Strategic leadership for sustainability and ESG
Balance decision-making between long-term impact and short-term success.
Transform business by addressing all stakeholders’ needs.
What is leadership for sustainability and ESG?
Companies and investors are recognising sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues as a strategic priority that addresses significant business risk and opportunity.
Many companies make the mistake of relegating ESG and reporting to investor relations, PR, or ‘corporate social responsibility’. Investible ones design structures to focus on sustainability as a material business issue that merits a standing item on board agendas.
With so many external factors impacting on business, leaders need to develop new ways of thinking and being, acting, relating and collaborating. Management mindsets must evolve to understand and respond to complex systems, holding space for both traditional transition approaches and innovative future thinking.
Strategic leadership for sustainability and ESG balances decision-making between long-term impact and short-term success, encouraging consideration of the needs of all stakeholders, facilitating business transformation.
What are the benefits?
Centring sustainability and ESG in strategic leadership can help future-proof business, drive strategic change, and boost stakeholder confidence.
Greenwashing is against the rules and the complexity around carbon offsets is problematic, making the business environment difficult to navigate. But there is deepening understanding of the economic risks associated with operating unsustainably, resulting in increasing regulation which will eventually impact smaller business suppliers.
Despite the growing difficulty in successfully navigating the changing demands of ESG and sustainability, there are a growing number of benefits. They include:
Trust. Enhance your organisation’s reputation and long-term viability by building trust with customers, employees, communities and investors.
Resilience. Ensure business continuity and minimise disruption by anticipating and adapting to complex environmental, social, and governance risks and opportunities.
Innovation. Drive initiatives that lead to new products, services, and processes by fostering and encouraging creative solutions to complex challenges.
How Contented helps
Our team have decades of experience supporting transformative sustainability initiatives across a wide range of organisations and issues.
We can help you lead on sustainability, by:
- exploring with you the environmental and social impact of your decisions;
- signposting resources and tools to help create change;
- supporting you in reflecting on how you model sustainability to your team;
- facilitating a shared vision, roadmap and action plan to prepare your organisation for an uncertain future.
We can help your organisation by:
- supporting, or acting as, your nominated sustainability representative;
- meeting requirements for reporting and certification;
- benchmarking your company culture.
- training, coaching and mentoring your team to build capacity to manage this work in-house.