Read time: 2.37 mins
Leadership for Sustainability: The Both/And Mindset
Corporations are facing increased pressure from stakeholders to implement sustainable business practices. Leaders who adopt a “both/and” mindset can identify opportunities for synergy and integration between the objectives of their businesses, society, and the environment.
Watch Marya Besharov, Guest Expert on the Oxford Leading Sustainable Corporations Programme, discuss how to harness this mindset in business.
Transcript
We see that there’s an approach to leadership that really starts with the leader’s mindset. That’s really critical here. And, the particular type of mindset that we find to be important is what we call a Both/And mindset.
Harness the Both/And mindset
And what we mean by this is that leaders who can see the opportunities for synergies, the opportunities for integrative solutions, for the win-win, the Both/And of the business and sustainability, tend to be really valuable and effective in harnessing the opportunities of competing demands and mitigating the challenges and risks.
And, importantly, when we talk about a Both/Mindset, we don’t mean people who try to erase or ignore the very real and very important differences and points of tension and sometimes conflict between business objectives and sustainability objectives. Rather, a Both/And mindset is about recognising and honouring, and paying attention to those differences, while trying to harness them in the service of finding points of connection, finding points of synergy, and finding integrative solutions.
So we see this, for example, in the large natural foods retailer Whole Foods Market, which operates hundreds of stores across the United States, and now globally as well, with a mission of promoting natural foods and environmental sustainability, while also operating a fast-growing and profitable retail chain. And at Whole Foods, the most effective managers and leaders of the stores were those who adopted this Both/And mindset. And what that means at Whole Foods is that they were respectful of and conveyed the value of the folks who focused on the business, and they certainly pay great attention to profits and growth, but they also understood and valued those who are a bit more idealist, if you will, who cared more about the sustainability focus, about natural foods and health, and they sought to help each type of employee in each constituent group in the organisation understand the value of the other.