Kıvanç’s Reflection on “Leading the Way to a Sustainable Future” Workshop
In this workshop, we talked about the leadership of sustainability and sustainability of leadership with examples and theories from the business field. The main objective of being a leader of a sustainable future is to give care to people and the planet alongside profit. Additionally, the sustainability of leadership depends on the collaborative leadership inside a group. I learned very valuable insights about the approach to the companies and diversity in our groups.
To be able to convince and motivate companies to take action about sustainable development goals, experts use a method that creates a “business case” for companies. The idea is to show the financial benefits of acting on the SDGs and try to convince companies to apply the necessary policies inside their organizations. I thought that the idea is not a good representation of the spirit of SDGs. Since we should act responsibly because of our future not because of possible economic benefits. However, the method works for most companies and helps us reach our goals faster. Therefore, we might need to use “the evil” way of convincing the companies for the good of everybody. I will use this approach in my future experiences since we may not have enough time to convince everybody with a naïve approach.
Another interesting discussion happened about diversity. The new learnings for me were the contributions of diverse communities, keeping our environment psychologically safe for diversity, and the inclusion of diverse people. We brainstormed about the benefits of diverse communities, and I have not thought that diverse communities are better to reach diverse markets and interests. This gave me the motive to include all kinds of people in my team to better communicate with different groups. I also imagine the psychologically unsafe environment and stereotyping ideas in a company. This could be the most harmful environment for innovation and development. Thus, I definitely and constantly check my behavior with my colleagues to prevent such disasters in our team. Lastly, the language that we speak in job adverts and interviews alongside the general image of our company may affect the applicants and decrease diversity in applications. Therefore, we should include diversity from job adverts to our speech.
At the end of the workshop, I was more motivated about working for our future than ever before. I evaluated my past behaviors and experiences in terms of the conversations in the workshop. I will use more positive language when I give feedback to someone not to break the safety of different ideas in the environment.
Tufan Kıvanç Kurt
