CLOs, global warming and the great opportunity

President Joe Biden’s recent pronouncement that he intends to halve our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 with the help of major business leaders and companies is a pitch into the wheelhouse of chief learning officers. CLOs should knock this out of the park.

Meeting Biden’s goal is dependent on how those leaders effectively drive culture change across different industries and in the profit and nonprofit organizations involved in the transition from fossil fuels. Without good leadership, such culture change cannot happen.

In my working with many hundreds of leaders of all ranks and functions, and in top organizations worldwide for the past 37 years, I have witnessed firsthand that most leaders, quite frankly, do not understand how to lead well. Furthermore, they go their entire careers burdened by this misunderstanding.

This is where CLOs come in. By re-thinking strategic and tactical approaches to culture change and promoting processes that further it, CLOs can be key players in helping meet Biden’s transformative objectives.

There are three fundamental ways that CLOs can do this: reorientation, execution and saturation.

Reorientation

Since many leaders lead incorrectly, it is critical for CLOs to expedite culture change by first understanding the fundamental concepts of right and wrong and reorient to a radical new meaning of leadership.

This is not about adopting an MBA-like leadership system into the learning strategy. There is a time and place for such learning. The culture change I am talking about entails a few simple principles that define effective leadership actions at all levels and functions.

Leadership is driven by simple, clear and consistent ideas. You’ll recall “Napoleon’s corporal”: Napoleon had a corporal attend all the meetings of his top general. After they left, he had the corporal repeat the plans they proposed. If the corporal did not understand the plans, Napoleon discarded them.

Culture-changing activities should have your leaders coalesce around a few precise, powerful leadership ideas that drive action and results.

In its simplest terms, leadership is about getting people to speak and act to achieve desired organizational results. The right leaders can get people speaking and acting in these ways. Wrong leaders don’t and can’t.

However, there is one more simple thing which most leaders miss. Right leaders don’t order people to accomplish tasks. Instead, they have those people order themselves to do them. This has everything to do with the leadership activities driving the culture change that CLOs can create.

In order to feel motivated to constantly do their best work, workers must feel valued and appreciated by that organization. The result is workers who trust their leaders, are deeply committed to their organization and devoted to teamwork. Engaged workers take pride in and feel excited about their work and understand the strong, positive links between that work and the organization’s success.

Since 2000, the Gallup organization has conducted a yearly survey on the state of employee engagement in the workplace. Gallup defines engaged employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace. Recently, however, Gallup found only 36 percent of employees were engaged in their jobs. Unfortunately, CLOs cannot get traction to change their organization’s culture with unengaged employees.

The first step in getting the unengaged engaged is to understand the roots of nonengagement. I submit that the consistent employee disengagement Gallup identified is due largely to the overabundance of order in leadership. There are many factors, but for immediate purposes in making culture change happen, CLOs should focus on the order being the least used leadership style.

Though it may be the easiest to accomplish, it is nonetheless the least effective in terms of achieving results because it cannot get people consistently engaged. Sure, they might be engaged to the extent they follow the order. They may even get results by following the order. Though they may comply, they are not necessarily committed. Only ardently committed employees can be culture-changers.

This does not mean that orders in leadership activities should be abolished. There are times when orders must be given. The trouble happens when leaders go to the order — too often instead of focusing on replacing orders with motivational relationships.

How do leaders continually get employees motivated? First, reorientate leaders of what constitutes right leadership. Right leadership is about motivation, action and results. Leaders who are engaged in culture change should understand the reality of motivation. The English language misunderstands the psychological truth of motivation. Motivation isn’t something leaders do to people, it is something they do to themselves. Leaders communicate, the people motivate. Only they motivate themselves.

With this principle in mind, culture change happens when leaders are motivating people (i.e., having them motivate themselves) to take action that achieves great results. When leaders see the function of their activities as furthering these factors, their effectiveness in driving culture change is dramatically increased.

Governments alone cannot mandate the changes needed to meet President Biden’s goals. Those changes must also come from profit and nonprofit organizations willingly driving change. Without the help of CLOs, even willing organizations cannot undertake the deep, results-producing focus needed for that change to succeed.

