Which leadership style is need to successfully engage with sustainability? How do social intelligence and conflict management help to successfully manage complex sustainability initiatives? From my perspective, sustainability change initiatives typically involves highly complex and multifaceted projects that require the coordination of interrelated domains such as economic, social, and environmental concerns. What literature do you suggest that supports the need to strive to work together, assist and support each other instead of competitive and rivalry based behavior?
A colleague of mine explored an approach in which he wanted to link the 'seven transformations of leadership (Rooke & Torbert, in Harvard Business Review) to sustainability. (but in the end he took his research in a different direction). The explanation of his original plan is in the conference paper below.
Conference Paper SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION – ORGANISATION AND GOAL FINDING
I personally feel a governance approach would be the best approach for management questions regarding sustainability. But if you want to broaden your perspective, maybe the following could be of use for you:
Su, C. T., Mitchell, R. K., & Sirgy, M. J. (2007). Enabling Guanxi management in China: A hierarchical stakeholder model of effective Guanxi. Journal of Business Ethics, 71(3), 301-319. doi: 10.1007/s10551-006-9140-3
Bramwell, B. (2011). Governance, the state and sustainable tourism: a political economy approach. [Article]. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 19(4-5), 459-477. doi: 10.1080/09669582.2011.576765
Dearden, P., Bennett, M., & Johnston, J. (2005). Trends in Global Protected Area Governance,1992–2002. Environmental Management, 36(1), 89-100. doi: 10.1007/s00267-004-0131-9
IUCN. (2008). Governance for Sustainability – Issues, Challenges, Successes. K. Bosselmann, R. Engel & P. Taylor (Eds.), (pp. 260).
To sum it up, questions address engagement and alignment of stakeholders in responding to complex change, conflict management, and attaining sustainability. In my understanding of your questions the following areas to explore are:
1. Stakeholders’ common understanding of change and its impact
2. Suitability of leadership and followership in the environment where change occurs
3. Quality of support system among the stakeholders
4. Characteristics of environment where change occurs
5. The intensity of change and capacity to respond to change
Reading attached Leading Transformational Change of Daryn Dyer will help .
Wishing you the best.
Consider the work from Nonaka, I. and Nishiguchi, T. (2001). Knowledge Emergence: Social, Technical, and Evolutionary Dimensions of Knowledge Creation. New York: Oxford University Press. More than anything else, effective change management needs guidance through an adjustment period for leaders of change and followers, otherwise known as the Neutral Zone. Nonaka and Nishiguchi offer a refreshing look at how personal caring for associates can ease this transition and become an effective cheer-leader for change. One of my favorite philosophies on change management and leadership.
A co-author and I tried to answer this question...here's the paper...it's about sustainability fellowships. Below is a tiny URL to the paper. It is forthcoming in EBR.
http://tinyurl.com/lgnr2et
Parts of this are covered in my book The Crisis Leader (sample chapters available under my publications). It deals with leading through challenging times such as crisis - most of what applies there also applies to complex change initiatives.
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