The conflict of CSR activity between the poles of moral philosophy and economics (Godfrey and Hatch, 2007) was in abundant evidence during this project. At first it was challenging to persuade the category teams to agree to reduce plastic packaging on their products. Key performance indicators set by managers within commercial teams include financial data metrics and a requirement to meet minimum brand standards, yet a lack of specific, measurable KPIs at category buyer level within the commercial function means that there is sometimes a disconnect between the various aspects of the triple bottom line (Cronin et al., 2011). A compliance approach (Cheremisinoff and Ferrante, 1989) is seen as a bare minimum, but those managers that are particularly engaged with CSR activity were more likely to apply discretionary effort to reduce the environmental burden of their product category. Once stakeholders appreciated the Greentailing benefits (Stern and Ander, 2008) to be realised from positive PR stories associated with single use plastic reduction, for example the level of media attention attracted by a plastic-free Easter Eggs campaign, there was more interest in participation, however. This demonstrates how coercive isomorphism can evolve into mimetic or normative isomorphism to drive a convergence of strategy (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) as stakeholders were moved to make such changes not because they felt coercive pressure from me as the packaging strategy leader, or from NGOs, rather they felt mimetic pressures to be seen as leading the ‘green agenda’, or normative pressure because they felt intrinsically that this was the morally right thing to do. Some more sustainability-educated stakeholders even questioned whether reducing plastic was indeed the right thing to do as in some cases it can increase the carbon footprint of packaging. A potential project to switch peanut butter from PET to glass jars was a case in point during the project.
Within this programme of work, the power to affect change is clearly distributed (Bolden, 2011), with Managers seeking conceptual approval from me as the leader within the dyad but, as Managers, taking control of their own work projects to effect change and contribute towards my strategic programme goal. Within this part of the project, social constructionism played a part in developing my persona as the leader of the programme of work (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Hines, 1988, Smircich and Morgan, 1982), whilst networks and distributed power to make a difference were key drivers of stakeholder management. Stakeholders were incentivised to contribute to the project outcomes not because they were within their key performance indicators from a traditional management perspective, but because of the leadership factors at play within the dyadic relationship. I do however feel that there is a divergence from the literature in that I was not seen as a senior leader in the broader sense, but more as a leader on the issues of packaging and plastics, which are very distinct constructs in the minds of the stakeholders involved and may not contribute towards perceptions of me as a leader outside my expert subject matter. I characterised my own stakeholder map according to the six modes of organising described in Alvesson et al. (2017). Leadership is used to convince internal and external stakeholders of the need to reduce plastic packaging, yet autonomy, group work, peer influencing, power and management are all used to this end simultaneously with different stakeholder groupings. I found that whilst senior leaders within the organisation may be willing to accept the greentailing benefits of plastic reduction stories, in practice there is little incentive to cascade management responsibility to delivery teams beneath them, preferring instead to focus on financial metrics such as profit and loss, depth of distribution, and market share. Whilst subordinate leadership in the organisation is operating from within a mindset of moral philosophy, often hierarchical management is restricted to economics.
I also mapped the stakeholders involved in this project according to the power / influence matrix described by Kuster et al., 2015. I found a divergence from the literature in that those stakeholders I had classified as having the most power and influence within the organisation in reality had minimal impact on the outcomes of the project, showing that stakeholder management is indeed often conducted at function level. Thought leadership from subordinates may filter up from lower levels in the hierarchy, but can be subject to misunderstanding. This occurred when the Food CEO advocated for compostable packaging in an external meeting, something which was not supported by the packaging strategy. In an ideal world it would have been preferential to work closely with those in the upper right corner of the power / influence matrix, yet organisational hierarchy often makes this impossible. This might be addressed differently in the future by better utilising the power of networks to summarise stakeholder needs into a few key messages which can then be shared with senior internal stakeholders informally through the New Power effects (Heimans and Timms, 2014) of the Political Arena (Mintzberg, 1985).
The third part of the project was the creation of a strategic direction for packaging. Strategy can be defined in 5 different ways, be it a plan, ploy, pattern, position, or perspective (Mintzberg, 2003). In this project, strategy is defined as a pattern of decisions or actions that move the organisation over time towards a certain direction, in this case away from plastic packaging towards alternatives. This strategy took learnings from the project and incorporated elements from other modules of the MSc to create four strategic pillars for the brand: Protecting Recyclability, Reducing the Environmental Impact of Materials, Cost Effective Compliance with Regulation, and Strategic Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2003). I used transilience mapping techniques to identify areas of open innovation to focus in on (Abernathy and Clark, 1985), and presented our position in the market using a maieutic machine method designed to stimulate inclusion and debate whilst embracing uncertainty (Busco and Quattrone, 2018).
I created the strategic pillars through engagement with the external and internal stakeholders identified in stakeholder mapping (Kuster et at., 2015) and agreed it as a strategic direction for the business by presenting it to internal stakeholders at internal governance meetings and through informal networking methods. In the past I had been unsuccessful at presenting governance papers because I had expected stakeholders to understand complex ideas and plans during the cross-functional governance meeting. I changed my approach this time by finding out who would be at the governance forum and engaging with those members with high power and influence ahead of the forum to answer any questions they had ahead of the governance meeting and build their needs into my presentation. In this way I was able to use the political arena (Mintzberg, 1985) to my advantage by agreeing formal sign-off through organisationally legitimate management channels, but also using leadership (Alvesson et al., 2017) and distributed power (Bolden, 2011) to influence stakeholders to buy into this strategic direction and create a social construction of reality (Berger and Luckman, 1966, Grint, 2005), where I was perceived as the leader on this issue with followers feeling compelled to deliver the strategy notwithstanding the power dynamic of the dyadic relationship or their managerial status within the organisational hierarchy.
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