comments, Twitter and Google+) this past year, and look forward to the continuing linear + relational journey, together, in 2012.

I had an interesting conversation today with a friend who is a big thinker on sustainability.  We were bemoaning the fact that sustainability is a topic that can look incredibly boring in the short run, and we (as media and/or sustainable business proponents) are missing a huge opportunity to celebrate and encourage the radical new thinking, boring as it may seem on paper, that is so needed in this movement.  How do we make sustainability sexy, in all its phases and shapes, from compliance to employee engagement to fleet fuel efficiency?  And, this means it has to be sexy enough for the media to want to cover it and sexy enough for younger generations to see sustainability as a very exciting engineering, math and science-oriented career path.  A tall order.

As someone who writes about sustainable business, I am surely guilty of  being attracted to stories about huge new innovations or emerging audiences, for example.  There is something in our culture’s 24/7 news cycle that has jaded us enough that we don’t see some of the foundational work quietly occurring in many industries.  But, the boring stuff really IS moving sustainability in substantial ways, and will eventually serve as models and case studies for all (but perhaps only in hindsight).

Here’s what my friend and I were thinking: if sustainability is about systems, and seeing the long term rather than jumping for the sexiest short-term “green” thing a company or brand can do (or that can be seen in quarterly reports), why don’t we operate more systemically in the way we talk and promote sustainable business?  It is a huge risk and a 180 degree shift from our culture’s modus operandi of delivering and eating up sexy, immediate, celebrity-driven “bits.”  But, sustainability doesn’t happen on the 24/7 news cycle or in always astounding ways.

So, what is always sexy about sustainability and the steps businesses take to move in that direction?  That whoever is leading these charges is taking huge, huge risks to limit themselves to the boring work, with their eyes on a bigger, far in the future, and very exciting prize.  It’s almost an extreme sport to step off the cliff of how things have always been done in a business or ignore the traditional view of what makes for big news coverage, and say.. “you know.. we need to be more deliberate,” or “I see a very exciting long-term result if we start with this small step.”

The thing is, systems thinking involves a future-orientation, and I mean so far in the future that we might not be able to claim “we did it” or be on the cover of The New York Times because we did it.  That is what we have to give up in order to really make a difference in this realm.

But, risk-taking IS sexy.  Think fast cars, steep ski slopes, and extreme skateboarding.

So, how about focusing on the ways never-before-taken risk can lead businesses down whole new paths, into incredible collaborations and toward unanticipated innovation for the good of industries and communities overall? This less-newsworthy stuff has to happen. It is the groundwork.

If we want future generations to look back on the incredible sustainability shift that simply must take place, and be proud of us for helping in that, we have to make boring sexy.

What those involved in greening sports venues are hoping (and getting help from The Green Sports Alliance to do) is that greener consumer behavior might come to be seen as less “Seattle treehugger” and more social norm by these simple nudges that encourage composting, recycling or a similar attitude change.  I could go on and on because I find this challenge so intriguing, but instead let’s just say I spy an opportunity through my gender lens.

If going green is seen as “girly,” why not look to the “girls” who are pro sports fans?  It is not that the percentage of women in those ranks comes close to meeting that number for men, but that the women who ARE fans have a lot of influence over how their households are run, and how their families live their lives.  Women are raising tomorrow’s sports fans, so why not get their help shaping their kids to be the future’s more compost-loving and recycling aware “butts” in stadium seats?

Sustainability is a movement, not something that we’ll see the mass population embrace over night.  If those of us working for change can stand the fact that there will be no immediate and visibly huge shift in consumer behavior in our lifetimes (let’s face it), we should lay some good groundwork for future generations.   In that way, you and I and the sports venues/teams looking to go green might not want to obsess about converting today’s sports fans from their fear of “girly green,” but focus on engaging with those “green girls” who can influence fans to come.

My intention with this column is to introduce concepts, ideas and networks you’ve never noticed before as you wisely develop your sustainable businesses.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Sustainability and women are inextricably linked.  This is not because of soft inclusive reasons, but for hard inclusive business reasons.  If interconnecting systems of operations, production, shipping, community involvement, environmental responsibility, and more are what we seek, the wider the variety of brains and human traits involved in corporate decision-making, the better. While we have a long tradition of rewarding linear and independent thinking, sustainability will demand a new priority on the relational and interdependent.

I often write about sustainability hidden in plain sight, in terms of what a person or company may already be doing that could be or help drive further sustainability.  In the same way, women are the best sustainability “marketers” hidden in plain sight.  If you want to convince your city to bike or walk more, get to know its women.  As well, if you want to sell more fuel-efficient cars or energy efficient appliances, start by engaging with women.

