The Five Qualities of a Sustainability Professional

Julio F. Campos

In this article, I will discuss what qualities a professional need to work with sustainability.

As a quick internet search results in a fair amount of similar texts, I decided to approach the topic through another bias. Easily someone will find recommendations on the profile considered ideal for acting in sustainability, however, this profile is the profile considered ideal by the corporate market. For this and other reasons, I will not address the profile of the corporate "sustainability" professional.

I will not make a comparison between this professional and the profile sought by the market, a quick search on the internet allows to locate the latter. I leave it to the reader to make this self-critical analysis.

I often see new graduates in various environmental areas unsatisfied with their jobs because they can not execute the proposals they know to be necessary, having to shape themselves to the needs of the company and not to sustainability.

Here then I present the profile of a professional suitably qualified by the academy.

What are the characteristics of a suitably trained professional to work on sustainability then?

- Multidisciplinarity:

Basic fundamental characteristic without which it is not possible to act on the theme. Sustainability involves all areas of knowledge and, since it is obviously impossible to know all of them, it is necessary for the professional to keep constantly in search of new knowledge for himself and to be able to communicate with those in other areas.

The result is the ability to observe a problem through a broad prism, visualizing its most varied implications.

However, since multidisciplinarity is not always correctly understood, it follows an example of non-multidisciplinary training.

Consider the formation of the professional as a tower in which each level represents the acquisition of a new formation/knowledge. Being multidisciplinary implies that you must have training and knowledge that are not linked or derived from those acquired at the previous level (ideally the training should look like an inverted pyramid, but few outside the academy have the time to do so).

Thus, a person graduated in management, in the next level taking an MBA in sustainability (I use the term sustainability in general, because several courses approach the subject), searching for a subject that did not study in his graduation, will not be expanded his knowledge, because it will study the sustainability applied to the administration, the focus of any MBA, and therefore within its area and previous training.

The result is the specialization in which the professional will arrive at a formation, at the top of a pyramid, with much knowledge about very little.

Specialization is the opposite result of multidisciplinarity.

- Systemic understanding:

I have seen constant confusion between systemic and holistic, which are not synonymous. Holistic means having the understanding that what you work is part of something bigger, linked to other issues, to a whole. Systemic goes beyond the holistic, being an integrated way of thinking in which it is known that the results will not be obtained focusing on a point knowing that there is something greater, on the contrary, the systemic one knows that the interrelations between the different points of a problem are at the same time the cause and consequence of these points, and therefore paying attention to only one point of the problem means not fully understanding the problem.

It can be said that while the holistic understands that a coin has three sides, face, crown, and border, but works with only one of them ignoring the others, the systemic works not only with the three, but also with the consequences that one has for with others, and himself and not only in space, but in time.

The complexity of a systemic view is far superior to that of a holistic one.

- Thermodynamic understanding:

You should have noticed that this is a feature not found in any of the texts that point to the ideal profile for a corporate sustainability professional. The reason is the lack of multidisciplinarity.

Thermodynamics is one of the most important bases for working with sustainability, particularly its second law, which defines entropy (in a simple way, wasting energy from a system), and is used in a wide range of fields of study, from economics to ecology.

The reason is simple. Understanding entropy implies understanding how one action affects another since the reduction of entropy (something positive) in one system mandatorily causes an increase in another.

It follows that a positive activity always has negative results, which must be sought and known to the maximum extent possible.

- Critical analysis:

It seems obvious that a sustainability professional needs to be able to critically analyze what is presented to him, but unfortunately, in the market, the opposite is the rule. Often we see professionals accepting and disseminating ideas and proposals which, under a detailed study, do not sustain themselves as resulting in sustainability. This attitude results from a bad qualification, according to the previous items, or, as we will see below, something worse.

- Solid ethical and moral stance: 

The sustainability crisis is the most serious problem that humanity has ever faced and is leading us to extinction. Therefore it is not possible for a professional in the area to allow himself to give up what he knows to be the correct one to satisfy personal needs of recognition or the company in which he works, often looking the other way. It is necessary that the professional's seriousness with the theme is above all else, otherwise, their actions will have negative results for themselves and for all.

- Bonus quality, COURAGE:

The most important of all qualities, and rarest one, courage is what we need the most  today from those who once wanted do make the difference and help the sustainability and leave a better world for our children. Behind every single one so called sustainability professional that  accept to back up a fake (or irrelevant) proposed sustainability actions there is a huge corporation which will use that approval to cause massive damage, or avoid a massive correction.

One may have all previous qualities, but if he's not have the courage to do the right think, stand his ground and say NO, I wont endorse that policy, all the five qualities are useless.

These qualities allow the professional to evaluate in a broad and critical way any proposal on sustainability presented, exposing its strengths and, above all, the negative points that the proposer ignores or hides from the general public.

On the other hand, they will make you persona non grata in most corporate "sustainability" circles, but after all, as a sustainability professional do you want to be taken seriously or be pampered by your peers?




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