The Sustainable Leadership 4US™ model is a learning method to facilitate leaders to integrate sustainability into the heart of their organization. It is used for groups of leaders, who bring in and work on breakthrough projects dealing with sustainability issues affecting the company during their learning process.

The Sustainable Leadership 4US™ model (Kellermann/Van den Bergh)

The model starts and revolves around the first P, the leader as a Person, who learns to facilitate his own journey to sustainability as well as the journey of others. The model starts with the development of the leader’s personal vision on sustainability (Head), moves on to his/her internal drive and motivation for sustainability (Heart) and then focuses on his/her ability to enroll partners to co-create together (Hands). The effectiveness of the leader increases by focusing on all three levels in this order. The bigger picture of sustainability and current trends is given on a macro level and the leader learns to translate it to a micro level, so he/she can put it in practice. This learning process is applied to actual business cases and sustainability projects of the leader.

Since the leaders’ purpose is to improve his/her impact on sustainability, his/her learning process is further strengthened by facilitating the leader to develop and apply new habits which foster sustainability. The leader (as a Person within a group) is coached on another three levels to increase his/her positive impact on People, Planet, Prosperity, as applied to his/her project. The Person hereby learns to further develop his/her leadership skills and to apply his/her personal qualities in order to influence the integration of sustainability within the organization as well as on the core business. At the same time, the projects generate a positive visible impact on People, Planet, Prosperity, outside the organization.

The best practices which result from this learning process are shared with each other, thereby providing input for new vision development. A cycle of permanent learning-and-developing-by-doing can thus be created within the organization. The shape of the model as infinity asks the leader to continuously be in development. This way, the impact on the 3P’s become continuously visible within and outside the organizations, on the short and long term. This makes the organization credible and trustworthy again to the outside world. Not only the Person’s habits change, but with more such Persons or sustainable leaders leading by example, they influence together and gradually the corporate culture of the organization to change as well, whereby the culture forms a collective of everyone’s habits.