You may not see their faces when you first think about those topics, and they may not be the ones your ad campaigns directly target, but in most cases, women are the ones to reach for the purposes of their influence on the broader market.  And, all of what we know about marketing “things” to women can now be put to incredible use in encouraging sustainable behavior and practices.  And this is what drives my work today.

Though my writing and consulting career was founded in ten plus years of women’s market research and understanding (I co-authored the book Don’t Think Pink), my focus in more recent years has been on sustainable business and human behavior.  I am driven to better understand how to inspire and engage more people (of whatever gender) to think, live and do business through a lens of sustainability.  What my combined women’s market and sustainable business knowledge tells me is that women hold the key.

But, this is not about having women-only events or about slapping a pink ribbon with an Energy Smart sticker on a refrigerator.  Instead, it may be more about launching a business reminder campaign similar to the “Buy Local First” effort, called: Think Women First.

Why?  Because, women will connect you to what’s important, they’ll let you know which key words to use, what tone to take, which of their values your product or cause needs to reach, and – the bonus – you’ll start to understand how to better connect with men and children on the same topics.  As I have long emphasized in my marketing to women articles and presentations: understand and serve women well, and you will reach everyone better.

This doesn’t mean that women and men exist in separate, polarized camps.  Like all things sustainable, you can’t say, “let’s tackle the women’s side” this year and then address the men’s market next year, because they are connected.  Getting to know women, first, however, will speed your way into the hearts and minds of everyone else.

And, this isn’t just about reaching consumers, either! It’s also about changing organizational culture and leadership. In my recent research on corporate sustainability leadership, a similar relationship emerged, where relational traits, those long considered “softer” or more “feminine” take the lead. In other words, a business or organizational leader’s relational traits contribute to their success in doing their jobs, building teams and integrating sustainability throughout.  It is not one (relational) way of thinking as opposed to the other (linear). Instead: Think Relational First.  When leaders start there, their linear and pragmatic thinking then knows where to go and how to best be applied.

Am I passionate? Yes. In recent weeks, I’ve started to see so much potential for “Thinking Women/Relational First,” it’s crazy.  What excites me most are the mass consumer influencing possibilities.  My favorites include: 1) biking (get more women on bikes to get more people on bikes, then with more people on bikes, you see a decrease in obesity and carbon emissions); 2) the greening of sports (if you want more people to recycle/compost at the stadium, make sure you are talking to women first, then you may just get more people recycling/composting at home); and 3) college campuses (get women engaged with sustainability there, get a lot more future professionals and citizens who have sustainability embedded in their ways of living and working).

So, this is not a women’s story or a women’s issue, and I will have no pink come into contact with this post.  Instead, this is solid sustainable business wisdom that comes from someone who knows, and I am here to help.  What could “Think Women/Relational First” (but not only) do for your business?

When you think about corporations doing things right, your mind doesn’t immediately  think of a candy bar, but maybe it should.  In the course of my research on the attributes of corporate sustainability leaders, I came across a reference to Deborah Cadbury’s recently published book, Chocolate Wars.  And, reading it has given me a better view of The Quaker way of business, which may hold great insights into early corporate social responsibility.

For example, for the Quaker capitalists of the nineteenth century, reckless or irresponsible debt was considered “shameful.” Furthermore, the group’s directives ensured that no man “should launch into trading and worldly business beyond what they can manage honourably.” Scan any New York Times front page from the past few months (years?) and you’ll wish a lot of twenty-first century capitalists, and congresspeople, were living by these same rules.

Other interesting nuggets from Cadbury’s book include her note that Quaker capitalism was extremely successful. In the early nineteenth century, 4,000 Quaker families ran 74 Quaker British banks and more than 200 companies.  As well, Cadbury writes that for the nineteenth century Quaker, business ownership came “with a deep sense of responsibility and accountability to those involved.” That deep sense of responsibility is harder to find today.  In the face of tantalizing stats and figures about money making, human stakeholders can be too easily be ignored by corporate decision-makers.

The big worry with Kraft’s acquisition of Cadbury in early 2010, and with other large corporations taking over small companies today, is that it is easy for the larger entity to destroy the spirit of the firm they takeover.  But, what’s “spirit” when you’ve got Wall Street looking over your shoulder?  (On that note, you may want to read a great Atlantic piece by Adam Werbach on PepsiCo and their Refresh project.)

The Quaker businesspeople had the concept of truly shared stakeholding and corporate responsibility in their blood, and they succeeded.  As Cadbury writes, their nineteenth century entrepreneurialism “illuminated a different work ethic on a more human scale between master and man.” What I’m wondering is this: how did corporations become so removed from the human factor, and are we doing all we can to get back there?

