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Setting CSOs up for success in an era of pushback

How sustainability leaders can find sweet spot alignment among profit, planet and people. Read More

(Updated on February 5, 2025)
Effective CSOs learn to become experts in tradeoff analysis to find sweet spots between profit, people and planet. Source: Antoine Desage/Shutterstock

What’s the biggest factor that determines the success of CSOs and their teams? Research finds it’s the quality and support of their C-suites. Unfortunately, C-suite support varies and in too many instances, communications between the C-suite and sustainability team remains polite, but distant.

Although more than half of Fortune 500 companies have a CSO or equivalent, studies find inconsistent performance from CSOs and their teams. What’s more, progress moves slowly. It takes effective CSOs on average three to four years to move the needle. One CSO told us, “Many CSOs haven’t been exposed to C-suite culture and they don’t know how to hang with the C-suite. The best CSOs find out what motivates them.”  

The good news is that evidence suggests creating a CSO role correlates with superior financial performance, as measured by return on assets. “A CSO should future-proof the business for change,” one CSO noted.

To be sure, it’s not fair to put the blame for inconsistent performance at the feet of C-suites or CSOs. Sustainability challenges result from decades of misconceptions, mismanagement and unintended consequences across civil society, government and business. Moreover, as burgeoning regulations threaten to push sustainability to the side as a compliance and reporting exercise, the ability of a compliance-focused sustainability team to make real impact could decrease. Large corporations are experts in finding ways to comply without fundamentally deviating from the status quo of current practices and outcomes. But taking such tacks could exacerbate risks, worsen societal impacts and tarnish the company’s and the field’s reputation.

Finding sweet spot alignment

One of the most significant impediments to advancing sustainability is that companies want to have their cake and eat it, too. They haven’t made tough choices and managed tensions between differing visions of success. CSOs need to help usher companies through a process to identify what they want from sustainability – you can’t hit a target you can’t see. “We have been ignored for so long and this has gone from zero to hero too fast,” one CSO said. “We have had everything thrown at us all at once. It’s not clear what the priority is and what needs to be done first.”

We recently interviewed more than 40 CSOs and complemented that with research into leading practices. We’ve found that for effective CSOs, the role is less about managing the corporate footprint, reporting and compliance. Instead, CSOs need to become experts in what we call “sustainability tension management,” which we explain in detail in a forthcoming report. These leaders work to understand how sweet spot alignment among profit, planet and people comes together, gauge the potential of “sweet spot strategies,” implement them and measure results. Where sweet spots don’t exist, leaders can become experts in “tradeoff analysis” to assess when it’s necessary to advance environmental and social performance at the expense of economic performance or vice versa. They search to see if longer-term solutions exist that might resolve such tensions. These are not easy tasks and, understandably, most C-suite executives lack experience or training in this kind of thinking.  

Mending a trust gap

CSOs understand that C-suite leaders get frustrated when sustainability teams can’t adequately articulate the financial and competitive value of sustainability in ways that lead to actionable decisions. This often leads to a trust gap, which is critical given many corporate leaders haven’t accepted the core premise of sustainability efforts: that the interdependence of economic, environmental, social and governance issues is increasing. Resisting this trend increases risk and misses the potential financial and competitive value sustainability can bring.

Also contributing to the trust gap is the fact that corporate leaders, CSOs and other internal stakeholders often take on personality archetypes for the kind of sustainability company their business exemplifies. These often-unstated positions drive decisions such as who they hire, what incentives they provide, and what they commit to. When leaders, the sustainability team, business lines and staff functions misalign in their understanding of why the company is engaging in sustainability in the first place, it creates confusion, misdirection and underperformance that limits impact and results that would benefit profit, people and planet.

This misalignment creates an incredibly complex role for the CSO and sustainability team. They must build multi-disciplinary expertise to effectively support every business line and staff function across a global enterprise. In today’s ambiguous and complex operating environment, all leaders need to manage tensions across the business in a multi-dimensional way rather than in the traditional hub-and-spoke structure most corporate roles were originally designed for.

No role exemplifies this quite as starkly as that of the CSO, which makes hiring the CSO and their team a difficult process. Finding the right mix of expertise and business acumen is the Goldilocks challenge of sustainability hiring. Rather than a traditional hub-and-spoke model in which CSOs try to offer expertise, make demands and trade favors, leading CSOs strive to build an interconnected network within an ecosystem. They help their colleagues build sustainability tension management expertise. They work through a process to identify and engage key stakeholders; understand archetypes underpinning the sustainability decisions leaders make; build strategies that align and integrate with strategic business priorities; set clear business case objectives for sustainability; and test sustainability activities to determine if they’re delivering sweet spot returns for profit, people and planet. If they do, they invest more. If they don’t, they move fast to make improvements.

To learn more about the actionable steps that CSOs and their team can take, check out our report, “How to Set Sustainability Strategy in 2025: Thriving in an Era of Impact and Pushback.”  

[We’re thrilled to offer an entire tutorial session on this topic at GreenBiz 25, led by Jeff Senne, Steve Rochlin and more sustainable business thought leaders. Get access to this tutorial, and over 75 other sessions designed to help you take your sustainability strategies to the next level and master the skills essential to face your company’s unique challenges. Use discount code GB25EDITORIAL for 10% off.]

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