Coaching & sustainability – significant impact
Most large organisations are making moves towards sustainability.
Leading organisations are integrating ecological and social factors into strategy.
Many factors constrain organisations progress, but the barriers of culture and values have so far received limited attention.
And, coaching has not been widely used as a means of integrating sustainability into culture and strategy.
Now values and culture, rather than technology or prices, are increasingly been seen as primary constraints, and coaching is emerging as a powerful and effective tool for transformation. At the leading edge, more organisations are making the connection between personal development and sustainable development, between a coaching culture and sustainable innovation.
Organisations at the leading edge are embracing the opportunity to drive innovation through shifting their culture, and the values and mindsets of employees. Those that are still focused purely on technical fixes and policies are missing an opportunity to leap ahead of their competition. The link between ‘inner’ (values, psychology, culture) and ‘outer’ (technical, structural, environmental) development is real and critical to organisational success. But, few organisations know how to effectively facilitate and benefit from those inner shifts.
To achieve the transformational change that the current social, ecological and economic context demand, they need to go beyond just focusing on the ‘outer’, objective aspects of sustainability, and go deeper to also address the inner roots of their unsustainability.
Inter-subjective, dialogic processes like coaching are a powerful and effective way to accelerate leadership development and adoption of new values and culture. They foster innovation and adoption of behaviours and systems that can enable development of organisations and society towards sustainability. Organisations that aren’t encouraging this type of interaction with and between staff are missing a crucial piece of the sustainability puzzle.
Coaching can take many forms to support personal, team, business and sustainable development. Critically, coaching represents an already-common method for development that is not being used to its full potential to support organisation’s own success and contribution to societal ’success’ i.e. Sustainability.
Cristina Madeira, Certified Executive and Team Coach by ICF
