The sustainability / profitability trade-off myth

Hello!

Lots of the business leaders I speak with are passionate about making a meaningful impact and feel the urgency around climate change and the other global issues we’re grappling with.?

But when it comes to actually delivering change in their business they struggle – they feel like they’re pushing water uphill, find it hard to influence other people on the senior leadership team, often being seen as a lone voice or even a ‘hippie eco warrior’. It can feel like making progress on sustainability / responsible business / impact is at odds with core business priorities.

And so in this month’s newsletter, I’ll share one way of addressing this.

Before I do, I have an ask of you… I’ll be starting to work on my impact report soon, and would love to know what changes you’ve made since reading this newsletter or seeing my other content! Please DM me or drop me an email ([email protected] ) to let me know. Thank you!

There’s a common perception that there’s a trade-off between sustainability and financial returns.?

Is this something you’ve grappled with in your business?

Sustainability is seen as a bolt on. Or a compliance activity. It’s seen as a cost, not a value add – and so there’s a perceived trade-off between profit and making progress.?

This often means sustainability slips down the priority list. And it can make creating and delivering a plan difficult. It feels like it’s being layered on top of everything else.?

We worked with a rapidly growing business where anything that wasn’t core to the business struggled to make progress. They struggled to see how they could deliver a sustainability plan when everyone was so stretched already.

Through our planning work with them, we helped them see:

• That they were already doing a lot of sustainability-related work, it just wasn’t being labelled that – especially the work their People team was doing.
• How delivering on a focused set of sustainability activities could help them step into new markets and win new clients, especially within the public sector.
• How sustainability created the potential for new service offerings and so new revenue streams.

Joining the dots between people, commercial and sustainability plans brought clarity and removed the perceived trade off. This made it much easier for them to move forward and make progress, even when they had limited resources.

Connecting your overarching business strategy and commercial objectives with your sustainability plan makes it much more likely that you will deliver impact at scale because the impact you have and your other measures of business success reinforce each other.

This month I encourage you to ask yourself:

How might we align our overarching business strategy and our sustainability / responsible business strategy so that they are mutually reinforcing?

If you want to learn more about aligning your sustainability / responsible business strategy with your core business strategy, together with other strategies for how to create a sustainability plan that actually gets delivered, then come along to our free seminar:

Build a Sustainability Plan that Delivers Real Change: Five Practical Strategies for Senior Executives

RESERVE YOUR PLACE HERE

Want to see examples of businesses that are integrating positive impact into what they do and how they do it? Don’t forget to check out my Impact Report Reviews series .

At the ICAEW Sustainability in Practice event on 3rd July, Nicky Leach and I will be running a workshop on transition planning and turning commitments and plans into action that delivers meaningful change. Sign up here .

Have you booked your ticket for Louder Than Words, the B Corp Festival being held in Oxford in September? Nicky and I will be there! Find out more here .

As always, let me?know?([email protected] ) what you'd like me to include in future editions of the newsletter. What help do you need to turn your commitments and plans into action that delivers meaningful impact?

PS Don’t forget to sign up for our free seminar to get five practical tips on how to create a sustainability plan that delivers real change.

PPS Please let me know what changes have you made off the back of this newsletter or my other content! Drop me DM or an email ([email protected] ) to let me know.