So much of what I see being researched and noted in the field of gender and leadership/the workplace these days seems to also apply to the sustainability movement. And, Lisa Belkin’s recent piece in the New York Times Magazine ties right in. She writes about how women won’t feel they’ve reached parity until if feels like it – whether or not the “numbers” show it to be so. No surprise there, but her point in the article was that in order for it to feel like parity, we’ll also have to change our expectations for men. “Or, more accurately, men’s expectations for themselves.”

Though Belkin writes of flex time, parental leave and Sweden’s forward thinking workplace policies, this fact also speaks to our challenges in nurturing and rewarding sustainable thinking in today’s businesses. To simplify it tremendously, some people think more linearly and others more relationally. The gender stereotypes have it that the former tends to be men and the latter tends to be women. Traditionally, of course, business has prized linear thinking. But, sustainable business functions most productively when there there’s a good balance of the two – in order to strive for that triple bottom line of good for people, planet and profit. Sounds like we’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for in integrating relational thinking into our classic business mix….

In his book, The Fifth Discipline, systems management master Peter Senge writes that the organization he founded, Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) connected the sustainable thinking dots to women by way of their Sustainable Consortium’s “Women Leading Sustainability” initiative. “The genesis of this project was the discovery that a disproportionate number of the highest-impact initiatives within this network had been instigated by women leaders…” Senge goes on to question what it is about women’s sensibilities that have made them step forward and become such effective sustainability leaders. His interviews with women leaders returned these thoughts (see page 368 of the 2006 paperback edition of The Fifth Discipline for more):

- women are more developmentally-oriented, and don’t have time for corporate politics or in-fighting;

- women are less ambitious about their personal advancement, more ambitious about the thing itself; and,

- women gravitate toward longer-term issues that lie at the periphery of most businesses’ attention, like sustainability, and approach these from a standpoint of collaboration and discovery rather than solutions and plans.

Ponder that last bullet point, once more. All organizations today should be focused on finding and developing employees that think exactly that way if sustainability is their goal. That doesn’t mean there has to be some huge hunt for female employees, necessarily, but it does mean that we need to start more deliberately rewarding those traits/characteristics in everyone. We want both women AND men at this table. So, as Belkin’s piece pointed out, our challenge is to figure out how to change men’s expectations for themselves.

Emphasizing relational thinking, and helping everyone tap their own potential in that regard, is what we need to do – for sustainability’s sake.

Andrea Learned is an author (Don't Think Pink), blogger, and expert on gender-based consumer behavior, with a focus on sustainability influence and communication. In addition to her blog (http://learnedon.com), Andrea contributes to the Huffington Post and provides commentary for Vermont Public Radio.