"The week that I was scheduled to meet with our CEO to ask for more resources for sustainability, we had been given a supplier award by one of our biggest customers. They had implemented their first sustainability award, and they gave it to us. I don't know why they gave it to us because we weren't even really doing that much, but I guess we were doing more than their other suppliers. Our CEO was over the moon that we had won this. He comes to the office the next day, and I'm in there pitching the sustainability thing and he's like 'Of course we're going to do this. This makes perfect sense. It's important to our customers. Look, we just won this award last night.' So he said, 'Go hire the people, get this up and running and let's get going.' We spent the next couple of months hiring the people and developing the strategy. We've been kind of going at a lightning speed since then." (VP Sustainability)
Several change agents pointed to the commitment amplifying potential of recognition. Here is what we heard:
"I think one of the key things in all of these conversations when you're dealing with the senior guys is your ability to be invisible. You may do all the work to prepare your CEO to turn up, stand up and do a speech, but you stay in the background. It's his day. It's his thing. He gets the glory… If you're starting to sit there and go well we did this and we did that, with the senior guys particularly, that's not what they're about. They need to be able to stand up there and own it and own it comfortably." (Head of Responsible Business)
"I think awards are important for programs that aren't that mature. It was part of my strategy, looking at rankings and awards, not to win them, but to understand what the evaluation criteria were so we would know what to focus on. I needed some guidelines as to what the leading companies were doing. What are the things they're focusing on? What are they getting high scores on?
We definitely had a strategy, looking at all these rankings. It wasn't to win them, it was just to understand what the criteria were. What are we doing poorly in? What do we need to do differently to get our score up, just so that I would know what to focus on. Much to our surprise, we started to win awards. Does it mean anything in and of itself? No.
I looked at them all with a little bit of a jaundiced eye, but the rest of the executive team started to sit up and pay attention. It just generated a lot of support and a lot of momentum at the very senior levels really early on, so I think it was useful. I've heard other companies who have more mature companies say that they don't want to get ranked anymore because they don't think it's meaningful. I can see us going that way. But I think it's important in the early days, and it helped our program a lot.
I'm a little concerned, because we can't keep going up every year, and we probably reached a plateau very early on. I'm sometimes concerned as they change their criteria from year to year, maybe we'll even slip a little bit. Then our people go say 'What's wrong, why are we slipping? Is our program not good?' I'm a little bit concerned about that, but I can talk to that. I can explain it, so I'm not that concerned about it. I think overall it was good for us." (VP Sustainability)