4 ways for CSOs to build leverage

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” said the Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes. Today’s CSOs have been handed responsibility for moving the world, but not the levers.

The CSO’s old job was telling a story: how the company’s environmental footprint impacted the world’s problems. That was voluntary. It didn’t require audit-ready measurement or financial value creation.

Now there are new lines on the job description, written in bold Sharpie: Ensure compliance. Anticipate and manage risks. Drive revenue. Cut costs.

The expectations are different as well, often because the boss is new: Per Weinreb Group’s recent CSO research, the number of CSOs reporting to Legal has doubled in just two years.

The bigger issue, though, is missing levers. In this column I suggest four ways that sustainability leaders can acquire those levers — or better yet, build their own.

Investment imbalance 

If CSOs are expected to create value and manage risk, how can they deliver without the proper leverage? According to research by Pam Gill-Alabaster, only about one-quarter of sustainability professionals report significant influence over corporate strategy, and only slightly more say that sustainability is fully integrated into company strategy. 

Even in companies that integrate sustainability, power and resources are limited. My analysis of corporate staffing shows that the IT help desk alone often has 12 times the staff of the sustainability function. Just the help desk, not the whole IT department.

High visibility, enterprise-level accountability. Restricted access to the levers needed. That’s a recipe for struggle.

Add this: Even when a major sustainability investment is approved, it’s less than other departments get. I’ve helped make the business case for multiple nine-figure sustainability investments, and even those were modest next to what marketing or R&D commanded in the same year.

Consider the scale. To make the Fortune 500, a company needs at least $7.1 billion in revenue. Marketing budgets average a bit over 7.5 percent of revenue, per Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, so even at the lower end of the Fortune 500, marketing runs around $500 million per year. R&D budgets at the largest companies often run to billions. Sustainability, meanwhile, gets a fraction of that.

How to close the gap 

You can close that gap two ways: lower the expectations or raise your influence. Raising influence is the far better choice. 

If you lower expectations about your impact, you risk sustainability being seen as a box to be checked rather than an integral part of the business. You can’t make real change from that position.

That means earning access to the levers you need. Here are four ways to do that. The first two build the case; the second two convert it into action.

Train your foresight: Foresight generates real value at low cost, because spotting a change sooner almost always saves a lot of money. For a large medical device company I consulted with, six months of additional preparation for a new regulation cut the cost of responding by 40 percent.

Become financially fluent: Quantify sustainability’s financial value and present it in terms that the business already uses. The top barrier sustainability professionals cite, mentioned by 74 percent of respondents to Gill-Alabaster’s survey, is that executives don’t see the business value at all. Other surveys confirm that: According to chief communications officers surveyed by the Page Society, only 25 percent of senior leaders believe climate action is in their company’s best interest.

Be a catalyst: Big transformations happen through influence as much as authority, and CSOs, who start short on authority, need influence most. I recommend two techniques for your catalytic toolkit. First, embed sustainability in a change people want for other reasons. For example, when vendor management wants a new system, have sustainability built into vendor evaluation by default. 

Second, make sustainability an invisible part of standard operations. For example, build sustainability language into how HR hires. Hiring managers can strip it out, but they rarely do. (When management consultancy Russell Reynolds changed the default for their clients, the number of job descriptions with sustainability language increased nine-fold.) 

Recruit allies: Build one-on-one relationships with colleagues in other parts of the company. One CSO made a point of having lunch with a different person every day for her first 90 days. Relationships are what convert a business case into a budget line.

Archimedes knew that moving the world requires a big lever. So earn yours.