Coaching for Sustainability: Elevating Individual Performance to Strengthen Business Resilience

Like most companies, Energy Sciences sets yearly strategic objectives to guide our growth and impact. The clearer our goals, the more effective our planning, and the more likely we are to achieve what we set out to do. Many of these goals are rooted in continuous improvement, a cornerstone of our culture. Through ongoing review and refinement of our business practices we enhance both our efficiency and effectiveness.

Sustainable business practices require more than operational excellence as they demand intention, preparation, and a commitment to delivering long-term value. At Energy Sciences, sustainability means reducing environmental impact, supporting social equity and community wellbeing, and maintaining financial resilience. It’s about aligning short-term actions with long-term viability.

The individuals that make up our team are at the heart of our sustainability strategy. As an energy management consulting company, our success depends on the strength and adaptability of our people. That is why we invest in both technical and soft skill development. While technical skills are straightforward in nature, soft skills, such as communication, collaboration, and emotional intelligence, are harder to quantify but are essential to building a high-performing, innovative team.

One of our most enduring and transformative partnerships in this work has been with Michele Clay of Mark Kamin & Associates, Inc. (MKA). MKA is an international learning and development firm transforming the world’s most impactful leaders and organizations.  In 2025, they received Inc. Magazine’s highest business honor for Excellence in business and named a 2025 Inc. Magazine Power Partner.

Since 2016, Michele has delivered individualized coaching, team development initiatives, and leadership training that have strengthened our organizational capacity and reinforced our identity as a values-driven enterprise. The MKA approach fully and seamlessly aligns with our commitment to conscious leadership and human-centered organizational strategy.

To mark a decade of collaboration, we asked Michele to share her perspective on coaching and sustainability.

ES: The world is currently experiencing a season of rapid change, digital transformation, and increasing complex landscape. Challenges now demand adaptive leadership and emotional intelligence. From your perspective, what are the current challenges leaders are facing?

MC: From my perspective – the biggest challenge leaders face is the unwillingness to take 100% responsibility for the performance of their company and teams; but this does not make clear what I mean, so let’s make it clearer:

First, the “world” says there is an unprecedented combination of speed, complexity, and uncertainty. We say, there are some fundamental critical elements – that if in place – an cause business to work (create workability, and thus, high-performance, and thus, unprecedented results) no matter the circumstances. 

We have been in business successfully close to 45 years, which includes multiple eras of economic uncertainty, where we caused our firm and our clients’ businesses to thrive despite the circumstances of those economic “uncertainties”.

Our work builds integrity into the culture as a platform for performance; and train teams in communication as the vehicle for effective coordinated action; and show leaders and teams how to end self-sabotage.

When those things are in place – speed and complexity are simple to manage.  This other area of “uncertainty” is our playground – it is all opportunity; and I would assert, is the domain in which Energy Sciences flourishes. 

Our firm’s approach to uncertainty is to shift your attention to the future.  In other words, instead of being arrested by fear and anxiety, start to look at what’s possible and what you and your team can get behind (the future you are committed to) creating.  When you do that, i.e., start to deal with your strategic objectives from that future – you get your present-day aligned and fired-up!

The next thing to look at is what we say is the greatest misstep leaders make is trying to create a culture based on a new future without making sure your team is connected to and honoring their word with each other – which is how we define communication and integrity.  This is like building a house of straw on sand.  It doesn’t work.

The process of establishing deep connection (what we call extraordinary communication) and reliability (a function of integrity) absolutely includes your making sure your team cleans up communication and integrity issues from the past.  We train how to do that and get most of the messes cleaned up during the training and it is nothing short of miraculous; people gain credibility and trust with each other through our process.  This starts to create the platform of integrity on which to create and build the future. 

When you have a platform of integrity, people can take responsibility for not just themselves, but for everything.  People give up being victims and start to make the right kinds of things happen in the company at every level, not just at the top.  Leaders and teams start to connect with and honor each other rather than undermining, gossiping, giving orders, resenting, and sabotaging themselves and each other – all a result of people taking ownership and operating as partners toward a common future.

The biggest mistake leaders make are the ever-expanding demands of their teams based on unclear and obscure goals or objectives while leapfrogging over damage from the past and what is happening “in reality” with their teams.  This creates a distortion of reality in companies and makes for toxic environments and mediocre or abysmal results.

The way we distinguish responsibility for people transforms people from victims into leaders.  People choose to be responsible and clean-up messes, even if they did not cause the messes, because they say so – they take a stand for what’s possible. Leadership.

ES: How are those challenges different from ten years ago?

