Leadership styles for planet, people and profit

13 February 2013 -

Sustainable development qualification launches in the wake of pilot success, providing bosses with thoughts on how to link performance to social responsibility

A programme that has saved companies from collapse by aligning economic and social goals with leadership styles has developed into a management qualification.

The Leadership and Sustainability Qualification (LSQ) is based on pilot projects in northwest England, Wales and continental Europe. It has helped charities, public bodies and businesses mould effective leadership styles, including harp-maker Telynau Teifi, which was struggling before the scheme but is now thriving – and manufacturing a new concert harp.

Another client, Princes Gate Cool Water, won an Enhancing Leadership and Management Skills Award from Leadership and Management Wales in 2011. The victory came after the pilot programme transformed the company’s management by measuring all aspects of economic, customer and environmental performance, and allocating personal responsibility for action to individual managers.

LSQ is the brainchild of chartered engineer and CMI member Peter Jenner, who has spent 15 years developing the scheme.

If you talk to bosses of companies or public bodies about the need for sustainability they will probably show minimal interest,” Jenner told CMI members' magazine Professional Manager. “Yet if you show how strategic and operational objectives can be achieved with cost reduction and measurable social and environmental benefits then they fully support investment in sustainability.”

The new qualification, which was developed with UK government and European Commission funding, launches in Wales this spring and goes UK-wide from the autumn.

“The approach to sustainability has not changed for 30 years,” Jenner added. “Only through a radical refocusing of organisational leadership can we align economic goals with social and environmental ones and break the tired and ineffective old model.”

Find out more about the LSQ scheme.