31 October 2024 By Alison Maitland

It’s been an emotional rollercoaster – and I don’t use the phrase lightly. Together with fellow coach Nick Martin, I’ve been facilitating a climate action group experience called The Week with these wonderful participants from across a mix of professions.

We watched three films on consecutive days about the climate, biodiversity, food and pollution crises, hosted by Frederic and Helene Laloux. After each, and then exactly a week later, we held deep conversations about our feelings and the actions these motivate each of us to take to save what we can of our precious planet.

Although it’s the second time I’ve facilitated this experience, I found this one even more powerful, and I’d recommend experiencing it more than once.

Here are some things that have really stuck with me:

The drip feed of negative news is not enough to activate people, unless we’re directly impacted. Continue reading →

14 Feb 2024    By Alison Maitland

You’re a leader with influence. You’re aware that people across your organisation are anxious about the future, facing the interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, conflict, polarisation, and rising living costs.

What is your role? How can you best support their resilience and sense of agency?

Here’s how a group of leaders at 3M, the US manufacturing company whose brands include Post-it notes and Scotch tape, responded.

Read more in my LinkedIn article here.

14 Dec 2023    By Alison Maitland

Rising anxiety about the climate and environment is affecting not only young people but workers of all ages. How should employers respond? In this report that I co-authored for The Conference Board, a business think-tank, we show how companies can begin by:

• Finding out how prevalent eco-anxiety is in your workforce;
• Engaging leaders across functions to provide joined-up responses;
• Acting to mitigate climate change through organizational strategies;
• Demonstrating evidence of pro-environmental actions;
• Validating eco-anxiety as a healthy response to what’s happening;
• Creating channels for employees to voice their concerns and hopes;
• Equipping managers to have conversations with employees about eco-anxiety; and
• Providing ways for employees to take collective environmental action.

You can download the report for free here. I welcome your feedback.

20 Dec 2022 How are inclusion and sustainability interconnected? In this video discussion about inclusive leadership hosted by fellow coach Priya Hunt, I explain why we need different thinking from business as usual, and as broad a mix of perspectives as possible, to make the shifts essential to deal with the mega-crises facing our world.
That means that leaders should consistently be asking: Whose voice is missing? What perspective have we not thought about? How can we bring different ideas into our decision-making? It’s what Rebekah Steele and I call harnessing “the collective superpower” of diversity in our book INdivisible.
Rebecca Jones and Garry Browne shared their experience on the business importance of inclusion and how to make it happen in practical ways, and the conversation flowed thanks to Priya’s skilful facilitation.