As a coach for sustainability leaders, I often advise clients on how to generate sustainability reports while also making progress on their most important initiatives. If this is one of your goals as a leader, I recommend you narrowly define the reports you need. Here’s why this is important.

The Problem

• Stakeholder Misalignment: If your stakeholders don’t agree on what reports are most important, you run the risk of disappointing them, and that’s never a good thing.

• Chaos: There are so many reports that could be generated, that it’s hard to focus.

• Resources: You have limited time, talent and treasure and you need to apply them effectively.

• Organizational Risk: Reporting or not reporting on things that miss important details can hurt.

Sustainability leaders today are under great pressure to produce reports. From the board to executive management to regulators, investors, analysts and even watchdog groups, everyone wants to know what we’re up to. They also want to know what results we’re producing. But herein lies the problem. Reporting in the sustainability field is an immature discipline.

Most other functions, like finance and marketing, have existing processes, technologies and data sets from which reports can be automatically generated. Sustainability has no such luck. Immature systems often result in incredibly laborious efforts to produce sustainability reports. While there are services and companies dedicated to reporting, they may be expensive, cumbersome to work with and may yield little value.

This can lead to one big problem. Sustainability leaders can focus so much effort on generating reports that it blocks them from delivering actual progress. This can damage careers and an organization’s reputation. There is a much better way. After 20 years of coaching sustainability leaders, I’ve identified a series of five steps to satisfy stakeholder reporting needs while also empowering sustainability leaders to deliver on the core mission—enhancing social license to operate.

Before we look at my five ideas, I’d like to describe who sustainability leaders are reporting to and frame their operating dynamic.

Knowing Your Audiences

Today’s sustainability leaders are tasked with delivering progress while constructing processes. Being in service to multiple stakeholder audiences further compounds the challenges of this role. Chief sustainability officers and other senior leaders charged with this responsibility typically report to these key audiences:

• Executive Management: It’s the relationship with the shortest leash. The sustainability leader must be able to guide the group on the overall sustainability function, not just report to them.

• Board Of Directors: It’s typical for each member to have discreet experience and interests. Few, if any, have substantive sustainability expertise.

• Investors: Financial shareholders have obligations to their own stakeholders. This drives what they want to see in analytics and progress reports.

• Regulators: Increasingly around the globe, sustainability is becoming a regulated function. Based on where your organization sources material inputs or develops business, certain types of reporting may be mandatory to satisfy this audience.

• Watchdog Groups: These days, there is little to no time lag between making environmental commitments, doing the work to deliver on them and reporting on your progress. This audience wants to know what you are doing at all times.

• Public: Civil society may not be quite as on it or organized as watchdog groups, but they are not that far behind. They want to know about how your organization affects their life. They are reviewing your outcomes, messaging and reports more closely than ever.

• Peers: Associates, competitors and potential collaborators are watching to see if they can model after your work, partner up with you or distance themselves.

Situational Dynamics

Sustainability leaders are faced with doing three interrelated things, all the time and at the same time. They must construct and navigate their sustainability program while radioing in service reports to stakeholders. Overemphasis in one area can often result in underemphasis in the other two areas.

Because many sustainability leaders come up the ranks from technical backgrounds, their modus operandi is to get all the data, interpret it and then come up with a set of initiatives. They are used to fully relying on data and scientific methods to be able to make confident decisions. This is the most comfortable approach for them when advocating within the organization. However, over-reliance on data for decision-making is simply unrealistic and risk-additive given the reputational imperative, the pace of ESG and sustainability and the current state of information systems.

Positioning For Progress

It’s possible to deliver real sustainability outcomes, satisfy your stakeholders and generate reports effectively. In working with sustainability leaders from diverse industries to advance their most important initiatives, I’ve discovered how to have reporting and goal attainment live comfortably side by side. Here is the approach I recommend:

• Narrow: Less is more.

• Peers: We may not report on things that peer organizations are emphasizing.

• Focus: We will report on a limited number of initiatives.

If you find that the reporting process is adding risk and blocking your ability to deliver progress, these five steps could really help.

1. Get clarity on the mission of the sustainability function.

2. Identify those initiatives that are most important to the organization’s social license to operate.

3. Define the reports that are needed to indicate progress.

4. Guide and negotiate with executive management on the reporting process.

5. Define and develop the data production and analysis program.

The challenge that many sustainability leaders face today is that they can be drowned with reporting requirements, and this can block them from achieving their most important initiatives. This can lead to fallout both for them and their organization. These five steps can help you get your most important work done, satisfy the reporting considerations of stakeholder audiences and enhance and protect your organization’s social license to operate.

Join me for part two of this series where we will examine each of these steps.

Let’s Make Progress, Together

Sustainability leadership is about more than compliance and aspirations—it’s about transformation. Making the right decisions at the right time requires the right expertise. Let’s talk about where you are today—and how you can move forward with confidence.

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