Page 62 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

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“GREEN GLUE”: HR PRACTICES

AND PROCESSES THAT MAKE

SUSTAINABLE VALUES STICK

ZELDA TENENBAUM

SUMMARY

This chapter describes how a company builds a cohesive culture once its
value system is in place. Told from the perspective of Zelda Tenenbaum,
Melaver, Inc.’s outside human resources (HR) consultant for over a
decade, the chapter focuses on the company’s realization, early on, that in
order to be a viable profitable business focused on the health and well-
being of the larger community, it first had to be a self-sustaining commu-
nity or culture in its own right. While a conventional business has a
strategic blueprint that it executes linearly, the green bottom line company
has a greenprint, an integrated approach to building culture that drives its
strategic plan. The focus of this chapter is this greenprint: a disciplined
approach to culture creation through myriad HR processes.
The HR processes addressed are organized around four areas critical to
culture building. Section one considers governance issues such as the shap-
ing of concrete shared values, organizational design, collective envisioning,
empathic leadership, decision making, and shared leadership. Section two
looks at the various rituals that shape a green bottom line culture. Section
three looks at the special language of a green bottom line culture, which
is as much a language of practicing values as it is a tangible language of

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