The primary objective of any corporate or business sustainability strategy is to enhance the risk resilience, continuity, and future growth of the business, in a manner that utilises responsible management and respect for people and their environments.
However, many organisations venturing into sustainability makes the fundamental mistake of viewing it either as a ‘good cause’ for their philanthropy, a PR program that proclaims their virtue, or a more attractive phrase to replace the unexciting IS14001 environmental management system (EMS) already in place.
Sustainability management in business has a greater function than gloss, PR, and process. Its primary goal is to add an additional layer of efficiency and enterprise risk management into the business, as it integrates with, enhances, and improves the basic leadership and economic governance. If led well it can become a powerful business model to drive forward an organisation’s internal culture, its decision-making and risk management. The expression commonly used is ‘future-fit.’
Note the careful use of the words ‘decision-making’, ‘risk management and ‘culture’. The responsibility for these lies with the organisation’s senior leadership team. They, therefore, play a critical underpinning role in a business’s sustainability strategy – it isn’t something that is left to a group of mid-level employees!
All strategies need focus and a corporate purpose!
Far too many, start off with good intentions and soon get lost, their sustainability progress stalling as they find they find themselves trying to swim in too many directions trying to tick all the boxes in the various ESG and CSR standards.
The answer, focus on your priority needs first!
You cannot do everything, for all people and for all environments, so stop, prioritise, and adopt a more strategic approach that aligns with your business needs.
I know from experience that in far too many organisations, prioritisation is dictated by short-term firefighting arising from internal organisational chaos, the scenarios repeat often and as an experienced leader you generally know where the fires are and what the solution is. Sustainability management takes a subtle more long-term view of the business, seeking to identify emerging trends and issues that could cause a business to flounder and even fail! Seeking to substitute the unsustainable, unethical, or deplorable ahead of your competitors and before they threaten the organisation’s brand, reputation and standing amongst stakeholders.
You may care a lot for a specific environmental or social cause, but you must focus on what is business-critical in the long term.
You can be easily seduced by some of the popular environmental campaigns out there. Yes, they are important but do they have a strict relationship to your business. If you are disgorging microplastics into the ocean, have a personal vendetta against dolphins, the Amazon, or socially disadvantaged people, then perhaps these should be your priority. For the rest of you (I hope) prioritisation will be simpler: Identify the areas in which your sustainability performance is weakest, costing you, dropping efficiency or materially unsustainable and start to rank them in order of business priority.
Try using Stephen Covey’s 4 box ranking method to map out and clarify your findings. Those marked both urgent and important are obviously going to be on the priority list.
This is a good starting point but has limits as a scoping model and as a driver for future organisational culture change. It simply lacks sufficient strategic consideration as a promoter for business growth.
Within the issues that you will have identified, all will have some degree of potential for improvement, risk reduction or better sustainability governance. All are ultimately important in some way for the future, but amongst them will be 1 or 2 sustainability themes that could deliver a major boost on growth through competitive advantage, customer ‘wow’ or improved efficiency. Focus on those first!
For example, if energy reliance and rising costs threaten the competitiveness of your production facilities, how can you achieve a greater degree of independence from the supply market; if the material is becoming harder to source or access through unstable supply chains, how do you substitute, recover or reduce reliance on it?; and if a dependency on poorly paid migrant labour now threaten the quality of service, production shortages or causes outages through their absence, it may be time to consider a more sustainable working approach.
Often one of the hardest leadership traits is strategizing. In this, I don’t mean the annual forecast developed (but rarely followed) when it is time to prepare the next Corporate Plan. No, the envisioning and setting of long-term objectives, back-casting to ensure you understand the various phases (incremental targets or required investment steps), and then remorselessly driving the plan through to completion. Most businesses leaders are overachievers, more focussed on the immediate and dealing with the ‘now’ of an organisation’s activities. If you really wish to drive long-term benefits from sustainability (and other business) initiatives, you need to prioritise, take time out from the immediate, take decisions that may go against traditional organisational practices and management culture, drop initiatives that lack a sustainable value to make space and allow a longer-term focus on themes that have a greater potential to drive forward a sustainable agenda.
Starting off with the easiest sustainability actions first isn’t leadership, its management, and avoid committing to the basic business model that sustainability seeks to instil internally. If it is a sustainability priority and has the potential for growth, get on with it.
Putting your leadership momentum and drive into achieving a significant challenge across the organisation sends out a clear message that this is firstly a priority for you and that sustainability is firmly on the business agenda.
If you and the team are spending far too much time maintaining old assets, ways of working, tired product lines or declining markets. It saps energy and destroys motivation. Stop, look where new business approaches integrating sustainability approaches can take you – new services, a new customer base and new ranges of innovative products. I see this trait often in patriarchal SME companies, where the founder is still wedded to the concepts that built up the foundations of the current business, but now prevents the 2nd or 3rd generation from bringing their current worldview into the business, often with a wider understanding of sustainability and next-generation brands. A vast amount of time is spent building internal tensions within the business as parties advocate for new strategies and others hold onto the unsustainable ways of the past.
I worked with one board chairman and founder who was determined that their decreasing and ageing customer base would never change their loyalty to their original food product lines. His worldview and certainty over the issue had unfortunately never led him to directly ask the customers what they thought! When presented with more sustainable and locally sourced product variations, the customers were more than happy to retain their brand loyalty but switch their choice, allowing the younger generation within the business to bring through new growth strategies.
Don’t spend your management skills and experience flogging a dead horse, switch mounts and continue the race. Fighting the business advantages of more sustainable approaches may take your time away from adding more profitable racehorses into your business.
Sustainability issues are now too well embedded in finance and within wider society to go away and will only increase as the worlds unsustainable norms increase. Now is the time, for now, business models that expand on the old norms of the time, cost, and quality, and re-interpret how these are embedded within the business.
The are many sustainability actions that can be taken, but to influence a business’s growth, culture, and interfaces with the wider world they must have a clear purpose. A purpose that the leadership team fully understands and has bought into. Setting clear sustainability priorities – priorities that directly relate back to corporate purpose – sends out a clear signal to all that you are doing what is urgent, and not what is green window dressing.
‘After we prioritised our needs and long-term business objectives we steeled on three themes that we wanted to focus on as a business over the next 5 years 1) our energy costs and associated climate impact; 2) the resilience and sustainability of our overseas supply chains; and 3) the innovation culture within the organisation.’
It’s a great start!