Sustainability needs leadership that is sustainable over the long term and makes our future #keltable. It’s good to be able to draw inspiration and guidance from a system that has been successful for millions of years in order to master the current challenges.
The forest faces the same problems as the economy and society and has developed intelligent, social and sustainable principles to solve them. In our new series, we will give you surprising insights into the complex ecosystem and show you which learnings and design options can be derived from it for your strategic work as a supervisory board.
Diversity ensures survival
Diversity is the fundamental principle that makes our forests resilient. A high level of biodiversity ensures greater stability and the necessary adaptability to changing living conditions. This makes the forest less susceptible to disturbances such as extreme weather, fire or insect pests and thus ensures its survival.
In real forest life, the great diversity presents itself as a very small-scale system in which each individual part plays an important and irreplaceable role. Investing in diversity by allowing and nurturing a wide variety of “players” can certainly be interpreted as risk prevention.
This classic idea of diversity is also well known in corporate management. Even if diversity is not directly associated with the aspect of risk management in the corporate context, it is practised in the same way. This is because only the diversity of risk assessment leads to genuine risk provisioning.
ESG – a new quality of diversity
Diversity takes on a whole new quality in the context of sustainability. In the ESG regulations, it is anchored in all three pillars of environment, social and governance as an essential basis for a sustainable future.
Diversity clearly has its greatest impact in the social dimension. The diversity approach turns the efficiency-driven cost factor of manpower back into people and stakeholders with a face who can and want to contribute to the company’s success. Anyone who wants to recognise, use and develop this potential will find relevant methods and strategic approaches in the materiality analysis in order to take responsibility for sustainable corporate development.
The governance leadership perspective focuses on the starting point of value creation: the company as an ecosystem. Here in particular, diversity matters and that is so much more than gender mainstream.
Old and young, engineer and creative, left and right-handed, etc. – a diverse mix of cultures, competences and experiences contributes to competitiveness and innovative strength.
But beware! The devil is in the detail here too. For example, useful apps for editing photos failed when they were launched because important tabs were only displayed on the right-hand side and were therefore unusable for left-handed users. Various teams at at least one point between product development and sales would certainly have prevented this failure.
The most important realisation for sustainability in the corporate strategy is therefore: only when our employee structure reflects the diversity of our customers will we be able to create truly customer-oriented solutions with which we can then ensure sustainable success.
Incidentally, the creative potential of diversity extends across all business areas and all hierarchical levels of a company. This means that diverse competences are also in demand in management and supervisory bodies. With a clear personal positioning, you make your qualifications as a member of the Supervisory Board visible; the qualifications matrix required by the GCGC ensures mandatory transparency.
The limits of diversity
In the balance between emergence and decay, adaptation and development, growth and effectiveness, diversity also reaches its limits. Where it conflicts with the natural or evolved framework conditions of the system.
For example, the Douglas firs cultivated in forests are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the climatic conditions in Germany. They originally come from the ecosystem of the cold rainforests of North America and cannot develop to their full potential in high temperatures and drought. At the same time, supposedly attractive exotic species are displacing the native flora and fauna. Without natural competitors, they spread invasively with massive restrictions on the habitat of native trees and plants.
The fact that not every promising management culture is good for the company’s own entrepreneurial ecosystem was recently experienced by Zalando with a former Amazon manager on the board. Contrary to expectations, a poor atmosphere of fear culture and bureaucratisation at the fashion platform quickly led to a high turnover in the management team* and ultimately to the decision not to extend the two-year contract at the beginning of this year.
Managers who live the values of their corporate culture and sustainably organise cooperation within their own ecosystem can reduce such learning processes to a minimum. (*Business Insider 31/05/2022)
Bonus inspiration for leaders
In addition to leadership work, sustainable leadership also requires regeneration. That’s why we conclude our article with your own personal bonus inspiration to recharge your creativity and resources:
There is no classic “information overload” in the forest. It’s never really quiet, but none of the things we see, hear and smell demand our full attention. In this setting, our senses perceive the complex structure of nature unfiltered. According to Attention Restoration Theory**, this allows the brain to recover and concentrate better afterwards. A short break in the forest is therefore not only good for our health, it also makes us more productive. (**Stephen Kaplan: The restorative benefits of nature)