10 Questions a Sustainability Manager Should Be Prepared to Answer
No matter where your company is on its sustainability journey, you will inevitably have to field some tough questions from your CEO or other executives about sustainabity. Here's a cheat-sheet to help you prepare. Read More
There are some questions every sustainability manager or CSO is going to encounter along the way. What’s interesting is that more and more managers are asking these questions of themselves and then are going out to find the answers. In the “early” days (that could be seven years, five years or one year ago depending upon the circumstances), one or more of these questions might show up unexpectedly in your inbox one morning, particularly after your CEO or another executive returned from a thought-provoking conference or trade show.
One measure of success in those days was how quickly you could put together an intelligent response, and so to make it a little easier for companies to get out in front of the tough but inevitable questions for corporate sustainability projects, here are the 10 questions you should be prepared to answer at some point along the sustainability journey of your enterprise.
1. What’s our carbon footprint? Since carbon dioxide has become something of a surrogate for environmental impact, this is the question most executives are asking. Do not be surprised if this question is accompanied by another more academic one, namely “what is a carbon footprint anyway?”
2. How “green” are our products? This question tends to follow very quickly since products are the lifeblood of any company. Again, the likely follow-on is something like “exactly how do we determine if our products are green?” As Greenbiz has reported, the area of product standards and ecolabels is rapidly changing.
3. Where do we stand relative to our competitors? A frame of reference is always important and most companies tend to look to competitors, customers and similar companies (i.e. size, revenue, location, industry) for benchmarks. Thanks to the internet and the growing trend towards corporate reporting, this task of benchmarking has become much easier.
4. How do we become a greener company? This is the question you have been waiting for because it is starting to look and feel like a commitment to enhance sustainability is being made. It is also the most complex in many ways since the answer can literally involve every part of an enterprise and its supply chain. This is also a question that involves both near-term tactics and project management as well as longer-term program development and strategy.
5. How educated and engaged are our employees? This is another question that signals a sustainability journey is maturing since the conversation is expanding beyond the small knot of key managers and executives to the entire workforce. Attaining some real amount of cultural transformation is also extraordinarily challenging in many organizations, particularly larger ones. Your answer to this query should definitely include a recommendation of patience and staying power.
6. Who are our “stakeholders” and what do they think of our performance? The notion that sustainability extends well beyond the boundaries of the corporation and that various groups and individuals care about your performance is often difficult for some executives to accept. On the other hand, “feedback” is a key ingredient in employee development and in customer engagements, so that sort of context may aid the conversation.
7. Which groups do we need to partner with? This is another area where extensive research, benchmarking and some pilot projects is usually in order. Two very effective organizations, say a corporation and a nongovernmental organization, will not necessarily find their collaboration successful.
8. What are our key sustainability metrics? The old adage “what gets measured, gets managed” is still a good start. However, be prepared to educate your colleagues on this subject as well, e.g. a facilities team accustomed to managing its energy spending has to be reoriented to manage kwH and therms. There are also some emerging metrics that bear consideration, e.g. the latest metric in the sustainability field is return on investment (ROI), how much have you saved through sustainability investments. Calculating an aggregate ROI involves some tracking many companies are not currently doing.
9. How do we set improvement goals in this area? This somewhat innocuous question has many implications and also requires a lot of data collection, analysis and planning. What levels can we achieve while growing our business, what will the projects involved cost us, how quickly can we achieve the goals (subtext: if everything goes right) and how will others perceive the goals. One other related question that gets teed up is whether the goal should be absolute or normalized; you should note that U.S. EPA’s Climate Leaders recently announced that its partners must set absolute goals.
10. How do we innovate and offer greener products and services? This again goes to the heart of an enterprise and the answers are sometimes elusive, not surprisingly since innovation is usually the result of a process. Innovation can be encouraged and nurtured, often without a guarantee of success, but resources and a commitment are a good starting point.
These questions reflect the several elements that are essential to a sustainability program: Data gathering, planning and analysis, tactics, target setting, strategy, continuous improvement, design for environment and employee and external engagement. The other lesson for managers in these questions is that they are focused upon your business and cannot be addressed with generalities. That is one reason so many sustainability managers will tell you the most important tool in their toolbox is knowing their companies — who to call, where to look, whom to engage. Undoubtedly some new challenging questions will emerge in this field, but the basics will have continued vitality.
Bruce Klafter is the Managing Director of EHS and the head of Corporate Responsibility & Sustainability at Applied Materials. He also maintains a blog on Applied Materials’ website.
Photo montage includes CC-licensed photos from net_efekt and net9.
