The Leaders Role in the Sustainability of their Organizations

 

In our recent book on Organizational Agility we talked about the fact that organization's which exhibit agility are sustainable over the long run. We used W.L. Gore as an example of a sustainable company due to their four culture principles that Gore called freedom, fairness, commitment and waterline.

A waterline situation at Gore involves consultation with other associates before undertaking actions that could impact the reputation or profitability of the company and otherwise "sink the ship.”

Gore is sustainable because of these four principles and because no one person can take an action that would sink the company.

Leaders need to understand the role they play in the long-run sustainability of their organizations.

A sustainability focus from a leadership perspective needs to address the following:

1. The need to be cognizant of where they may be making waterline decisions and rely on the power of we over just the wisdom of the leader. As Rod Collins like to say, everyone is smarter than anyone
2. The need to recognize the importance of work-life balance for themselves and for their people. eXtreme Programming refers to this as sustainable pace—in the context of software development fresh minds make fewer mistakes that result in fewer defects in the developed software. For other contexts it has similar results of higher quality decisions and work products
3. The need to recognize that organizations exist in communities. The benefits that accrue from work needs to consider all stakeholders—customers, staff, and those in the communities in which they operate. As I noted in  Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers,  when organizations take care of customer value, stakeholder value is a happy by-product, whereas those that focus solely on stakeholder value are not sustainable over the long-run. It is the role of leaders to know the difference.

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