Execution

Getting leaders to agree with the fundamental concepts of right leadership cannot alone create culture change. Those concepts must be executed throughout all levels and functions of organizations’ daily activities. Furthermore, such endeavors must lead to increases in hard, measured results the organization needs.

Culture change only happens within the realm of results — especially increases in results. How can leaders execute right leadership for increases in results?

Though working from the top-down is important when disseminating the principles of right leadership and instituting an all-encompassing, organizational commitment to them, working from the bottom-up is also important in determining the learning content as it relates to exceptional execution. Focus not on what trainers think should be imparted, but rather, what deeply engages leaders and what they believe are relevant to their daily challenges.

An increase in results is the key to leadership learning in a culture-changing environment. This goes beyond more than just providing courses for leaders. What they learn is not just immediately applicable leadership processes, but processes that get results long term as well.

By being involved in culture changes, leaders are not only improving their performances at work, but also advancing their own careers, as their organizational engagement is enhanced. Furthermore, since developing a deep leadership pipeline is necessary for sustained cultural change, these leaders must also teach their soon-to-be leaders these processes as well.

The results of the processes must be monitored and evaluated consistently. Such monitoring and evaluation must be tied to systematic, measurable outcomes, measurements required for organizational success.

For example, some of the most important culture change drivers — yet often the most neglected — are small-unit leaders. Small-unit leaders make or break culture change. They are where the rubber meets the road between products or services and the marketplace. They are critical players when safety is a consideration in the workplace.

Bringing the right leadership processes to this group should be done by instructing those small-unit leaders to employ small, quick-reacting learning teams that are focused less on such factors as training costs and institutional scoring and more on the measurable value of the results that accrue from their leadership activities.

Execution must be invigorated and expanded by peer-to-peer interactions, manifested not only on how effectively the leaders apply processes but how well they teach those processes to others. The effectiveness of their leadership should also be measured by and be accountable for the effectiveness of the leadership of the people they lead.

Because greenhouse gas emissions are people problems, the solutions to global warming are people solutions. People solutions are invariably advanced through good leadership. Without such leadership, people solutions lack precision, power and unified purpose.

Saturation

Finally, CLOs must also rethink the way they go about saturating their organizations with well-executed and culture-changing leadership activities.

This cannot be done ad hoc, but must be accomplished through results-producing twin strategies. Number one: An organizational strategy, designed to achieve overall goals. Number two: A leadership strategy designed to show the ways leaders will execute the organizational strategy.

Saturation cannot succeed without CLOs creating systems to develop, direct, monitor and evaluate processes.

There are many such systems and processes.  Here is one that has worked for many organizations over the decades that CLOs can apply immediately to begin wide and deep cultural change:

• Educate small, nimble teams on right leadership principles and processes.
• At the end of the initial education, members of the teams select results-increasing Initiatives, which they will execute back on the job using the processes. Integrate each initiative into overall team efforts.
• Applying the leadership fundamentals they have been taught, leaders roll out their initiatives during a period of around 35 business days. 
• The teams come back for a one-day session and report on the outcomes of their initiatives. What were the obstacles to achieving success? What were best and worst practices? How did they measure success or failure? What increases in hard, measured results accrued, and what further increases can be aimed at?
• At this stage, financial leaders review, analyze and validate the results.
• At the end of the session, participants select new Initiatives or describe how to continue their old Initiatives to achieve more results. 
• This process when repeated many times with many different teams at all levels and functions of the organization will change the culture in positive ways.

Joe Biden’s compelling challenge can only be completely met with the help of the business community.  Halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 will be a bridge too far for many of the organizations involved in this effort if they cannot fundamentally change their cultures.

No other organizational functions have the resources, knowledge, reach and capabilities to make such profound cultural changes than CLOs. Greenhouse gas reduction goals can only be met through systems approaches which not only entail big-picture processes and practices but grassroots activities. CLOs are in the unique position to help both approaches succeed.

Guided by reorientation, execution and saturation, CLOs can make such changes happen in highly effective ways.  In doing so, CLOs will not only help their organizations but the planet too.