A recent paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Sukhbir Sandhu and Carol Kulik looks at
this issue using data on how 21 organizations developed the new role of sustainability
manager. Sustainability management means making the organization friendly
toward its natural and social environment, and it is described very differently
by different people. Skeptics call it “building an emotional bank account with
the community,” while idealists say, “We realized that to be sustainable, we
had to be part of a sustainable society.” Organizations have a mixture of
skeptics, idealists, and care-nots, and in this environment the sustainability
manager position has been created and shaped in ways that work with the rest of
the organization.
You might imagine that
this would be an improvised process. It was, but somehow the improvisation followed
three distinct patterns, each with its own set of consequences: prospecting,
orchestrating, and championing. Prospecting organizations asked a manager to
scout for sustainability initiatives done elsewhere and introduce them to other
managers, who made decisions on initiatives based on potential reputational and
legitimacy benefits. Orchestrating organizations had formalized corporate sustainability
plans and used the managers to internally market and implement those plans,
based largely on a business case of cost / benefit. Championing organizations
had a mixture of planned and opportunistic sustainability efforts, the manager
was integrated with the top management team, and sustainability initiatives
were embedded in functions.
So what were the
consequences of these patterns? Often that problems accumulated to the point
that the organization transitioned to another pattern. Such transitions followed
a sequence. Prospecting was a natural starting point for organizations with no
prior sustainability manager, but in this pattern the manager had little
discretion and had difficulty convincing top management to act. In some
organizations, this missing communication and continued pressure to do more led
to orchestrating. Orchestrating involved ambitious planning and many
initiatives, but there was often poor follow-up by the organization because the
sustainability manager did not have sufficient authority over other
organizational units. This lack of implementation sometimes led to championing:
the stage at which sustainability tasks became integrated with other
organizational tasks and the sustainability manager had both the authority and
opportunity to promote new initiatives. What Sandhu and Kulik found was that sustainability
managers had the greatest success when top management bought into the necessity
of the role and set parameters for it but the managers could determine how to
do their work within those parameters.
The results of shaping a
new role from both the top and bottom are good for sustainability, but the
implications are a problem if organizations incorporate many new roles in the
same way. Combining bottom-up and top-down initiatives for each new role means top
management teams may need to grow, as they need to make more-complex and
more-frequent decisions. No one said that management was easy, but the
complexity of a modern organization has made it harder than ever.
