I recently had the pleasure of reading Nancy McGaw’s new book “Making Work Matter: How to Create Positive Change in your Company and Meaning in Your Career,” where she shares lessons learned during her 15-plus years leading the Aspen Institute’s First Movers Fellowship Program, a global network and professional development program for corporate social intrapreneurs — employees across the company who seek to create positive social and environmental change.
No one knows social intrapreneurs better than McGaw. I have known leaders who have gone through the yearlong First Movers program and have shared what a great experience it was for them. I was pleased to read many of their stories in this book, including Rahul Raj (who was at Walmart during his time with First Movers and now consults directly with First Movers), Diana Simmons (then at Clif Bar), Josh Henretig (then at Microsoft), Nicola Acutt (then at VMware), Anupam Bhargava (then at Pratt & Whitney) and Marika McCauley Sine (then at Coca-Cola). So I hold the program and McGaw, as its founding leader, in high regard.
Based on her experience mentoring and collaborating with more than 300 intrapreneurs across a variety of roles and industries, McGaw shares best practices that can help managers, leaders and anyone embarking on their journey to create positive social and environmental change.
In sum, here are the six lessons noted in her book, many of which can be applied to chief sustainability officers (CSOs) in their leadership capacity:
- Start by imagining new possibilities for your company. Change is always difficult, but you don’t have to be satisfied with the status quo. Consider what needs to change in your company to achieve greater positive impact. Define the social or environmental problem you want to work on. Then, assess the skills you can bring to effect change.
- Interrogate the problem you have identified before you try to fix it. We often race into problem-solving mode before making sure we have thoroughly understood the problem. Seek varied perspectives to look at the problem from multiple angles and timeframes.
- Change management is a team sport. Don’t go it alone. Become an expert collaborator. Learn to ask thoughtful questions of others to understand their perspectives, and listen to their input, especially those who are genuinely skeptical about your idea.
- Go for the small win. Design a pilot or prototype to test your idea. Piloting lets you test an idea in a way that requires few resources and lowers the risk of failure. If the pilot fails, you learn and revise. But a small win can create a building block for more experimentation. For example, when Henretig was working in sustainability at Microsoft, he became curious about applying the company’s expertise to address the challenge of poor crop yields for small farmers. He partnered with Ranveer Chandra, an engineer already investigating the use of digital technologies in agriculture. Bringing other colleagues on board, they created a pilot through which they developed cost-effective tools to create heat maps that farmers could use to help predict weather patterns and soil conditions to make informed decisions about the best time to plant. This led to the creation of FarmBeats (now part of Microsoft’s AI for Earth initiative), an established program that uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing to enable a wide range of data-driven land use solutions.
- Hone your skill as a storyteller. We tend to talk about our work in terms of data and bullet points. But it can be far more engaging to tell a story like building a narrative of how a particular customer has been positively affected by a new product or initiative. This is the approach that Kate Judson has taken at Adobe, where she is director of global onboarding, to get buy-in on the company’s hybrid work policy. Rather than using an abstract argument, she makes the case to her senior leadership by using presentations that feature employees at the company who have made significant contributions to the business — and then she notes their location. That approach lets senior leaders focus on the impact these employees have made regardless of their location.
- Take the time to think. Cultivate a practice of reflection (such as journaling, poetry or nature walks) to revisit your values and priorities. Consider your actions in light of your long-term aspirations.
Looking at the CSO role from a new angle — such as that of an intrapreneur as McGaw’s book urges us to do — can reveal new ways to progress and embed sustainability throughout the organization. Where do you look for unexpected insights? Please share your stories on LinkedIn of how you have used the perspective of an internal changemaker in your career to bring your colleagues on board and create positive outcomes.
[Join sustainability professionals driving transformation across their organizations with Trellis Network.]