Managers, What's Your Plan For Climate Change?

Nov 16, 12 | 12:02 am

By Jordan Cohen

In the wake of superstorm Sandy, we've heard story after story about the big infrastructural challenges of disaster response, crisis management, and climate change. And we've heard story after story about the storm's economic toll on supply chains and small businesses. But what about the impact on individual managers?

Climate change doesn't just mean that governments and big companies will need to reassess their risk management, or make their infrastructure more resilient. It means that all of us, as individual managers, will have to figure out how to cope with power outages, damaged facilities, and employee absences - all on very short notice.

While fewer business leader responses to Sandy have been reported in the media, I have heard a wealth of anecdotal evidence since the storm that many were quick to grasp the importance of their response as managers. As a result, these leaders conveyed the strength of leadership and values-based decision making that is commonly recognized as good for business.

Examples I've heard of include senior managers:

• moving in with relatives and offering employees their own homes;
• providing additional transport like car services for employees to get them to where they needed to be;
• temporarily relocating employees to another state;
• renting hotel rooms for staff to use;
• distributing "go-bags" - containing the items they would need during an evacuation - to employees in advance of the hurricane and giving out flashlights during the outages.

In the aftermath of an event like Sandy, leaders have the opportunity not just to do the right thing as human beings and citizens, but to promote employee engagement in their organization, through promoting corporate participation in relief efforts.

There's more… carry on reading the full article "Managers, What's Your Plan For Climate Change?" in the Harvard Business Review Blogs