Why sustainability leadership must go beyond the CSO

There is today a critical and growing demand for leaders who are fully engaged with sustainability, and environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles. Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs), or those leading dedicated sustainability functions, may be tasked with developing and implementing a sustainability strategy. But if they are left to do this in isolation, they are doomed to fail.

Sustainability leadership has to go further, with wider sponsorship at board level to ensure the right culture and vital training is embedded across functions. The risk otherwise, amid today’s many competing business challenges, is that sustainability quickly becomes siloed and ineffective, with insufficient organisational reach to generate enough awareness, let alone business impact.

In this piece, we consider what great sustainability leadership looks like, and some of the ways to go about achieving it.

What is sustainability leadership?

Sustainability leaders may head up a sustainability team, but they may also come from other parts of the business, in which sustainability is not a primary part of their role. What such leaders share is both the passion and ability to sponsor sustainability initiatives, as well as understanding of the importance of bringing in the wider business to implement change.

They play a key role in communicating the importance of sustainability, embedding vital learning programmes, and inspiring people to engage with sustainability initiatives and targets. More than that, they understand the importance of aligning sustainability to business objectives. If successful, the result is sustainability that achieves real business impact, untapping significant new value and growth opportunities.

Such leaders, however, typically face an uphill challenge because the rest of the business isn’t equipped to understand or support this work. Only 3% of executives think their organisations have in place the skills they need to deliver on their sustainability commitments, according to an Economist Impact survey conducted last year.

Upskilling the workforce is therefore vital to building a foundation of critical skills in sustainability. But so is the right leadership approach, which goes beyond any one sustainability leader or team.

Sustainability in the boardroom: A collective endeavour

CSOs, and other sustainability leaders, face a daunting challenge in covering all aspects of sustainability. Not only are such skilled professionals few and far between, but even when they are successfully recruited, we sadly see many businesses wasting such a valuable opportunity by relying far too heavily on these individuals or small teams to do everything alone.

In our experience, the sustainability leadership approach we see working best encompasses five key elements:

1. Understanding the breadth of sustainability leadership: CSOs and Heads of Sustainability may own sustainability projects, manage budget, and drive sustainability training. In our experience, however, further boardroom sponsorship is vital — the CEO, or equivalent, should also be championing the importance of sustainability and sustainability skills training, and they should be communicating that support across the wider business on a regular basis.
2. Plotting out a company’s unique sustainability journey: CSOs play an important role in understanding how sustainability impacts and challenges their type of business, and establishing where it currently stands on the sustainability journey. Such leaders can also use this to present a solid, and actionable, business case in the boardroom, using it as the basis to set objectives and clarify the level of commitment required. Sustainability efforts are long-term in their nature, so any strategy needs to be tailored, and reflect anticipated impact over years, not just months. But this can also help achieve buy-in, if it results in a plan that is seen as both realistic and achievable.
3. Agreeing objectives/outcomes: Whether it’s compliance, risk management, cultural change, capturing growth opportunities, or more likely a mix of the above, the businesses that are most successful in sustainability, identify their key business objectives and align their sustainability and skills-development strategy accordingly. This is only possible, however, if sustainability leaders are fully embedded in board-level strategic decision making with sustainability tightly interwoven into the business’s vision and growth plans.
4. Upskilling the workforce: Leaders also need a groundswell of understanding, support and skills to support strategic efforts. With such a significant skills gap, this meansrolling out sustainability training makes up a significant part of effective sustainability leadership, requiring time and resources to ensure it is properly curated across the business, based on skill gaps and use cases. The results, however, can be transformative, empowering a business from within, mobilising cross-functional sustainability champions, and allowing sustainability leaders maximum agility to meet firm-wide targets.
5. Measuring success: The right learning metrics can then support sustainability leadership, not just by showing how skills are developing (and where gaps need to be filled), but also in demonstrating all-important business impact. At Sustainability Unlocked, we take a holistic approach, which includes the Kirkpatrick Model — a framework for evaluating the business effectiveness and impact of training programmes — as well as measures including Net Promoter Score (NPS), Engagement, and Seat Uptake.

