Hi. I'm Ken Bettenhausen, professor of management at the University of Colorado Denver. In the last two lessons, you've learned a set of tools to help you identify the political lay of the land and devise strategies to gain the support or reduce the resistance to your ideas. In this lesson, you'll hear how two members of the CU Denver Business schools managing for sustainability advisory council. One about gaining support for changes that enhance sustainability at their firms. As you listen, identify the stakeholders involved, their interest and how our advisory council members won them over. The exercise at the end of the lesson will ask you for this information. Sarah, can you tell us a little bit about a change you made earlier in your career? Sure. When I was managing sustainability for Prologis, the global real estate firm, I received calls from employees all over the world asking random questions about sustainability or what are we trying to do to be green and I realized that there was a lot of grassroots energy within the company around sustainability. And so I proposed the idea that we have a sustainability champion program and that was where we would identify at least one volunteer in every office globally to serve as the point person for sustainability for that office. Wow, that was ambitious. It was. Wow. It was. Where do you find resistance? Where do you find allies? How did you move that forward? Did you do it on your own? Fortunately, I had a lot of support from upper management. When I did propose it, I explained the vision and I shared stories and examples of the kinds of questions I was getting right to really prove that there is interest in this topic. And so, I was able to make a strong case. And so when the executive team understood that, I got the green light basically to go ahead. From there, I sent out, rather drafted an email that was sent out globally from somebody much higher up than me to basically say that this was an initiative that had support from the top and that there was the expectation that every office would identify at least one person to participate. Fortunately, there was not a lot of resistance. We were able to identify at least one person in every office to represent their particular location in our sustainability efforts. So now you have one person located in every division throughout the world. What job did you get them to do? What kept it a group and what did it, kept them motivated? Sure, yeah. You know, the first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of questions around what should we be doing, what could we be doing. I realized that we needed to develop a framework to really guide those efforts. We created what was called, we called it The Prologis Green Path. When thinking about our impacts as an office-based company, our impacts were energy, water, waste and procurement. For those four topic areas, the champions were divided into groups to then brainstorm what the offices could be doing in each of those areas. Now, I could've come up with that checklist for energy, water, waste and procurement. I mean, it's really not rocket science when you're talking about just an office, but I thought it would be more impactful if that was really generated, you know, if people had buy in and they could be part of that process. So, once we had the different steps identified within those four areas, I engaged the marketing team to come up with posters, emails, reminders to brand it and to give it a really nice look and feel. Then with that content and with that branding, then we were able to roll that out around the offices globally and then therefore the champions had a menu of options basically for what they could do. That allowed us to start identifying initiatives and tracking progress. That sounds like a great success story. Did it... How did that fit in to larger goals? How did that develop momentum? What did you do with that? It did. There was a, given the enthusiasm within the company, it was just, it was a really great way to try to tap into our network as a company. We would on those conference calls with the sustainability champions, they would be speaking with employees that they wouldn't otherwise have a chance to speak with, and so, it was helpful in that regard. It also was very helpful in that it supported our sustainability reporting initiatives. So when it came time to do our sustainability report and we wanted examples of what was happening in the different locations, I had a person at every office I could go to. We developed a tracking system using our internet and so, they could then upload the information to there and so it really streamlined the data gathering for sustainability reporting. How much of that did you have in mind at the beginning, a priore, and how much evolves along? Is it a multiple stages? In terms of the sustainability champion program, yeah. It expanded beyond what I expected. You know, I thought that it would be a nice forum for getting together and sharing ideas, but then once we actually branded The Green Path and had the system for tracking and gathering data, it was much more robust than I was anticipating in a good way. That's a wonderful story. That's the power of one. What one person could make a difference and then take advantage of what snowballs, what opportunities there are and how you can really just leverage that. Thank you. Of course, I think change management and change initiation has always been a part of my job where I go with... The hospitality companies have a lot of growth that they can do in sustainability initiatives. As I move through different hotels, I would always start and look kind of what's that low hanging fruit that they haven't implemented that we can start with right away. Once you get the initial buy in and show the cost benefit from employee morale and a profit cost savings, even profit revenue stream, can start taking on bigger and bigger projects. And if there's not an issue but there's an opportunity, you can identify that opportunity. That does come from paying very close attention to the work that you're doing, to the market around you, to what other competitors are doing or to what other organizations are doing if there's not a problem or if there's a need for change. There's a lot of stuff happening right now federally that