I recently heard Bruce Karas, Coca Cola’s VP of Environment and Sustainability, speak about that corporation’s continuing efforts to embed sustainability in their culture.  And, while he was referring specifically to the beverage maker’s activities and increasing awareness, I kept seeing how what Coke was doing was based on larger truths to which more corporations should be paying attention.

One big topic for Coca Cola, no surprise, is water.  This natural resource is a huge risk that needs to be taken into account for their daily business operations and continued success.  It’s so important and so easy to map out in black and white numbers that even the finance guys can easily “get” the benefit.  Because of this, they, the bottom line deciders, can be supportive of change in how the organization handles water challenges.

As such, Karas turned to a discussion of  Coca Cola’s partnerships with NGOs around local watersheds in the communities where its plants are located.  From his description, it sounded like the give and take in those relationships was incredible, and that involved parties tended to learn much in the process.  The  stories about how such partnerships can work out well for everyone are important tales to tell. For, how these watershed collaborations are communicated seems crucial to sustaining what Karas referred to as “the social license” to operate in the wide variety of regions where Coca Cola does.

On the employee engagement front, specifically, Karas spoke of Coca Cola employee volunteer watershed (and oceans) work, and what they experienced or came away with after those projects.  As well, he used the example of  a Coca Cola plant manager in Texas (an obviously water-troubled area) who took it upon himself to take some of his employees to the local utility.  This field trip gave them all an up close and personal experience with what happens with water, where it comes from and where it goes.

Historically, and for most corporations, the typical volunteer work days and field trips may have been more symbolic – akin to handing a giant check over to a cause (and being sure to get a good photo!).  These days, such occasions need to be much more experiential, in order to serve their purpose – and projects like these have the potential to deliver a threefold punch (at least):

• Reparation of watershed, crucial to community and to the involved corporations sustaining business.
• Powerful volunteer projects, in the outdoors, where groups of employees experience water at its connection to the land and can commune with one another in all they learn,.
• At-home results, where a corporate volunteer’s new awareness of water use/efficiency leads to behavior change in using their own faucets and toilets.

In a related aside, and since covering corporate sustainability trends and testing grounds in the Pacific Northwest specifically is now part of my mission (so-named “Ecotopia Reports”), I took note of something Karas called Coke’s Bellevue, WA, plant: a “center of excellence.”  Apparently, this plant brings managers from all over the country (maybe the world?) to be schooled in the cutting edge sustainability-related measures they’ve been testing.  The Seattle-area plant now diverts 98% of  its waste away from the landfill.  I’ve heard about other corporations using their PacNW locations/plants/offices as examples and using them to get their everyone up to speed, and (perhaps more importantly), more excited about the sustainability-related possibilities.

If these sorts of stories are of interest to you, I’ve got a twitter feed (@EcotopiaReports ) and this post launches a new blog category, so you’ll know where to go to get inspired yourself.

Of related interest:

University of Michigan’s Erb School case study on Coca-Cola and how they were perhaps spurred into more water focus by student activism in 2006.

Jon Stewart’s interview with Alex Prud’homme, author of The Ripple Effect

Before I go further, take a look at the 10th Collegiate Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary definition #2:

…the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

In interviews and conversations I’ve had with (mainly male) sustainability leaders, I keep hearing about the necessity of empathy in their work.  At the most basic level, these people have to at least theoretically walk in the shoes of a lot of other people – and experience how those people experience the world – in order to make the right decisions and be able to communicate their corporate sustainability messages well.

Whether sustainability leaders need to understand and reach a board member, investor, customer, administrative or facilities staff member, general public/local community member, or any of the other possible corporate stakeholders, the best man or woman in the job will be able to see things from a lot of other perspectives. If not, he or she will quickly lose the trust of those stakeholders, and the decisions they either make or influence will not reflect the whole system of considerations necessary for sustainable business practices.

The ramifications of NOT working with or having empathy are huge!  So, why does it still seem like empathy is for sissies?

In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink writes that empathy is one of the six essential (my emphasis) “R-Directed” (right brain) aptitudes needed in this, the conceptual age:

…in a world of ubiquitous information and advanced analytic tools, logic alone won’t do.  What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others.

And, more from Pink:

… Because it requires attuning oneself to another, Empathy (Pink’s capitalization) involves an element of mimicry…

Where else do we hear of mimicry?  In so many writings about biomimicry, and how important the examination of nature’s models and systems can be for solving human problems as we strive toward a sustainable world.

Empathy is powerful stuff, and being able to put it to use will be something at which the most successful sustainability change agents and leaders will need to excel.

To me, that means: Empathy is not “for sissies,” but it is “for Susties!”