3 Ways to Build Internal Credibility

As a corporate sustainability professional, you have tons of responsibility and little authority to unilaterally make things happen.  Reducing your company’s environmental footprint or eliminating unfair labor practices from your supply chain are just a few of the big, audacious challenges we are tackling with limited resources. 

While we may not have the power to magically make our companies more sustainable, we do have a significant amount of influence with our colleagues to get things done.  Working with our colleagues, we can be catalysts for sustainability across departments. After all, the challenges we are working on are greater than one person, department or company.

To be a successful corporate sustainability professional you need to exert “soft power” within your company.  Business schools and organizational psychologists have studied this topic and found that you gain credibility with others when they trust you.  To continue to develop trust and credibility you should: 

1. Demonstrate expertise

2. Nurture positive relationships

3. Consistently commit

Demonstrate Expertise

Your colleagues are experts in something other than sustainability.  They are looking to you to be the sustainability expert and relate it to their job responsibilities.  That means not only do you need to be constantly learning and building your knowledge but also demonstrate results and anticipate and respond quickly to problems.  You’ll know if your colleagues think you are an expert if they are seeking you out for your opinion. 

Nurture Positive Relationships

Your colleagues are part of the solution (and sometimes part of the challenge) to creating a more sustainable company.  To create exponential change you are going to need to understand, empower and make your colleagues successful.  Understanding what their business priorities are and connecting your sustainability efforts to their outcomes is key (e.g. how does your sustainability project increase access to capital, employee engagement, social media hits, etc).  

Consistently Commit

None of the above matters if you don’t follow through on your commitments.  Do you go above and beyond what needs to be done?  Your colleagues will notice.  Do you walk the “sustainability talk?”  It matters. I once showed up to give a sustainability training in a big, expensive SUV (in my defense, it was a rental and apparently the only car they had left) and my credibility was shot for the day.    

You are not going to create a more sustainable business without your colleagues, so building your credibility and their trust is key to your success.

Interested in Learning More?  

Here are three resources that informed this blog post:

• 3 Elements of Trust, Zenger and Folkman.

• The Trusted Advisor, Maister, Green and Galford.

• Drive, Pink.

Photo by Mckenna Phillips on Unsplash.