Sustainability is a team sport
Sustainability is a team sport, if you want to succeed you need to surround yourself with people who are willing to help you thrive.
Whilst you may have a clear plan in mind, you’ll need others in your organisation to back you, bounce ideas off, obtain budgets and make things happen. Having a collaboration mindset is equally beneficial through external partnerships with people like you, in equivalent roles, but in other organisations. In this environment everyone wins as we all learn, share, and prosper from one another.
The Mastermind
The concept of participating in group knowledge sharing was widely promoted by the American self-help author Napoleon Hill in his book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ published in 1937. The Mastermind, as he called it, is one of his 13 laws of success. To quote Napoleon Hill, “the Mastermind consists of two or more minds working in perfect harmony for the attainment for a common purpose”.
For those in Sustainability, the common purpose is already known, that being the collective decarbonising of your businesses. A Mastermind group’s role, therefore, is to help you accelerate to this collective goal through exploiting the full strength of your members experience, training, and knowledge as if was your own. As Napoleon Hill said “When a group of individual brains is coordinated and functions in harmony, the increased energy created through the alliance becomes available for every individual brain in the group.”
Three tips to create your group
Whilst I’ve run groups for sustainability and energy practitioners for over a decade, starting with the Energy Club in 2011, anyone can set up a Mastermind group. It could be a group of local businesses, those on an industrial estate or participants in a sector. The specific type of businesses may not matter so long as the common purpose (to decarbonise) exists.
If you are thinking to set up a group, here are my top three tips to making it work:
Be clear about confidentiality
Be clear that the exchange of information is held within the participants and some information may need to be kept out of bounds. Keep the topic to energy and sustainability improvements within in your estate and you should be fine.
Find members of equivalence
Everyone needs to learn something new; everyone is the teacher; everyone is a student. Make sure your group contains people and organisations who have familiar challenges and objectives that will resonate with the attendees. A small group of the right people is better than a large group of the wrong.
Be committed
Expertise must be shared for expertise to be gained. Be ready to share your insights with your group at every meeting. Everyone is an expert at something, so share it. Don’t be surprised to see expertise flourish from others, back to you, as a result.
Cross-collaboration in a Mastermind group is an essential tool to help you succeed. Without it we’ll duplicate our failures, learn slower, and miss out on techniques to succeed. By accessing this wealth of expertise in a Mastermind group, you’ll speed up your progress, and that of your members, giving all a better chance of hitting the Net Zero deadline.