Lessons for Leading a Sustainability Team to Triumph
Asheen Phansey, a dedicated Net Impact member, never had a rule book for sustainability success. But after winning our Impact at Work Challenge in 2012, he knows a thing or two about what it means to recruit the right allies and launch projects to help the environment.
Asheen, an engineer at Dassault Systemes, and his partner on the marketing team, managed to eliminate over a ton of harmful plastic from the company’s waste stream, implement commuter incentives, and offset 100% of the company’s electricity with renewable energy credits. With 10,000 employees and more than 100 offices at Dassault, they faced numerous challenges along the way, the biggest one being the question of how to create momentum amongst like minded employees. Follow suit in your own workspace by sticking to a few simple steps that Asheen describes as his key principles for success:
1. Change your mindset
Being a successful intrapreneur is easier than you might think. “The best intrapreneurs are empathic translators: that is, they can understand the needs and concerns of the various stakeholders involved, and speak the language of their domain,” says Asheen. Begin by networking internally with a lot of people from diverse areas of expertise to better understand their concerns. The more business knowledge your team has, the better you can draw from to help understand and solve challenges.
2. Look for allies in all sorts of places
According to Asheen, “You should find and gather your allies no matter where they are in the organization – high, low, and sideways.” Find your team’s shared values as well as your allies’ ‘day-job’ goals to better develop shared-responsibility projects. Provide them with some value: share news of successes within the company and sustainability trends in the industry and beyond. In addition, treat them well, by sharing credit when you make announcements about your projects.
3. Events drive actions
By acknowledging that intrapreneurship projects are extracurricular to most of your allies’ day jobs, you’re already halfway there. But don’t let this circumstance allow projects to fall off the to-do list. As Asheen says, you should schedule regular meetings in order to “create a culture where people are embarrassed to show up with no progress since the last meeting.”
4. Small wins build a big picture
Intrapreneurship can sometimes progress extremely slowly. Do not get discouraged by this as the tiny steps you make will eventually turn into meaningful advances towards a more sustainable office environment. Something small,such as making sure the lights get turned off at day’s end, means more on a larger scale. After all, nothing says “we’re not really serious about sustainability” like having your office building lit up like a Christmas tree when employees drive by it at night.
5. Be scrappy
Make use of your resources. Net Impact – including the online materials, the local chapters, and the conference-- remains one of the first sources to which Asheen points would-be intrapreneurs. Provide incentives. According to Asheen, a certificate is your secret weapon: Give your colleagues something tangible to put on their resume.
6. Set the tone right from the start
“Make sure you treat intrapreneurship projects as real work projects: send out an agenda prior to your meetings, follow it during your meetings (while still having fun, of course!), agree on next steps when everyone’s together and inspired, and send out agreed-upon action items just afterward. This formality sends the message that these projects are important to the business and should be supported.
Want to launch your own project like Asheen? Join Climate Disruptors to get a weekly dose of inspiration and resources to help you launch your own project at work. Find your way to our next webinar on June 29th in order to learn more about how to Facilitate Behavior Change for Climate Impact held by strategy consultant Matt Biggar. Unable to make it? Send any questions in advance to climate@netimpact.org so we can be sure they are addressed!