The most important leadership skill for sustainability professionals

Overview

I have been working in sustainability for around 26 years now and this article discusses the one skill I wish I have been taught when I started. It would have saved me countless frustrating conversations where I was trying to convince someone that this whole sustainability thing is a good idea.

Just do the math – if you spend on average 6 hours a week trying to get support for your sustainability initiatives like getting budgets approved, pitching new ideas, business development meetings with your clients, writing proposals and business cases etc that works out to be 6.31 years of your working career spent in frustration trying to convince others to buy-in to your sustainability initiatives.

What if you could get twice as good at getting people motivated to support or participate in your sustainability initiative, product of service?

That’s 3.15 years of work saved! What could you do with that? How much more sustainable impact could you deliver? What is the value of 3.15 years of your time?

This article summarises a simple technique we have been developing that helps sustainability advocates become far more effective at getting buy-in.

Best of all you can learn this skill in less than 90minutes.

Introduction

 If you are passionate about sustainability you have more than likely experienced one or all of the following:

• Frustration that people won’t listen to what you are saying.
• Disbelief that people don’t seem to understand how important it is to fix these sustainability issues before its too late.
• Exhaustion because you are working really hard trying to fix important social or environmental challenges but you are doing it all alone and feel like you have to do everything yourself.

Nearly everyone I know who works in sustainability experiences these challenges almost on a daily basis.

The reason you likely struggle with these challenges is because you have never been taught one of the most critical and important leadership skills that every sustainability professional should have – the ability to influence and persuade others.

The good news is that this is a skill that you can learn because just like sustainability it is based on science, specifically behavioural science.

The Importance of Influence and Persuasion Skills

To achieve our sustainability goals, a vital tool is influence. The ability to influence people, teams, and customers is one of the most powerful skills we can add to our work. By understanding how to leverage this skill effectively you can drive change, create sustainable outcomes and embed a strategic vision for sustainability for your clients and your business.

Your ability to influence and motivate key stakeholders is an essential leadership skill in order to achieve better sustainability outcomes.

The skills to influence others draws upon the realms of behavioural science, sales, and communication. By integrating these powerful disciplines, you will gain the tools necessary to shape decision-making processes and effectively influence individuals and organisations towards embracing sustainability.

Research from behavioural science has provided valuable insights into how individuals make decisions and what influences their behaviour. By understanding these psychological principles, you can employ strategies that nudge stakeholders towards sustainable choices, fostering positive change at both personal and organisational levels.

Sales and communication skills, on the other hand, are essential for effectively conveying the benefits of sustainability, engaging stakeholders, and inspiring action. By harnessing the art of persuasive communication, you will be able to make compelling cases for adopting sustainable practices, whether it be encouraging clients to invest in your products or services, or persuading individuals to adopt sustainable behaviours in their everyday lives.

Did you know… We have a FREE guide that will teach you practical techniques for improving your ability to influence and motivate others to implement sustainability initiatives. You will learn how to shape decision making and how to apply these skills to help you achieve your goals whether this is encouraging a client to buy your product or service, or to help influence someone to adopt more sustainable practices.

The SPINS Technique

The good news for you is that you don’t need to spend years studying behavioural science to learn how to influence others because we have done it for you and codified the best in behavioural science into a simple and practical 5 step process you can learn in just a few hours.

The SPINS technique is a practical 5 step method to help you influence others and to get more buy-in for your sustainability initiatives.

Ready to learn how to do SPINS technique yourself? Here’s the step-by-step technique plus our FREE guide also has some examples of the technique in use so you can get a feel for how it works.

To create change, you must build value as a trusted advisor.

You can create trust by guiding people through a sequence of questions to develop a deep understanding of their needs before pitching your service/idea/project.

SPINS is an acronym for the five steps of the process.
Situation
Problem
Implication
Need/payoff, and the
Solution.

Situation

Situation questions allow you to get a clearer picture of your stakeholders current situation. They are used to find out facts and background about your client. So these questions are designed to establish a context and build rapport.

Situation questions might include things like

• Can you tell me about your role in the organisation?
• Do you have any specific sustainability targets/KPI’s?
• What’s your budget?

Problem

Next up you want to ask some problem questions. Problem questions are an important part of your SPINS process as they help you understand the different problems that your stakeholder wants to solve with your product/service/idea.

Here are some example questions to start building your spin influencing script:

• What don’t you love about your current (existing service or product or project)?
• What keeps you up at night? Why?
• What are your top three challenges?
• What would be the first thing you would change about your work?

Bear in mind that many people won’t have a full understanding of their problems. If they’re not familiar with sustainable solutions, they might have clear problems that seem obvious to you but that they haven’t been able to identify yet. It’s your job to draw those out.

Implications

The third step in your spin technique builds on your problem questions. Implication questions hone in on the problems you’ve identified in the previous step. They also demonstrate to your stakeholder why those problems are important and why they need to be solved.

Here are some questions you might like to ask:

• Why is this a significant problem?
• How do you feel about the current situation?
• What would be the impact of not solving this problem?
• What percentage of day/week do you spend fixing problem X?

You can get really specific here, building on the pain points that they shared in the previous step.

What they do is they grow the problem into a clear statement of want, desires, or intention to act eg buy your services, engage with your project.

Need Pay-off

After you have completed the above steps in your SPIN script, you can move from active listening to a discussion. This is the stage where you repeat your potential issues back to them, along with possible solutions.

The purpose of this step is to make your client feel heard and validated. Now is your chance to express the payoff that this person needs – even if they don’t know what that is.

Crucially, this isn’t about telling your client how your product/service/idea can help them. You want them to come to the conclusion on their own.

This step in your SPINS script might go something like this:

• What would it mean to you if you can get this solved as soon as possible?
• How would you find this solution useful?

Now what distinguishes this line of questioning from the problem and implication questions is that they are positive and solution-focused. This approach invites your client to visualise and explain the potential personal benefits of your solution in their own words.

When you’ve been through your stakeholder’s needs, it’s time to pitch your idea or service.

SOLUTION

This is a crucial stage in your conversation – now is the point where you have to show your client or stakeholder that your sustainability initiative has something to offer them.

You reach a point in every pitch where you need to explain your offer in detail and remind them of the expertise you have which makes you uniquely qualified to help them.

The idea is to demonstrate how your product or service or idea can help your potential stakeholder and solve their pain points by linking your solution to the benefits they described in the need/payoff questions. At the same time, you also want to give a brief outline of what makes you the person to help.

EXAMPLE

The following video is from our online course and provides an example of this technique in action.

In this video the sustainability manager for a medium to large business involved in manufacturing components for the construction industry is meeting with the CEO of the company. In this conversation the sustainability manager is seeking to influence the CEO to get the board to consider her new sustainability strategy which includes some ambitious targets for the organisation to achieve net zero and to start to develop its circular economy strategy.

Conclusion

The ability to influence and persuade others is one of the most important leadership skills that every sustainability professional should have in their skillset because it is something we are constantly trying to do.

The more effective you are at influencing others the bigger the sustainable impact you will make.

If you want to learn more we have a free guide you can access on our free resources page or you can take our online course that will teach you the SPINS technique.