David Grayson says the most effective CSOs come from the business, so young people wanting to build a career in sustainability need business experience first.
In recent weeks, I have separately met several new Chief Sustainability Officers, Sustainability or Corporate Responsibility Directors. None of these individuals have much previous direct experience of sustainability or responsible business debates. Each of them, however, are successful, senior managers, with broad and long experience in their respective companies. Given the seriousness with which those companies are now treating sustainability, these new appointees are clearly not being given a comfortable final berth before coasting to retirement. Rather, their CEOs have recognized that if sustainability is their business strategy, they need a Chief Sustainability Officer or equivalent who is an experienced manager who understands how to bring about fundamental change in the particular culture and circumstances of their organization, because embedding sustainability is the ultimate change-management programme. They probably also looked for proven team-players comfortable leading “beyond authority.”
I contrast this with the eager students wanting “a career in sustainability,” who – no doubt – leave my office or email exchanges with me a little disappointed by my advice to get business experience first. And I also contrast the outlook for these new Chief Sustainability Officers I have recently met, with the respondents to the GLOBESCAN /Business for Social Responsibility survey last autumn which asked CR / Sustainability directors to rate their degree of interaction and working with other functions in their business. Allowing for BSR’s long-standing and successful work with supply-chains, which probably means the supply-chain relationships are unusually strong, the picture overall of other-department engagement shows just how much work remains to be done to embed sustainability. See chart-reproduced with thanks to Globescan.
Until CEOs and Senior Management Teams see commitment to sustainability as fundamental to a company’s competitiveness and, therefore, as the key driver of innovation and new business development, we will not see the mass of Sustainability / CR specialist teams being able to answer honestly, “5” – extremely close and regular collaboration – to their degree of interaction with every business function.
Incidentally, the Doughty Centre asked similar questions of UK CR professionals at a recent Corporate Responsibility Group meeting in London and found similarly low levels of interaction with Innovation, New Business Development, Marketing, Finance, Investor Relations etc. When we do get high “5s”, it is likely that the company concerned is serious about sustainability being embedded. This is a key recommendation we give to CR directors we mentor through our partnership programme.
If readers are looking for how to start those crucial conversations, a good starting point is to understand what has blocked or enabled previous conversations (the subject of one of our How to guides, ‘How to engage employees in CR’), and to then to appropriately discuss with the right people what are the most material social, environmental and economic impacts (positive as well as negative) of the activities of each business function and of how that part of the business effects the overall impacts of the company. How to map the most material impacts is the subject of the latest Doughty Centre “How-to” Guide, written by our Visiting Fellow Mandy Cormack, to be published in June.
Professor David Grayson CBE is Director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Cranfield School of Management.
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