Why High-ability CEOs Talk about Climate Change Differently from Everyone Else

As a heat dome settles over much of the country, and a giant El Niño bathes the West Coast, it’s worth remembering that climate change is real—despite certain political winds trying to blow the entire issue under the rug. Let me mix these metaphors, please, because this stuff is important and billions of people's lives are being impacted daily. Now a new report reminds us that climate change is so important that it has become a business leadership matter, and how you handle it can reflect your public image.

The study by a business researcher looked into climate-related disclosures in thousands of U.S. mandatory financial filings, and the study points out that, curiously, so far "little is known about why some firms repeatedly use similar climate narratives and others revise them extensively."

The goal was to examine these language habits and map them onto the company CEOs' managerial ability and to examine how strong leadership may play into how companies talk about climate change. The results may surprise you. Analysis showed a strong CEO is positively correlated with repetitive patterns in discussing climate-related matters. The match went deeper than companies simply using similar climate-related wording over and over again, finding that deeper semantic patterns that reflected core meanings and concepts were consistent. 

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.