How to build your "relationship capital" to advance sustainability
This week I had the great pleasure of interviewing Ben Goodare, a senior sustainability professional who has been an amazing supporter of my work, including peer-reviewing my new book, The Good Communicator (you'll hear his interview in The Good Communicator podcast in the next few weeks - in the meantime, give a listen to the second episode of the podcast, fresh out, HERE or HERE).
We talked about how he managed to influence the top management of his last job, made of mainly hard-nosed engineers and business people, who didn't buy into the sustainability narrative, to adopt sustainability across the company. I asked him about his learning in this long journey and he shared with me some incredible wisdom connected to communication. One of the key learnings of his experience was around building "relationship capital".
Navigating the business world, especially if you are a fresh sustainability graduate, it’s really hard. You've got all this great knowledge about the environment, but the business side? That’s a whole different beast. One of the toughest parts is figuring out how to build and maintain relationships.
Many sustainability teams are strapped for resources, short on funds, and often don't get the recognition they deserve. This means you can't always rely on having a big budget or a lot of staff to get things done. Instead, you have to get good at building "relationship capital."
What's relationship capital? It's all about making genuine connections and helping others, even if it’s not part of your official job, and building trust and goodwill over time. Sometimes, you'll find yourself doing tasks that aren’t directly related to sustainability, just to help someone out. Maybe it’s pitching in on a project or lending a hand with something outside your usual duties.
Ben said that, at first, trying to build relationships for him felt like being 16 again and trying to date. It was nerve-wracking, awful, and full of rejection. You put yourself out there, and make these great suggestions to the board or senior managers, and often, they just look at you with pity, thinking, "You don't understand business." But if you have built your "relationship capital", when the time comes for you to need support for a sustainability initiative, you can tap into this reservoir of goodwill. Because you’ve built strong relationships and shown you're a team player, your colleagues are more likely to step up and help you out.
In the end, being successful in sustainability within a business isn't just about sticking to your job description. It’s about fostering a co-creation spirit and being willing to go the extra mile for others. By doing so, you can build a network of allies ready to back you up when you need it most.
This approach not only helps you overcome the challenges of limited resources but also makes it easier to drive sustainable change in your organisation.
This article was originally written for the Green Gorilla weekly newsletter. If you liked it, subscribe to receive more articles like this and learn how to communicate sustainability better, how to be more productive without selling your soul to the work devil, and how to make an impact in the world. Here is the link: https://newsletter.thegreengorilla.co.uk/