You have your next Big Sustainable Idea, you have your chance in front of the CEO, So Don’t waste the opportunity! Consider these 3 Key Actions before you meet to help convince your CEO to adopt your ESG Initiative. Your strategy is to convince them to invest emotionally and financially in your idea. So, spending some time in preparation can greatly increase your odds of success.
Firstly ‘don’t show up and throw up‘. Too often I have seen young technical experts and managers attempt to pack too much information into a presentation or seek to run through a vast amount of PowerPoint packed slides, each one more complex than the last.
Data overload can never be a successful influencing strategy and during a long strategy meeting when many decisions are being made, it will be a persuasive move. Yes, it demonstrates you know your sustainability issue in-depth, but it doesn’t often trigger a ‘Follow Me!’ response.
I can remember my rising embarrassment at one meeting when after checking my junior colleague’s slide content previously, I realised that over the weekend she had added in about 20 extra slides under her own initiative. As she introduced ‘and now for the next slide’, I remember looking around the Board table and seeing the glazed (but polite) looks each slide was received with. She knew her stuff technically, but the five slides with the critical messages for CEO were lost in translation. Afterwards, she believed she had done a great job, but it was a struggle to regain support from the senior executive group. I learned a lot that day.
Another poor approach when pitching a sustainability or ESG initiative is to present your paper as a “we ought to.” Do this.
Even worse when a junior executive only talks about why ‘they’ want something to occur in the future, this gives out the appearance that their perspective trumps the thoughts, concerns, and strategic priorities of the CEO.
Remember that when you are pitching for resources, support or finance you are one organisational supplicant amongst many competing for these scarce organisational assets. It may be your priority, but you will have to make it theirs to get your desired share of the available cake.
Yes, ESG and sustainability issues are on the side of the angels, may morally be the right move and if carefully out should bring a degree of benefit to the organisation, people, and their environments. That is too simplistic an argument, it needs to be supported by more emotional reasoning about why it should happen. The advice in this Leading Green blog is based on my experience as both a Corporate Sustainability Manager and in coaching developing ESG managers to be better leaders in their profession. We are the new profession on the block, not as clearly defined in the corporate culture as Marketing, Finance, Property Management, etc, so we must act that little bit sharper than other established corporate players.
Your first, and most important action, when bringing up a new ESG topic in discussion with a CEO is to put all your strategic effort into asking probing questions, active listening, and exploring what the CEO considers or knows already about the selected ESG or sustainability issue and why it is an emerging theme. Set aside your agenda or desires for a moment and listen to the CEO’s view of the world.
Start with asking them about their goals and expectations for ESG and sustainability are, what safeguarding concerns they may have and their importance to the organisation, what their timelines and priorities are for ESG, who the relevant people are on the board and in his management team to take up ESG accountabilities, what are different viewpoints around the Board table, even what their own career ambitions are in respect of sustainability leadership, etc.
Only in the final minutes of the time allocated to you raise your approach and provide confirmation of any strategic alignments you have. Conversations such as these are important in building trust between you and the CEO, and your function as a component of the corporate framework. The CEO has been given an opportunity to explore an issue at their own pace and given time to set out their world picture, desires, and opinions. You on the other hand are now well equipped to take the next action,
This next step is difficult for many managers but rewarding if you can achieve it authentically and without any appearance of falsehood. We all have an innate bias and preferences for how the world operates around us, thus it can be difficult to retain an objective stance, reflection, or confirmation of how another person feels, views, or seeks to act on a topic without putting your own individual perspective on the issue.
I have a great weakness for playing the devil’s advocate when debating the merits or strategic value of a desired course of action. In this role O seek to advocate an opposing or unpopular alternative to expose all possible alternatives to a thorough examination. This can be a great route to examining an issue from another’s perspective but does run the risk that you spin the argument in your favour, or deliberately misinterpret the views of another. Take care, you must seek to accurately restate the CEO’s perspective on the topic, simply, and without interpretation or spin. You can position their statements against undeniable facts that support and inform the CEO but keep these to a simple statement or sentence.
What does success sound like? It sounds like the CEO’s verbal agreement with your understanding of their perspective. Without this affirmation, it can be very difficult to move on to the third and final action.
The mindset for this step does not demand that you adopt a Machiavellian persona to trick your CEO into carrying out an ESG action that in onerous for the organisation. No, I still demand high professional and leadership ethics be applied by anyone employed within a senior sustainability role.
