Expert Sessions | Community Building with Drew Wilkinson
Earlier this year, we hosted a series of expert learning sessions to help shape a long-term strategy for Work on Climate—one that’s grounded in the realities of an ever-evolving political, social, and economic landscape. These sessions brought together practitioners who have driven real impact by building climate-focused ecosystems, communities, and workforces across a range of sectors and scales.
Our second expert, Drew Wilkinson co-founded Microsoft’s first global employee sustainability community (commonly known as “green teams” and worked on Microsoft’s Connected Communities team for several years, one of the largest corporate Communities of Practice programs in the world with more than 60,000 members and 1,000 volunteers.
The interview with Drew will focus specifically on his leadership of the Sustainability Community of Practice, with 37 chapters around the world.
What was the purpose of the Sustainability Community of Practice?
Officially, the purpose of the Community of Practice was to grow sustainability knowledge in the workforce at Microsoft. It was to create a distributed network of employees so that you could have a place, an environment where peer-to-peer learning could happen, in this case, the sustainability fluency of the Microsoft employees.
Unofficially, the purpose of the community was to get Microsoft to get more serious about sustainability and put more resources into fighting climate change.
For the first two years, it was all about putting pressure on the company from the inside, which was ultimately successful. Microsoft is now widely known as a corporate climate leader, with really big, ambitious sustainability targets. Once that happened, the resources started flowing, and the goal of the community really shifted to exploring the intersection of sustainability with every existing job, and pushing the company to go further, faster than it would on its own, beyond just operational improvements and into its policy work and how its tech was being used by Big Oil. The mission of the community was “to make sustainability part of everybody’s job.”
What were some of the specific ways in which members could engage with each other or with the shared purpose of the community?
The ways that members could engage was either synchronously or asynchronously.
Asynchronously, people use these hyper-scale platforms, like Work on Climate uses Slack, to talk to each other about whatever they’re interested in, whenever they want. It’s an ‘always on’ conversation forum, right? And we did the best we could to make it easy to figure out where to go to have that conversation. So you want to talk about the circular economy? There’s a dedicated place for that. You want to talk about home sustainability and how you can create pollinator gardens? You can go here. You want to learn about Scope 3 carbon emissions? Over here.
And then synchronously, the local chapters would schedule in-person meetups. That could be something like a volunteer tree planting event in your local community. It could also be working with your local stakeholders on the ground in your subsidiary office to make it greener.
… the number one thing the community did was: successfully changed the paradigm of who was allowed to work on sustainability.
What types of leadership did people exercise, and how did you cultivate this leadership to make sure that more people step up?
I guess in organizational psych terms, we had transformational leadership. Some of it was democratic, the inner workings of the sustainability community leadership team, which were very analogous to the way Work on Climate does it. You’ve got roughly 50 volunteers who own programs and have a lot of autonomy and agency within that structure to run those things as they see fit. There was a lot of sort of holocratic leadership style in there.
And other people, like those of us who led the community, were the face of it. You know, we were the ones who were managing all the relationships with the chief sustainability officer and the other executives, making sure that the community’s efforts were aligned to the company’s, making sure we got resources and executive support and maintained that seat at the table. So a little bit of everything.
But what we ultimately tried to do was create an environment where anybody that wanted to, could develop leadership skills. That was one of the ways that we kind of unlocked this flywheel of endless volunteer participation, by tying participation in a community leadership role to your professional development goals.
How did the core team operate the community, and what types of activities were involved?
We realized that there are limits to how effectively you can scale a distributed leadership model with volunteers. The sweet spot seemed to be around 50 to 60. After that, the span of control gets too big, and it gets too hard to herd all the cats in the same direction. So we had these programs that were mostly long-standing. Every single month, there was a single call that the entire community was invited to. And that was like, if you’re only going to do one thing, go to that.
But we also had educational opportunities with sustainability professionals, so you could learn: What is aqua farming? What is carbon sequestration? So there were people who ran those programs continuously, typically for six months at a time.
So for Holly and I and the other folks who were like the leaders of the community at the top, we would also offer: if your manager is not supportive of you doing this work… come to us, we’ll go talk to your manager (if you’re cool with that). We’ll explain to them why this is valuable, why the chief sustainability officer says employees are the center of our sustainability strategy etc to try and unblock them and get official support to volunteer with the community from their manager.
What kinds of impact did this community of practice create for its members, and through the work of its members for Microsoft or out in the world?
We created a peer-to-peer environment where anyone could go from climate curious to full-on climate intrapreneur in whatever flavor they were interested in. We created a place where people could learn about sustainability and then turn that knowledge into something meaningful using the resources of a trillion-dollar tech company. It created a lot of impact, but if I could boil it down to one sentence, the number one thing the community did was: successfully changed the paradigm of who was allowed to work on sustainability.
Prior to the existence of the community, the only people that were allowed to work on it were those who had it in their job title or jobs spec, less than 1%, right? So we successfully changed that narrative and said, no, sustainability is part of everybody’s job.
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Christina Perez
Christina is a Marketing Content Strategist living in the DC Metro area.