🍃The Link between Company Purpose & Sustainability Strategy: Your Job Might Depend on It

Welcome back 🖐,

A company’s purpose and its sustainability strategy are starting to become interlinked in ways that have become significant to long term business success and viability. Understanding their relationship and creating connections will be key in your professional success executing on sustainability projects. This article will help you think about how to straddle the line between purpose and sustainability strategy and to test where things currently stand in your organization.

An Evolving Context

US workers had been on a steady walk towards more meaningful work, yet, the pandemic triggered a more wholesale shift. Research reveals that US workers’ priorities have shifted from pre-pandemic times with 66 percent of employees citing employers’ positive impact “as more important than before the pandemic”, a similar increase to the one observed in the importance of salary and compensation. The research also shows that C-suite leaders see purpose as critical for employee engagement and 92 percent of them agree that if their companies were more focused on purpose, it would be more successful.

Purpose vs. Sustainability

In business, a company’s purpose can be defined as “a company's core reason for being and its resulting positive impact on the world”*. Sustainability refers to “doing business without negatively impacting the environment, community, or society as a whole.”*

Just by these definitions, company purpose and sustainability could already be linked in your company, but not necessarily, and sustainability has a broader scope to focus on beyond purpose. “Focusing on purpose alone risks ignoring critical sustainability commitments that fall outside a company’s purpose. Take, for example, a company whose purpose is to reduce global emissions through wind energy. Does this mean they can ignore diversity and inclusion among their staff, or waste and pollution in their supply chain?”

Ideally, every business would understand its main sustainability risks and opportunities, but also find a way to link them to its purpose and business. Otherwise, having disconnected sustainability and business strategies can give rise to the dissonance that stakeholders perceive and that can lead to actual or perceived greenwashing issues.

Ready to Test your Purpose and Sustainability Alignment?

Some questions can help you measure the degree to which your company has a compelling purpose, and whether is linked to your sustainability strategies. Are you ready to try them?

1. Is our purpose distinctive, motivating, and relevant to our business? Does it address a local or world societal need, going beyond serving customer needs, and concisely communicates why we exist? Does it have a verb in it, as in “we exist to...”? (1)

2. Does our Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, ESG, and Community Investment strategies link to, reflect, and advance our purpose. Is our ESG / CSR approach differentiated from, and not conflated with, our purpose? (1)

3. What if your marquee sustainability/ESG strategy and programs disappeared tomorrow? What would happen to business results over the short, medium, and long-term? (2)

The last question is particularly important because if the answer is “business results would be minimally impacted”, that would suggest that sustainability is not very integrated into the company. You either change that or some of your projects could be deemed un-essential and dismissed or your role could be in the chopping block the next time the company needs to reduce headcount.

Hopefully this gave you some food for thought. Clearly, it can be a complex undertaking to align purpose with sustainability. Just deciding what a company’s purpose is can take a significant organizational effort! However, the more you align the two, or build the connection if they don’t exist, and understand areas where they are independent, the better you will position your sustainability efforts for long term success and to create value for the organization and the world (not to mention saving yourself a lot of headaches 😅).

Enjoy and reflect 💭. Warm regards / saludos,

Julio