Your outlook is that you are seeking to convince your CEO to agree to action or direction of travel that is good for them, in their best interest and that has advantages for the organisation. If what you are about to propose is not aligned with their best interests, back away now and rethink your strategy!
Rule 3: A simple way to propose your initiative is to say, “Your objectives are X, your fears are Y, so I propose you consider doing Z.”
The following story seeks to illustrate the approach I have outlined above and used in my own work.
Whilst working in the electricity industry the issue of leakage from underground oil-filled cables was one of ‘don’t lift and look under that stone’ issues. It was regarded as career suicide by employees, yet it was known that a vast amount of cable oil was being bought and consumed but nobody wanted to know why! As part of our emerging CSR and ESG culture, I felt that the issue had to be addressed if not immediately then sometime soon.
In Action 1 (first understand the CEO’s perspective), I introduced the topic neutrally in one of our regular conversations. I asked a series of open questions about “What do you think are the potential benefits of being the first UK utility to report on oil use in this area?” “How might a step like this benefit or damage our reputation?” “How might it benefit or adversely impact on customers?” “What is your risk appetite corporately for reporting this in the CSR?” “What would you have to comprehend to see this to be of business value?” “What approach do you believe our utility competitors are taking or planning to do, in this area?” “Long-term, do you see the organisation having a sustainable response to this issue, and why or why not?”
He asked a lot of probing questions, looked at the issue from several operational perspectives, and questioned what the current reporting lines were. He talked. I actively listened, scribbled down notes, and separate my bias to resolve the issue from his perspective, his appreciation of risk and his thoughts on future action.
In Actions 2 and 3 (take onboard the CEO’s perspective to their satisfaction, and then Position your initiative strategically in a way that helps the CEO achieve their objectives), I went away and spoke with my environmental management team, benchmarked the CEO’s perspectives against operational practices at all levels of the organisational chain, and asked colleagues involves in the process what were the pros and cons from their perspective and had pilot-tested a few ideas on how the issue should be reported upwards and through which organisational channels it should reach the CEO. Once I felt I could transparently align with the CEO’s perspective I asked to speak with him again on the issue. Thankfully he agreed but proposed a board agenda slot. My idea of a cosy chat went out the window, it was presentation time.
I started the presentation with an “Imagine a future where we are…” and sought to outline all the various visions, opportunities, concerns, and qualms I had heard from the CEO, other managers, and some of the frontline staff on the issue of cable oil leakage. I discussed the reactions to future monitoring and reporting, and set out the positive evidence for adopting this approach, the negative perspectives that would need to be still addressed, and how it aligned with the corporate office’s ESG requirements and objectives that were being considered, and which were likely to be passed down to the CEO in his objectives, and how our operational concerns and past reluctance to report oil loss would be addressed transparently in the CSR report.
Finally, I outlined two case studies I had uncovered to demonstrate the internal advantages and disadvantages.
Case study 1: The story of a recent underground cable failure that had caused extensive disruption to customers
Case study 2: A report on an underground cable that was requiring regular and increasing oil replenishment.
In both cases, we had tracked back their oil refills through stock records (uncovered by accident) that showed a rapidly increasing level of leakage before critical failure in the first case, and the immediate risk of failure in the second case that still had time to be remediated by the maintenance planning team before catastrophic failure.
In the discussion that followed the CEO outlined that what he considered an external problem that he had partially viewed as ‘ignorance is bliss’, had now become an internal opportunity to minimise extended customer outages (one of his KPIs), positive action within the organisations CSR activities, a one-upmanship move on his rival utilities, and a useful asset monitoring approach for critical infrastructure.
As a result, the organisation’s CSR and ESG programme took a significant step forward, there was greater alignment between the environmental and asset management functions, governance and transparency embedded deeper within the corporate culture, a ‘poo in the shoe’ issue had become a business benefit, and the CEO’s priorities, reputation within head office, and importantly his deciding to act had been upheld.
3 Key Actions that help convince a CEO to adopt an ESG Initiative
As I stated at the beginning of the article, when seeking to achieve your share of the internal resources-finance-investment cake, you will have to make it theirs (or find reasons to help others share the benefits) to get your desired slice of the cake.
Remember, great ‘must do’ sustainability or ESG ideas don’t always sell themselves to others internally. It takes an adept sustainability leader to successfully convince a CEO to sometimes lead on sustainability issues.