MC: Today, it may seem disruption is constant rather than episodic, and that the pace of change outstrips traditional planning cycles.

For a planning cycle to be outstripped, you must have an established planning cycle. One of the reasons people engage with us is because of their need for a plan or a failing, stalled or plateaued plan – but people get stuck in that process no matter where they are at with it. 

We organize our clients to operate in the present from their future-based strategic objectives. We train to plan your Future From the Future™, and train in our Operating States model – so the ability to pivot, adapt and expand capacities is built-in.  That is where my relationship with Energy Sciences began.

ES: We have found that coaching fosters self-awareness, resilience, and strategic thinking. How can coaching help leaders develop themselves to address the challenges they face?

MC: First, in my opinion, if you are human, you are a leader.  Our work is based in brain science, and how I say it is, we humans go through life mostly unconsciously.  Our coaching at MKA has you get conscious to what is running you unconsciously and leaves you with a “say” in your life and the future.  When you have a say in your own life and future, you have something to say about the business and the people you lead.  Ownership and accountability show up and challenges show up like opportunity – and you are not only ready for it – but your mindset is also “bring it on!”

Everything we address leads back to being 100% responsible for yourself and your life.  No one can make you responsible, it is a choice and a privilege you give yourself.  Getting people to get that it is a choice is a privilege of my being a trusted coach and advisor.

ES: Effective leaders drive sustainability by modeling values, engaging teams, and making decisions that consider long-term impact. How does coaching develop a sustainable mindset?

MC: Coaching does not provide answers, nor does it tell you what to do.  Good coaching points you in a direction you didn’t know was a direction you could be pointed; in other words, good coaching has you see something new, reveals and un-conceals that which was hidden from your view.  It gives you access to your blind spots.

In our approach, we get our clients organized around excellence, and we work with you to develop and build a muscle to “distinguish” – you empower yourself to keep going, moving forward, extending, and surpassing what was possible; this is a large part of how we distinguish “excellence”.  Notice the word excellence has the word “excel” in it (go look up the definition of excel).  When you are organized around excellence, sustainability is built in.

ES: In what ways can elevating our own effectiveness as leaders contribute to sustainable business practices?

MC: You just asked a question about mindset – it starts there.  The context you are operating from shapes everything; and you must look at that.  You must also get yourself in reality.  Human beings mostly walk around asleep, not connected to themselves, others or reality.  We transform that so people are deeply connected.  Connection is essential to team.  You can’t have a team if people aren’t connected. 

What every organization wants, though they don’t know it, is “team” as a culture. They want a culture where people love to be there.  Does not mean the company becomes a doormat – no no!!! We alter people’s relationship with fulfilling their accountabilities.  It’s shocking the degree to which people don’t even have clear accountabilities.  And for sure people have a very weak relationship with their word and how to honor their word.   We show people how to live as their word and operate in an organization where there is a commitment to fulfilling accountabilities and being their word.        

WHY?

Because everything goes up – all metrics – all results, including people’s personal lives.  Everything gets better when people operate with real integrity.  This produces a culture where people love where they work.  It’s easy to train for great service when people love where they work.

ES: Michele, you have shared that what is deeply fulfilling for you is empowering leaders to unlock their full potential. Please expand on this and include the most rewarding aspects of your career?

MC: The great joy of my life and my fulfillment is in both getting deeply connected to people and engaging with them in the hardest work of all, which is to look at and confront yourself authentically.  Our methodology for this undertaking is exceptional, and people come alive, and all manner of new things become possible: things they’ve given up on, things they refused to deal with, things they’ve been avoiding, ignoring or neglecting, things they would never even allow themselves to think or dream about – and that is what I love about this work – people transform and end up in trajectories and producing unprecedented results that impact themselves, their business, their teams, their finances, their parents, their spouse and children (if they have them), and all of their future possibilities.

It is a sacred trust I have with my clients; and its lifelong.  Our client’s stick around; when you have the experience and honor of being heard and known – you don’t want to leave that.  And that is what we produce in teams.  We create cultures where people love to be there, and this includes our relationship with our clients.

I have invested decades (and continue to) in developing myself; I am the living expression of our work, honored and empowered to deliver it while profoundly supporting my clients’ success.

I can see instantly what someone is capable of, their potential, their commitments – and I can see where they are stopped and stuck – and I am ruthlessly committed and compassionate to their “discovering” who they really are and what is really possible, unbound by the past.

This article reflects Energy Sciences’ belief that sustainability begins with people. By investing in coaching, we not only enhance individual performance and development, we build a resilient, values-driven organization prepared to meet the challenges of tomorrow.