Event Details

Engaging Green Skeptics for an Organization's Sustainability Initiatives

Approved for 1.25 Business Management and Strategy HRCI Credits

This presentation will give you a vision of a sustainable enterprise may begin with top leaders, but it must be disseminated throughout the organization to take hold. HR is, therefore, central to an organization's sustainability efforts. Many organizational associates may be skeptical, however, of the need to change for the sake of sustainability. How to engage these people is the topic of this presentation. In the five strategies for engaging green skeptics that I will present, I summarize my experience leading hundreds of business and environmental professionals from skepticism to enthusiasm for sustainable business.

Following this presenta tion, participants will be able to know:

• The five tactics for engaging green skeptics in sustainability initiatives

• How to engage, not avoid, green skeptics, those who do not understand the need for change

• How to use the information for designing effective training programs for employee engagement in sustainability initiatives.

About the Speaker 

Founder and President of Executive Education for the Environment, Trudy Heller shows business leaders how to integrate environmental stewardship into their business models, operations, and competitive strategies. She has worked intensively with executives and staff at Campbell Soup, GE, Lockheed Martin, Merck, REI, and many other firms, and she has spoken and conducted training programs throughout the world – from Canada, the United States and Mexico to the United Kingdom, Ireland and Italy to Russia, Thailand and India.

 An adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, Heller has also been on the business faculty at the Wharton School and at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She regularly presents her findings at academic conferences in the U.S. and abroad.

 Heller speaks on new business models that incentivize companies to reduce the materials and energy used in production as well as on the ways information technologies are enabling green solutions. She explains the role of emerging economies in creating so-called “leapfrog” innovations – how they are different and why they are important. And she engages skeptics, who often believe that business and environmental interests conflict, by describing the many opportunities for business to prosper by providing green solutions.

www.gvfhra.org to register