6 reasons not to hire a chief sustainability officer

So you’ve heard that ‘everyone’ else is getting into the sustainability game, and decide you better get yourself into it as well. What better way than hiring yourself a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO). You instruct the HR director to go out and fine someone. On the face of it this seems like an excellent idea and it may well be an excellent idea, but have you decided who they are and what function they will fill in the company. I thought it might be 'fun' to consider 6 reasons why you shouldn’t hire a chief sustainability officer.

You want an eco-warrior

You want someone that is going to come in and tell you go 100% renewable, use only recycled paper, enforce car-pooling, sourcing all materials locally, etc. There are of course good reasons to consider any of these but are they part of a coherent plan. Before you start sourcing renewable energy have you looked at energy efficiency, before you go after recycle paper have you examined where the largest materials footprint is and where efforts can be best spent. And before your eco-warrior makes too many changes on environmental grounds have you consider the economic and social implications of these decisions?

You want a dictator

You want someone to come in and shake things up: to tell manufacturing to cut water by 90% or to tell sales to cut travel emissions by 50%. But if someone does this it could well cost too much, break employee moral or be a significant distraction. The CSO must be a partner, not a dictator. They must help each function perform in a better way, and can only do this by fully understanding and working with the different departments. The CSO is there to help each department develop their own sustainability plans, so that they will then understand them, feel a sense of ownership of them, and in turn be more likely to drive the plan forward.

You don’t see sustainability as impacting your overall company strategy

You don’t intend to involve the CSO officer in strategy. Sure after all they were just brought in to slash and burn and what has sustainability got to do with thinking and planning for the future (of course at this point you, the CEO should be resigning). If you don’t recognise that sustainability, at its’ core, is about planning and sustaining into the future, you have missed the point.

The CSO should be working with raw material sourcing. For companies dependent on agri-foods, if their raw material supply chains are not supported and managed, there may not be any affordable raw materials to support business as usual no mind future expansion plans. They should be working with R&D, marketing and sales to ensure the products you are producing are meeting a need and hence will be more in demand in the future. They should be working with HR to attract the right type of talent to support the sustainability strategy.

Sure we can take the cost hit for a few years to get the eco-nuts off our back

If you think the CSO will cost the company money, and not lead to a more profitable company, then just save yourself the cost of their salary and give the money to charity. Sustainability, is about sustaining, and I have yet to see a company continue long into the future that spends money year after year on projects with no return. The CSO may not be a profit centre, but it should be carefully monitored that the initiatives introduced have short payback periods and are increasing returns in the profit centres (both short and long term). Again this may involve increasing productivity within your supply chain, reducing cost and weight of packaging, driving manufacturing efficiencies and helping develop products where a demand exists.

You don’t see them as full member of the team

You bring them in but you don’t give them voting rights at the board meetings. You corner them off into the hemp lined office and give them pigeons for communication least their emails have a carbon footprint and transport is by bicycle thus ensuring they never get anywhere or manage to really get under the hood of the business. If you don’t see the CSO position being as central as HR, Finance, Operations, Sales or Marketing than again save yourself the money and don’t hire them.

Sustainability should be managed by all functions and at all levels

And to finish on a slightly more serious note: you have heard that some sustainably mature companies think there is no need for a CSO because sustainability should reside in all areas and operations. This thinking has a lot of truth in it, as one person or one team can’t embed sustainability into an organisation. Sustainability must be core to all decisions and this can’t happen if every person doesn’t consider it in their decision making.

But you can’t expect sustainability to be front of mind for HR, for manufacturing or for sales/procurement. You need a central torch bearer that constantly re-enthuse the various functions and acts as guardian of sustainability. But this person is not just a gate keeper; they are a key component to securing the viability and future of the company. They are the link that ensures the HR, Sales, Manufacturing, Finance, Operations and Procurement sustainability strategies synergise. Without this joined up thinking, there is a significant risk that some of the benefit will be eroded or worse prove counter-productive. For example if you have marketing out talking about the sustainability of your products but procurement isn’t supporting the sustainability strategy there is a significant reputational risk. Or you have a case of manufacturing investing in equipment to drive efficiencies but HR doesn’t bring people in who understand or who wish to get the best out of the equipment, then the additional investment is a drain on the business.

More and more top performing companies are starting to introduce a Chief Sustainability Officer and generating success. I think this is something that all companies of scale should be doing. For those companies that are not large enough to support a new position, someone within the c-suite should have this distinct role included in their job description: ideally this person will be the CEO. After all the CSO could just as easily be called the chief strategy officer, which for my money is one of the key functions of the CEO.