In early 2024, researchers at University of Strathcylde and the University of St Andrews asked 28 in-house sustainability professionals about their work. This blog outlines some of the skills they shared.
At the start of 2024, 28 sustainability professionals were asked: ‘what is it really like to work in the sector?’
Technical competences have often been prioritised by development programmes and professional bodies preparing people for specialist sustainability roles. However, our recent research has identified that the main challenges sustainability professionals face (which include eco-anxiety, loneliness, greenwashing and imposter syndrome), require less tangible, transferable skills related to persuasion and personal resilience. The research found these skills to be invaluable in enabling sustainability professionals to become more effective change agents.
Persuasion
While having expert technical knowledge of sustainability is important, our research participants mentioned that persuasion was required for being:
“in a room with the established opinion that climate change is all lies. To have the confidence to be that voice for nature, knowing you’re going to get a hostile response, is a whole other level that I didn’t think I could personally do.”
This statement from a Sustainability Lead in their first year in the sector, resonated with comments from those with over a decade of sector experience.
To create change, we found it was important to be able to anticipate conflict and opposing opinions, gather the confidence to continue to represent sustainability, and to scale up plans effectively.
Our research highlighted that persuasion isn’t always about giving speeches or convincing leadership in board meetings. An open-minded attitude and the capacity to acknowledge the need for everyone in an organisation to bring their expertise was important in creating effective action plans. For example, we asked what skills they found most important in their sustainability roles, and one person said:
“Projects are bigger than you and everyone brings their own expertise to the topic. So, I think being open minded about your collaborators, and giving them a chance before dismissing them is always a good idea.”
The importance of showing up as ‘a human’ was a common sentiment in interviews. Multiple participants made almost verbatim the same statement about climate change communication, and the value of being able to “get that message across in a non-technical way so others understand it, without the sustainability professional being accused of ‘scare mongering’.”
Personal resilience
Personal resilience, or being able to reflect, be empathetic, take care of themselves, and set personal boundaries was another key soft skill for sustainability professionals.
Not all participants used the term eco-anxiety, but interviewees stressed that being able to compartmentalise these worries was valuable. For example, a senior sustainability manager at a multi-national corporation emphasised the need for “endless patience and not taking it too seriously.” He clarified that if you start “to get too invested in it, if you think about what is really at stake, about your children when they’re 30 years old, and how awful it might be, you start to get upset and it doesn’t help.” For some, being able to be detached was a ‘uniquely important’ quality for sustainability professionals to cultivate.
At the same time, others approached communication about emotions somewhat differently. One Head of Sustainability with 10 years’ experience stated:
“the more I progress in my career, the more I feel like some degree of emotional intelligence – being very self-aware – comes in handy. Particularly when it’s kind of people management and especially in sustainability, you get to a point where a lot of your job is persuading people and influencing more than doing the kind of technical delivery stuff.”
Having some ability to talk about emotions was noted as an important component of communicating honestly and openly with colleagues about how the climate crisis made people feel.
Personal resilience extended to self-motivation, creativity and recognising that learning from failure is part of the process because:
“in sustainability, it’s one of those unique places, where you’re not doing this because somebody else has asked you to, or because it’s part of this bigger strategy, all the energy has to come from you, why you keep pushing it forward, when it keeps getting hit back down.”
This sense of persistence and resilience was learned and not necessarily an attribute when participants started off. For example, one ESG Manager spoke about how “if one thing out of ten goes ahead that’s a win for me […] you just have to keep going and eventually you get somewhere, or at least you learn from your failures.”
Our research suggests that more support to improve transferable skills is needed to address the challenges of eco-anxiety, greenwashing, loneliness, imposter syndrome, and career progression that exist in this sector. This presents opportunities for professional associations and employers to improve access to therapy, coaching, and peer support, with the aim of helping sustainability professionals to develop soft skills related to personal resilience and persuasion. In the longer-term, professional associations may need to update their development frameworks to ensure that future professionals are well-equipped to fulfil their vital role as change agents for sustainability.
This is a guest article by Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs (Coach for Sustainability Professionals and Chancellor’s Fellow in Sustainable Design at the University of Strathclyde), Heather Lynch (Coach and Facilitator for Sustainability Professionals), and Shona Russell (Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the Centre for the Social and Environmental Accounting Research).
Want more ideas about how to support sustainability professionals? Read more about our research; subscribe to our newsletter; or follow us on LinkedIn! Katherine Ellsworth Krebs; Heather Lynch, and Shona Russell.
