If You're Going To Do It, Do It Right!

My clients (and friends & family) have all heard me say, "If you're going to spend the time to do it, do it right." I guesss its become kind of a mantra as I got so tired of seeing clients "tick the box" and do activities just so they could share they are doing it, not actually making an impact. But after a bunch of conversations with leaders over the past few weeks, I wanted to share these thoughts about moving forward with your corporate sustainability strategy.

First, Sustainability Is Not a Report. Often, when leaders say, “We need a sustainability person,” what they often mean is: “We need a report.” I hear this all the time. But sustainability is not a job, a department, or a document. It's a set of ongoing activities that should involve every part of an organization, from strategy and operations to finance, data, culture, and communications.

Creating a sustainability strategy and producing a report are two activities in a much larger ecosystem. Treating them as the goal rather than the outcome is where many companies go wrong. A sustainability report is like a financial statement. No company would say, “Our goal is to produce a balance sheet.” The balance sheet is a snapshot of performance, not the business itself. If your primary goal is disclosure, you are optimizing for compliance, not performance. If your focus is impact, resilience, and opportunity, the report becomes a byproduct of doing the work well.

Sustainability is a portfolio of activities, not a single function. When done properly, corporate sustainability includes multiple, distinct types of work. It takes a village. See below:

Strategy & Governance: Defining strategic priorities aligned with business risk and opportunity, integrating climate and social risks into enterprise strategy, setting targets and accountability, and aligning leadership incentives.

Skills required: Strategic Planning, Systems Thinking, Industry Knowledge, Materiality Expertise, Data Governance and Analysis, Regulatory Knowledge, and Organizational Change Management
Must be led by: CEO or member of C suite and executive leadership team, supported by experienced consultants

Measurement, Data & Carbon Accounting: Building greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories, conducting lifecycle assessments (LCAs), tracking energy, water, waste, and supply-chain data, and translating messy inputs into decision-ready insights.

Skills required: Data Analysis & Modeling, Carbon Accounting, Emissions Quantification, LCA methodologies, Software Expertise, Data Collection & Management, Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC): Sustainability Frameworks & Regulations, and Supply Chain Management
Best resourced by: Fractional specialist support to train the internal team - not all skills need to be developed in-house. This is technical work. A short course does not prepare someone for incomplete data, resistant departments, or supplier gaps.

Operations, Facilities & Supply Chain: Improving energy and water efficiency, redesigning and optimizing processes to reduce cost and waste, working with suppliers, and embedding circular economy principles.

Skills: Operations, Supply Chain Management , Circular Engineering, Procurement, Project Management
Best resourced by: Fractional experienced consultants to lead and train internal teams

Finance & Risk: Integrating ESG and climate risk into capital allocation, evaluating ROI, preparing for regulatory and investor scrutiny, and understanding impacts on insurance and cost of capital.

Skills: Finance, Risk Modeling, ESG Financial Planning, Scenario Analysis, Data Analysis, and Reporting
Best resourced by: Fractional experienced consultants to train internal teams

Culture, Communications & Storytelling: Engaging employees, translating technical work into clear narratives, avoiding greenwashing, and shaping behavior, not just awareness.

Skills: communication, organizational change management, HR, storytelling, design
Best resourced by: internal communications and HR teams, supported by sustainability-literate storytellers

Community, Partnerships & Social Impact: Designing programs aligned with business relevance, partnering with NGOs and governments, and measuring outcomes rather than counting activities.

Skills: stakeholder engagement, program design, impact measurement
Best resourced by: internal ownership with partners who understand the local context

Why Experience Matters More Than Certificates

Courses are useful. They build knowledge, introduce common scenarios, players and vocabulary. They do not replace experience. Real sustainability work involves incomplete data, internal resistance, unresponsive suppliers, executives seeking certainty where none exists, and trade-offs that don’t appear in textbooks.

People who have done the work recognize patterns quickly, where data usually breaks, which “quick wins” are distractions, and what resistance looks like before it surfaces. That insight only comes from repetition.

Not every role should be full-time. Not every role should be outsourced. And no single person can do all of this well. But its important to have the right people leading this internally and know how to get employee support across the board (this can't be a "mandate from high") And its equally important to find experienced consultants in your industry (and location) to help establish strategies, plans and transformation. Its highly unlikely that anyone inside your organization has this experience and can optimally lead this work. When I see a CEO ask their legal team or HR leader to become their Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), I'm immediately suspect of the true commitment to transforming the business. If the CSO has no sustainability experience, why would anyone follow them? Would you hire a CEO or CFO who has no functional knowledge? Of course not. Don't have a random person in your organization driving sustainability if they don't know what they're doing.

Decide What You’re Optimizing For (and I've met with leaders fully across this spectrum)

The real question is not “Who writes the report?” It’s:

• Are we checking a box or changing how we operate?

• Do we want a document or better decisions in managing resources, mitigating risk and future-proofing our business?

• Are we focusing on compliance or unlocking opportunity?

Sustainability done right is not cosmetic. It’s operational. Financial. Cultural. Strategic. If you’re going to do it, do it right.