there's a lot of change going on, and so having an ear tuned to what's going on, you can realize an opportunity for where change is needed. Then, I always get buy ins simultaneously and it might seem somewhat manipulative, it's all done with the best intentions but the adage plant seeds and water them, nurture them to help them grow. And that's really how I get buy ins. So it's not going to my boss right away and saying, "Here's my idea. This is what I want to do. Here's my plan." It's kind of planting seeds along the way with meetings and comments and bits of articles or information that I found to start to get them to open up to that idea before the idea is even presented and doing that with colleagues as well. And again, depending on the scope and scale of change and how it's going to directly affect the stakeholder that you're speaking to is going to affect the level of motivation that you need to engage with them on. But I always start very early on in the process to get that buy in as soon as possible and to get them engaged so that they have the ownership of the change as it actually starts to become implemented. That one because there was so many stakeholders within the hotel, the departments that it was going to affect, there was lots of resistance of change but there was also lots of drivers to tap into. I think to be a really effective change agent you need to tap into both of those. That if you only focus on the drivers and not the resistance, you're going to sell yourself short and vice versa. So, looking at the changes in the laundry system, the drivers were cost savings, labor savings, water savings, energy savings, less chemical usage, better result in the linen, longer linen life, and so there's lots of opportunities there to show. Sounds like a no brainer. Yeah, right. Yeah. Who could resist that? Well, lots of people. The laundry staff was some of the most tenured staff in the hotel. Someone had worked there for 55 years and why would we change? We've always done it this way. I don't want to learn anything new. I don't, you know, I can't learn anything new at this point. So really empowering the staff to get excited about learning something new. A lot of studies, I'm not going to quote any now because they don't have at the top of my head, but show that even as you learn as you go along, it keeps the brain young. And so the learning of something new is actually really healthy for us throughout our lives. Not using that as a reason for the change but using that kind of in my back pocket as we engage with the staff and train them on the new system. One of the biggest resistors in that change was the engineering department. They had to install water meters in the laundry system to make sure that the savings are being actualized, otherwise the ROI, the return of the investment was just something we're estimating. So that was something you actually want a tangible dollar amount savings. How many gallons you were saving? Correct. Yes. And so they had to install a water meter at the laundry department. They were really resistant to that. They had to change out the laundry equipment for the equipment that fed the chemicals and programmed all the laundry systems and there was a lot of resistance with that as well. Not necessarily from the laundry staff but from the, excuse me, the engineering staff, but from the engineering leadership. There's always that kind of tension in hotels because if you're doing changes to the building, it's always going to affect the engineering team. And so any hotel I worked to, that was always something I came across and I made a point as much as I could to befriend the engineering leadership, befriend the engineering team, and really try to get them on-board with the change. So, did they have a budget was because they were going to have to bear the cost of it or was it because they'd have to bear the work of installing it or I mean? Definitely both. So, these just foot draggers or how did you get to talk to them? I mean, what are they doing that keeps gets in the way? Well, I mean, I think you hit on it right on the head there is that it's going to be the labor of the engineering staff, doing the physical change at the beginning and also the cost. In typical business world the cost follows revenue. So, if the cost of the laundry system was paid by the engineering team, they said that first off they don't have it in their budget. So one of the things I did was forecast this for budget season for the following year. And so we started talking about it I believe in summer of the current year, wanting to implement it as soon as possible but knowing that there was a financial burden to the engineering team, I ended up doing research, getting buy in early on, doing training with the staff, figuring out that this was something we could do. Then in the last quarter of that year as we were budgeting for the following year, folding in the changes into that next operational budget so that that couldn't be a barrier anymore and working with the accounting department and executive leadership to make sure that the cost for the operational changes would have been recognized in the operational budget for the following year and just eliminating that resistance right there. Yeah. It's so important that you're realistic about the cost, you've done your homework and that you have enough lead time to actually utilize this normal processes of a company. So the budgeting process is sometimes at six months, usually it's a year. Sometimes it's a five-year budgeting huddle if it is a bigger capital expense and so you really have to understand your organization, understand where it fits and how you can not be at odds with that. Most definitely. And I think if you do that, if you do your homework on the budget, you can actually use that as your friend and ally with any changes that you're implementing. If you can forecast what the change is going to be. One thing that was always a barrier to any change that required upfront capital would be well, where is it in the budget? We didn't budget for this, we didn't forecast for it. So once I got that answer a few times earlier in my career, I realized that the more I could fold these changes and as far and ahead as possible into the budget, the more likely they would be to be approved and be successful.
