How to Build Sustainable Success

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Sustainability. That's a word that you hear a lot these days. On most occasions it is used in an environmental context.  As in "sustainable = green." But it is so much more.

Do you ever think about it from an organisational perspective?

As a business leader sustainability should pervade everything you do. After all you are not immortal, but your organisation could be. And you are responsible for enabling that. 

Of course that is the big difference between corporations and individuals. Companies have a distinct and separate legal persona that enables them to continue your work long after you have clocked off for the last time. Which means that it is one of your key responsibilities to ensure that you don't jeopardise that and instead leave a lasting legacy that builds sustainable success. And - paradoxically – the key way to do that is through your people.

That is one reason why talent management is an increasingly important subject. The "war for talent" has resurfaced as one of the biggest challenges you face and thus the biggest threat to your efforts to be more sustainable.  You need to be very, very careful, however, that you don't side-tracked into thinking of talent management as something distinct from the people who possess the talent. Hopefully, this diagram from my book "Lean Organisations Need FAT People" will help you avoid making such a fundamental error. Let me explain how.

Stairway to Sustainable Success 
Talent has to be identified. When it is some training is required to turn it into ability. Exercise ability and you build experience whereupon it becomes a skill. Skill on its own is great, but it still requires more. You need to create opportunities to put that skill to use and – equally important but too often overlooked – you need to remove the barriers that prevent it being used. When you do that the person takes full responsibility for what they are doing; they become independent and take ownership for what they deliver. This in turns brings greater enjoyment and enables the person to start fulfilling their potential. And isn't that what you want from your people?

After all, an organisation with people who are fulfilling their potential is much more likely to fulfil its own. It certainly will be more successful and that success will be more sustainable.

You could say this gives you a simple recipe for creating employee engagement. However, this is where you need to come back to the total person. It may sound like the oldest clichΓ© in the book, but you need to remember that:

  1. Every person has some talent;
  2. Their talent is required for them to do their job, and the more you develop that talent the better they will do their job;
  3. An organisation requires the seamless linking of all those talents to operate effectively.

Thus no organisation can operate at anything like its full potential unless each and every individual is using their talents properly. And unless they do, its sustainability will always be at risk.

So, if you want to build a lasting legacy and ensure the sustainability of your organisation, you have to recognise and foster the partnership between the individual and the organisation. 

The great thing is that if you do, you will create a shared purpose that embeds sustainability into the organisation and thus – since, to be viable, the business must have a useful purpose in the first place – you will be helping the greater cause of sustainability as well!

38 thoughts on “How to Build Sustainable Success”

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