Avoid these mistakes to achieve your sustainability goals

In the past two decades, businesses have made great strides in making major commitments to sustainability: 68 percent of C-suite executives say they have developed a robust sustainability plan and 89 percent of large public companies have a net-zero commitment. And yet, a whopping 98 percent of large companies don’t achieve their sustainability goals. 

What’s going on?

In interviews with more than three dozen CSOs as part of our research for How to Set Sustainability Strategy in 2025, we found that leaders are proud of their programs and progress. Most CSOs interviewed believe their boards and C-suite leaders have made a good-faith commitment to sustainability. But they generally agree – we’re not creating real impact for people, planet or profit at scale. 

Our research finds that seven indicators of poor sustainability tension management (STM) hinders the ability of leaders to work through high-value tradeoffs that appear in conflict. When practiced well, STM limits growing conflicts in corporate sustainability and strengthens business. We observe that in many companies, these indicators underpin and therefore undermine the ability of companies to achieve their sustainability goals for people, planet or profit. 

Seven (deadly) indicators 

• A focus on performative compliance. Companies can respond to reporting and rating frameworks in a way that looks thorough. However, research finds discrepancies between disclosures and actual performance. For example, some companies have used reporting to avoid full implementation of anti-bribery regulations.
• A focus on sustainability parameters. Often these are known as “dials that can be turned up and down to change performance without altering the structure of the larger system.” An example of this is turning corporate headquarters into a model of sustainability practice with the adoption of renewable energy features without driving the practice into the rest of the enterprise. 
• Trading the achievable for the challenging. Imagine a major retailer that, instead of addressing the top priority concerns that stakeholders raise related to labor rights, instead promotes waste reduction. That’s what we’re talking about here. 
• Falling in love with programs, not solutions and impact. We observe sustainability teams becoming committed to reporting frameworks, standard systems, rating questionnaires and other programmatic activities they do. These are tasks and means to an end but not the end itself.  
• Measuring for reporting, not management. This is when the vast amount of data used for reporting becomes viewed as a box-checking exercise, rather than as information critical for effective and productive sustainable management. Research finds that sustainability reporting spending exceeds that of sustainability innovation by 43 percent. Many organizations are approaching sustainability as an accounting or reporting exercise rather than a transformation play.
• Keeping sustainability metrics separate from business KPIs. Sustainability is often viewed by C-suite leaders as distinct from conventional business activity, and thus its KPIs will run on a separate track without integrating into the high-priority business KPIs such as share price, revenue and costs. Sustainability professionals may amplify these tendencies if they’re too focused on advocating for impact and don’t take the time to make a sustainability business case.
• Keeping sustainability performance incentives vaguely defined. Very few staff will possess true incentives that drive them to achieve excellent sustainability results. We observe that pay-related performance incentives for executives and managers remain the exception, not the norm. Sustainability team members often don’t have performance incentives to drive sustainability into the business.

Resetting goal expectations

The ability of a company to effectively practice tension management helps it identify and avoid the seven (deadly) indicators, and determines the quality of its sustainability performance. In this way, companies can make explicit decisions to pursue sweet spots where economic, environmental and social goals align. Just as important, STM will help companies honestly determine when they must make tradeoffs. Sometimes this means economic decisions prevail. Other times social or environmental considerations will prevail. Acknowledging and embracing these tensions runs contrary to much of the accepted dogma in the space, captured in common statements that we hear at nearly every sustainability conference we attend, such as, there are always “win-wins,” and “sustainability is a journey,” implying a reachable destination, or “the role of sustainability professionals will sunset once the mindset is baked into the company’s DNA.”

The tension between competing values, interests and outcomes will always exist. Even when a company builds sweet spots where economic, environmental and social concerns find an equilibrium, or where addressing societal issues leads to economic success, the dynamic nature of markets, societal needs and environmental concerns will always present new challenges. Thus, sustainability is not a destination; it’s a process and path, and that path, full of tensions and tradeoffs, is the goal.

Unless companies make tension management expertise an urgent, competitive priority central to the way they win, they won’t make real progress on sustainability. They’ll also miss out on its huge financial potential, fail to manage its risks, and the business, planet and people will suffer as a result.

Just as companies embrace philosophies such as Lean Management, Good-to-Great, Six Sigma, Total Quality and others, sustainability tension management as it pertains to economic, social and environmental concerns can become a discipline that shapes decision-making, leadership strategies and talent development throughout the enterprise.