It is Friday and here is a less serious post. The other day I bumped into this little accessory which I immediately adopted. Now, it has a fixed place at my bag and for me it represents Climate Tech.

Climate - because it is assembled totally from recycled (up-cycled?) material.

Tech - simply because it looks like a robot.

What do you want to name it?

This has been in the works for months! And we are excited to launch our new service packages - Sustainability x Change Management.

​Reducing our climate impact might be the biggest, global endeavour of this century. We as a company decided that we want to contribute our expertise: change management. We are excited to drive the people side of doing business. And this means we can accelerate your sustainability journey with our expertise, our passion, and our methods.

At the heart of our business, we strongly believe that sustainability is a huge business opportunity. Your sustainability journey might start with compliance to regulations and to market demands. We are helping companies to turn this around. Understanding the possibilities to retain & attract talent, to improve your operational efficiencies, and to tap into new markets.

How are we facilitating the change in your sustainability journey? We are focusing on three key elements.

• developing the Why: inspiring your leadership teams and workforce
• defining the What: setting the ambitions and targets for your journey
• facilitating the How: experimenting new solutions, one step at the time

The Sustainability Week Asia is over and it has been filled with great presentations, discussions, conversations and questions! And one underlying thread was very apparent:

• we need to act
• we need to achieve the impossible by 2050
• we must start now
• the targets are huge
• we don't have enough people on board
• how can we possible get anywhere?

This all is so daunting. And this is dangerous. We humans tend to fall into paralysis under such circumstances. Big changes are triggering fight, flight and freeze. Let's avoid that.

While keeping the Sustainability vision in our mind, let's start with small steps; with a pilot, with one product category, with one location. We will see results and we can learn and celebrate. With this we develop more motivation and more people joining the movement. In no time, the results will get bigger, more numerous. Change management is here to accelerate the journey.

We need to start and act now.

During the Sustainability Week Asia in Singapore, on stage and in the hallways, there was one strong agreement among speakers and participants. Most companies are still in the game because of compliance - in order to keep their 'license to operate'. They are pushed by regulators, clients and the markets to provide their sustainability reports and commit to token targets.

If we want to turn the tide on climate change, we all need to go beyond that and understand one important thing:

Sustainability is one huge business opportunity!

The opportunities fall typically into three buckets: attracting & retaining talents, operational cost efficiency and exploring new markets. And all of them have a strong impact on profit. Once we realise this, the sustainability movement will be unstoppable!

How can we create this awareness? As a change management practitioner, there are a few simple insights:

• develop inspirational stories that are engaging together with the impacted groups of people
• translate the high-level targets and strategies into practical action at the front
• embark on the journey in small steps with small wins along the way

These points will keep the momentum and accelerate your results - in terms of climate impact and in terms of business outcome.

Today was Day one of the Sustainability Week Asia here in Singapore. The first session, Tony Fernandes. And he mentioned something which is close to my heart:
"In sustainability, companies need to push first their internal marketing!"

This, in my experience, means that we need to make the new vision tangible for employees, so that they can relate. And it also means that we need to translate strategic KPIs into targets for the people in the front-line. Translating the vision into action.

I have been glad I was able to be involved in large-scale programs where we have achieved that wide-spread engagement. It takes some effort to create this momentum. And then, the movement is building up and delivering excitement, motivation and then strong business results.

Don't keep your initiatives in a closet; let's create these movements.

I hear that with many of my clients: I feel like they are only ticking the box and they are waiting to be told what to do. It feels like we have a blame culture which is slowing things down. How can we change them and stop this complacency? How can I enable my people to be more proactive?

And why bother, I can simply do the job myself and delegate the important stuff to 'my guy'. The answer is productivity - productivity based on more action & results, and based on a more energetic & focused culture. Once we bring the people out of their inertia, then they will also be able to grow personally, master new skills and feel more confident and excited. Which impacts the productivity of the entire team and the people around them.

What does it take to enable this change? Ownership! We want to create an environment which allows the people to identify themselves with the overall objective and feel engaged to reach that with their best effort. They own their part of the business.

From my experience, here are the key ingredients to develop ownership:

1. Provide a clear direction and purpose of where we want to go as an organisation; this needs to be motivating and inspiring.
2. Focus on the future with trial & learning; this includes appreciating diversity, discovering each other's strength and asking the question: "what can I do differently? how can I help my team?"
3. Balance the focus between business outcomes and the way of working; only with great relationships we can deliver great results.

The underlying topic is: becoming a High-performing Team! This is when a team can deliver excellence effortlessly. Everything falls in place and as a team we flow towards success.

Image credit: ©Eloi Stichelbaut - polaRYSE / Holcim-PRB