Achieving wider leadership buy-in: The value-creation opportunity

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), in its“Catching The Wave” report of 2024, asked: What are the three things holding companies back on delivering on their sustainability strategy? The top responses were:

1. Short-term thinking
2. Seeing sustainability as a cost
3. Lack of skills

But what could improve performance across all these parameters? Effective leadership.

“Sustainability’s operationalisation is slowed by a shortage of staff at all levels who have the right skills and awareness, including most C-suites and boards…” stated the report. “Internal traction and investment depend heavily on senior leadership’s full and vocal embrace of sustainability’s strategic value.”

The good news, however, is that this same strategic value is a key driver for a business’s wider leadership to embrace sustainability efforts. In a recentMorgan Stanley survey of 300 businesses, 85% of respondents chose value creation as the top reason for delivering on their sustainability commitments — followed by regulatory and then moral obligation.

The business leaders we work with go further: they see sustainability as key to future-proofing their business, making them more resilient, and creating top-line growth, reducing costs, minimising regulatory interventions, attracting and retaining talent, and making the organisation a more credible long-term investment proposition. They see sustainability as a business-transformation opportunity.

Strategy to action: A cultural journey

In our Sustainability Unlocked video Sustainability Leadership in Action,Dr. Birgit Vallmüür, Founder and Managing Director of TitanSwan Ltd., a sustainability leadership consulting firm, shows how great leadership allows sustainability to develop and spread, and become part of the culture.

She suggests, for example, allocating different Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to different board members (ideally depending on personal preferences). Distributing sustainability issues in this way ensures they can be aligned more easily to specific strategies and everyday decision making, rather than issues becoming siloed with one individual. This results in greater business impact.

Similarly, in her video Cultivating a Culture of Sustainability, Birgit considers how an effective top-down approach takes in the historic nature of the business, its recent changes, and current challenges. She provides specific tips for implementation, including:

1. Create a sustainability-focused statement
2. Select a few of the UN SDGs that are aligned with business processes and objectives
3. Make a climate pledge to set a long-term greenhouse gas target
4. Monitor key metrics with targets linked to employee remuneration
5. Distribute surveys among employees to collate ideas on sustainability improvements

As Birgit explains, however, the cultural leap also depends on a bottom-up approach, requiring leaders to encourage collaboration that nurtures a sense of achievement and ownership. In our view, upskilling the workforce is essential to success here. It brings teams together, enabling employees to understand the powerful difference they can make, with the right capabilities, to translate sustainability objectives into action.

It’s about establishing a foundation of understanding and building on it. This means training that clearly communicates scientific concepts, aligns sustainability with data-literacy skills, and gives employees at all levels the skills they need at the right technical level to contribute meaningfully to firm-wide goals.

Leading the way

We work with businesses that are enjoying considerable success in their sustainability efforts. These are the ones in which all business leaders — not just those heading up sustainability — have embraced the very real opportunities a credible sustainability strategy, including workforce-wide skills training, can offer.

This is far beyond meeting regulatory-compliance requirements; it’s about building brand reputation around positive social and environmental change, improving employee engagement and retention, and generating new investment and revenue streams.

The list is long of ways in which the right sustainability strategy, nurtured from the top, can unlock a company’s full potential. This is the time for leaders, in sustainability and beyond, to make their mark in a field that is only going to become more important for the future of our businesses, economy, people and planet.

Discover more

Watch a clip from the video What Do Sustainability Leaders Do, in which Wayne E. Mayer, Ph.D., a Strategic Sustainability Consultant and CEO of When Everything Matters, considers how today’s sustainability leaders must inspire action, challenge conventions and find innovative solutions to pressing environmental and social issues.

Watch the whole video to learn:

• How sustainability leaders drive change and engage people within an organisation
• What behaviours and skills define effective sustainability leadership
• Explore the role of entrepreneurial thinking and adaptability in sustainability leadership