by Liz Hall
Middle and line managers need to be engaged and empowered to motivate staff and encourage innovation if organisations are to be truly sustainable. This is one of the interim findings of the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development’s (CIPD) three year Shaping the Future programme, which has focused on bringing meaning to the issue of sustainability of people, finance, the environment and society.
The findings, which were published last week (January 2009), highlighted a core number of enablers for sustainable organisation performance. These include vision and values, knowledge-sharing and the role of line managers, which sit within three themes- leadership, engagement and organisational development. These themes have also been highlighted as important by previous research. However, the CIPD has identified three other crucial enablers: a strong performance-focused culture; clear and consistent communication, and assessment and evaluation measures.
The report also highlights further insights at the heart of sustainability: distributed leadership; shared purpose; locus of engagement; alignment; balancing the short and long term, and assessment and evaluation.
It is employees’ locus of engagement in particular that is critical to enabling or blocking performance. For many of the case study organisations which participated in the research, aligning the objectives of the organisation, teams and individuals was a priority if engagement was to support sustainable performance. Organisations are encouraged to ask whether they consider the organisation as a whole system.
The findings have implications for coaches: a focus on engagement, alignment, meaning and purpose across the organisation is likely to prove beneficial.