Sustainable Leadership: Analyzing Adidas's Change Management Report

This report analyzes the sustainable leadership practices of Adidas, examining the external and internal forces driving change within the organization. It highlights Adidas's shift towards sustainability, including changes in supply chain and production processes, driven by social, political, and environmental factors. Internal forces such as a new mission, vision, and leadership also played a crucial role. The report details the change process, including identifying the need for change, preparing for it, managing it, and reinforcing it, while also addressing challenges like resistance from employees, suppliers, and difficulties in meeting consumer expectations. The analysis references Adidas's commitment to sustainable practices, its impact on stakeholders, and the strategies employed to mitigate resistance to change, providing a comprehensive overview of Adidas's journey towards sustainable leadership. The report references academic sources to support its claims.

RUNNING HEAD: SUSTAINABLE LEADERSHIP
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Sustainable Leadership

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Executive Summary
This report aimed to analyze the external and internal forces that lead to change for
organizations. This report highlights the changes that Adidas adopted related to sustainability.
Further, the role of leadership is identified in Adidas in order to deal with changes.
Moreover, this report discuss about external factors that lead to change in Adidas are political
factors, environmental factors, and social factors. Internal factors are the value system, new
mission, and leadership. At last change process and challenges to resistance to change are
identified.

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Changes
A leader plays an important role in bringing change and to implement change in a
way so that people can accept it. Adidas is a well-renowned brand in the clothing industry.
Recently the company scored highest in the category of sustainability cotton 2020. The
biggest change that the company followed include the change in the supply chain and
production process by shifting to sustainable cotton policies and by focusing on human rights
(Danigelis,2020).
External forces
The reason behind these changes was the changing mindset of people, pressure of
governments across the globe and environmental factors at the global level. These three
factors drove Adidas to change its policies and practices. As with Adidas other players like
H&M and Ikea were also ranked near the top (Danigelis,2020). Adidas believe that the
bigger the company, the bigger the value chain and the bigger the impact. However, the
company mainly affected by social factors, political factors and environmental factors at the
global platform. Social factors include sportspersons and athletes' concern about sustainable
clothing; political factors include a focus of government on the use of sustainable cotton
rather than conventional cotton and at last increasing negative impact of the clothing industry
on the society and environment (Danziger,2020).
Internal forces
The internal forces that led to changes in the production process and supply chain of
the company were the new mission and vision of Adidas, value system and new leadership.
Adidas is a sportswear manufacturer which is operating for the last sixty years (Crasto,2020).
Adidas' mission is “to be a leader with a focus on sustainable business practices”

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(Epstein,2018). Due to change in its mission the company strives to change its policies. On
the other side, the new leadership framework was the force behind the changes as CEO
Kasper Rorsted focused on fulfilling global customer demand in a sustainable manner
(Danziger,2020). This indicates that leader vision and mindset is a major force that drives an
organization towards sustainability.
Change Process
According to Hayes (2018), change is a process that includes four stages that are
identifying a need for change or drivers of change, preparing for change, managing change
and reinforcing change. Adidas' new business strategy focused on the production of
sustainable products and for that, the company changes its supply chain, formed partnerships
to reduce environmental impact for that 99% of cotton sourced from around the world was
better cotton (Danigelis,2020). These initiatives impacted stakeholders of the company
mainly employees and suppliers and led to resistance. In order to cope up with the resistance
to change leader adopted various ways such as providing training, communicating with
suppliers and motivate employees to accept the change (Crasto, 2020).
Resistance to Change
The most important facets of change are resistance to change. It is the nature of
humans to counteract any changes and maintain the status quo (Hayes,2018). Adidas face
challenges in implementing change such as resistance from employees and from suppliers,
increasing the cost of production and difficulty in meeting consumer expectations. The social
factors and human resources are the factors that led to resistance to change and it became
difficult for the company to convince employees to accept new vision, policies, and processes
(Crasto,2020). Further, the company is also lacking behind fulfilling customer expectations in
the sportswear industry with its sustainable practices and policies (Danigelis,2020).

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References
Crasto, S. G., Kee, D. M. H., Xin, C. W., Juin, H. X., Man, L. K., & Pandey, D. (2020).
Product innovation by Adidas Group through Sustainability. Journal of the
community development in Asia, 3(1), 1-7.
Danigelis, A.,2020. Adidas Tops New sustainable cotton ranking for 2020. Retrieved from:
https://www.environmentalleader.com/2020/02/adidas-sustainable-cotton-ranking-
2020/
Danziger, P.,2020. Adidas challenges the fashion industry in sustainability, pledging only
recycled plastic by 2024. Retrieved from:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2019/07/18/adidas-challenges-the-fashion-
industry-in-sustainability-pledging-only-recycled--plastic-by-2024/#6c6bad0b1049
Epstein, M. J. (2018). Making sustainability work: Best practices in managing and measuring
corporate social, environmental and economic impacts. Routledge.
Hayes, J. (2018). The theory and practice of change management. Palgrave.