How to be a Successful Chief Sustainability Officer

Despite differences between industries, the challenges Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) face are often similar at their core. 

Designing a sustainability strategy, implementing sustainability in wider business strategies and greenwashing are all topics on the table.

Each speaker first explained their most important key skill to being a successful sustainability leader.

“It’s such a cross functional role, there’s so much to do in terms of translating external environments and contexts into what that means for your business context,” Tom explains. 

“The only way you can do that is working across the business. Ultimately, you’re reliant on different parts of the business to deliver sustainability.” 

Hilary says: “Communicating and combining language with intent allows you to cut through the political noise.” 

Olivia’s key advice is to be resilient. “It’s not easy, you have to persuade all kinds of different stakeholders so the ability to keep going, trying things and learning is really key,” she says.

Davide says that leaders need to keep finding energy because “CSO is an incredibly lonely position, there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of expectation”.

Integrating sustainability in business strategy

“From a strategic perspective, sustainability is not just a one dimensional thing, it cuts across all parts of the business,” Olivia explains. 

“All of these parts need to understand the value it can bring to become strategic. If it's a bolt on, it's not going to be strategic. 

Davide says: “Learning about the issues across the business have helped. Speaking their language can help to make sustainability our strategy instead of just mine.

“Supporting existing strategies is fundamentally important” 

Tom agrees that “knowing the business and commercial strategy” is fundamental. 

“If you don’t know that, you’re setting yourself up for a bolt-on. The reality is that often there’s only the capacity to do a certain amount, so you need to focus on the big wins and areas where you can have impact.” 

How to design a sustainability strategy

Davide’s recommendation for creating a sustainability strategy is to “start with the endgame”.

“Start with your vision and purpose, then work backwards to fill the gap.” 

However, Tom argues that short and long term sustainability strategies need to be linked. 

He explains: “We’ve been through a phase of a lot of companies setting long term targets without understanding how they're going to get there. 

“It’s good to have ambitions, but to operationalise those targets and ensure the board and exec team have a clear idea, increments are needed.”

Hilary believes that strategy is about choosing which actions to take instead of doing them all at once, and letting it change is important. 

“It’s not meant to be static, your strategy should be a living, breathing, agile thing,” she says.

Greenwashing and greenhushing

Davide feels that sustainability is “constantly under scrutiny, so you cannot just make claims”. 

Olivia says: “Our main strategy on this is to avoid making claims about sustainability unless they are rooted in data and science and usually small in scope.

“This means not using lazy language like eco travel and being specific and data driven. 

“At the same time, comms teams want to tell a story and need to do it in a way that engages the audience, so constant dialogue with the comms team is needed.”

Tom agrees that working closely with comms and brand teams to ensure language is authentic is crucial, but says he also worries about the flipside: greenhushing.

“I worry that it can grow too much and we can go the other way with too much risk aversion. 

“It’s an interesting balance for organisations, not wanting to greenwash but making sure they can talk about what they're doing.” 

Hilary says: “Greenhushing makes progress invisible. In reality, people are doing the work and not being able to talk about it. 

“If we’re not celebrating successes and talking about the great work we’re doing, it’s a really hard place to be. 

“To counter this we need radical transparency, taking folks along with you on the journey to share not just successes but learnings.”