Empowering climate leadership at ScottishPower

From strategy to action

ScottishPower has a comprehensive Sustainable Development Strategy that highlights the role of all employees. Their goal was to connect this strategy with tangible actions, and foster a culture where everyone felt empowered to act on climate change.

To achieve this, ScottishPower decided to run a bespoke climate education programme for their senior team. This ran alongside a complementary carbon literacy training programme for all employees, ensuring that everyone in ScottishPower benefitted from climate training.

Leadership engagement and training

We collaborated with ScottishPower to develop a two phase climate education programme for senior leaders.

Leadership Conversations for CEOs

In the first phase, we ran a climate-themed Leadership Conversations series for the Management Committee, including the Group CEO and CEOs of major business areas. We encouraged participants to take a step back from day-to-day operations and focus on the strategic aspects of ScottishPower’s transition to net zero. We examined how to align the company’s activities to their long-term net zero goals, emphasising practical action, shared responsibility and ownership.

Leading Climate Action for senior managers

In the second phase, we developed a Leading Climate Action programme for 30 colleagues reporting to the Management Committee. The programme included two in-person workshops, with time in-between for participants to develop and implement an ‘action pilot’.

Fostering a culture of strategic thinking, practical action and cross-business collaboration

Encouraging strategic and proactive thinking

By setting aside dedicated time and space, the programme allowed senior leaders to think strategically and proactively about their approach to climate and sustainability, considering long term business implications.

Promoting practical action

Participants were given the motivation, agency and tools to take meaningful climate action within their sphere of influence. Each participant in the senior management programme developed a climate action pilot with detailed plans on budget, timetable, and support needed. Topics included recycling old wind turbine blades and expanding programmes to help customers use energy more efficiently. The pilots demonstrated that action is possible in short time frames, and encouraged experimentation and learning from challenges.

Participants were encouraged to use their action pilot experience to identify a new climate action plan to implement post programme.

Fostering collaboration and idea sharing

The programme brought together leaders from across ScottishPower to exchange ideas. The action pilots fostered a culture of peer support by sharing each other's efforts.

Highlighting climate as a core responsibility

We helped participants recognise that everyone at ScottishPower has a role in tackling climate change. The programme boosted awareness of ScottishPower’s sustainability ambitions, and generated engagement and enthusiasm for climate action.

The climate training programme with the University of Edinburgh Business School really helped us to translate our climate and sustainability ambition into practical action.

It helped us to clear aside the noise of day-to-day work and think proactively about how our long-term approach to climate. The approach adopted by the Business School was super flexible and recognised not only the different starting points that colleagues bought to the training but also the breadth of roles and responsibilities in the room, allowing individuals to make their own connections to climate change and the impact they can have.