Page 64 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

HR PRACTICES AND PROCESSES THAT MAKE SUSTAINABLE VALUES STICK 43

Problems and Opportunities

Change. Such a funny thing. It’s everywhere around us, part of our daily lives. A part of
us feels it and resists. And a part of us isn’t even aware of it, so gradually does it seem to
occur. And then blink—we’re part of a new way of thinking and acting and belonging.
And almost as instantaneously, it feels as if this new world has been with us always, like
a well-worn pair of jeans that feels good on us. Did you know that it took the United
States only twelve years to go from a culture where 90 percent of the population rode
horses and only 10 percent drove cars to the reverse? Twelve years. We switched from
using leaded gasoline in our vehicles and unregulated emissions to catalytic converters in
the same span of time. In fifteen years, we replaced vacuum tubes in our radios with tran-
sistors and discarded black and white televisions for color. It took twenty-six years for air
travel to become the dominant means of transportation among cities. And it took forty
years for us to shift from a wood-burning civilization to coal, and then from coal to petro-
leum and nuclear. We forget how fast our culture can change, how fast our culture is
always in the process of changing. Often in the blink of an eye. And part of our forget-
fulness has to do with the strange aptitude we have for assuming that the way things are
now is the way things have been for a very long time.
I find this to be true in my own work as well. I look at Melaver, Inc. today, a com-
pany that still has its challenges to be sure, but one that is made up of a passionate
group of people, working as a team that is collectively and effectively focused on
being a thought and product leader in sustainable real estate. They have been working
cohesively toward realizing that vision for so long now that it feels as if that has
always been the case. It hasn’t. The company’s evolution, which seems so smooth and
effortless in hindsight, has been a painstaking process of managing change internally.
Managing change internally—a multi-year focus on practices and processes to build
community—has enabled the company to promote changes externally in the community at
large. Becoming a company focused on a green bottom line is based on building a strong
culture of community inside the company. For more than ten years, my involvement
with Melaver, Inc. has focused on shaping that strong culture of community and on creat-
ing the green glue that enables sustainable values to stick. This is a story of that green glue.
Consultants typically begin by listening and observing and making assessments. As
I go back through my files, I am reminded of many of the problems—in HR-speak
we call these problems “opportunities”—facing the company in the mid-1990s. If
real estate is all about “location, location, location,” then the problems facing this real
estate company over a decade ago were all about “communication, communication,
communication”:

■ Lack of a well-articulated vision commonly shared by all members of the company.
■ A disconnect between the CEO’s ostensible desire to have everyone share in the
vision and a sense among staff members that at the end of the day, the CEO really
was intent on doing what he wanted.