How to Build a Winning Sustainability Strategy

Top Tips from a Seasoned Expert

Meet Shauna Sadowski, a seasoned sustainability leader, with an impressive career pioneering sustainability work at mission-driven brands including Simple Mills, Annie’s, and Clif Bar. For the past 20 years, her work has been focused on leading and supporting sustainability initiatives at the intersection of food, farming, and business. We sat down with her to hear her top advice for sustainability leaders on building a best-in-class sustainability strategy. 

[fs-toc-h2] Building with Intention

There’s a special sort of magic that happens when a business's sustainability strategy is core to the business, top of mind for leadership and employees alike, and truly impactful. However, achieving this kind of alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It must be driven by a strong sustainability leader, who has a keen sense of how to build bridges across the organization and ties between business strategy and sustainability strategy. Fortunately, Shauna has ample experience doing just that. 

<span class="small-blockquote">“A strong sustainability leader has a keen sense of how to build bridges across the organization and ties between business strategy and sustainability strategy.”</span>

[fs-toc-h2] Step 1: Focus on What Matters Most to Your Company

In the world of consumer packaged goods, sustainability is about pinpointing what truly matters to your organization. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach; businesses need to tailor sustainability efforts to their unique needs. 

A sustainability strategy cannot be developed in a vacuum from the overall operations of a business. Traditional CSR focused more on philanthropy and less on changes to one’s supply chain. In contrast, today, companies are accountable for making changes to their practices, and taking action within the context of their own operations. 

<span class="small-blockquote">“There’s been a significant shift in the idea of responsibility. Traditional CSR focused more on philanthropy. Today, companies are accountable for making changes to their own supply chains.”</span>

“Sustainability leaders are responsible for understanding and quantifying the impacts of a company’s operations quickly and efficiently,” Shauna shares. “Developing viable sustainability programs that balance carbon emissions reduction goals with working conditions, supplier diversity and land use–is the hard work facing leaders in this field. Investing time to understand both the business and its impacts across the value chain, including farmers, has informed my understanding and approaches.”  

[fs-toc-h2] Step 2: Nurture Your Internal Relationships

The shift away from philanthropy to internal sustainability goals has brought about a need to involve many more internal stakeholders. Long gone are the days that CSR sat in isolation from the rest of the company. Today, successful sustainability strategies must involve internal partners - from supply chain, procurement and finance to product development, marketing and operations. 

This means that pulling off a successful sustainability strategy has become much more complex and time-intensive (hello, cross-functional steering committees!), but also fundamentally more rewarding if executed correctly. It also means that the sustainability leader must speak multiple languages and wear many hats to succeed at internal stakeholder management. 

So how can a sustainability leader build internal allies? Shauna suggests sitting down with your colleagues and getting to know them on a personal level, even those who may be more skeptical of the importance of sustainability initiatives. What are each team member's priorities? What motivates them personally? And how can sustainability help each person succeed? For example, procurement teams are most often looking at cost savings. So when Shauna talks with them, she tries to bring the focus to financial numbers and speak the language of numbers.

<span class="small-blockquote">“Sometimes, internal stakeholder management requires slowing down, and that’s been a big part of my learning as I reflect on the beginning of my career path and journey in sustainability.”</span>

Shauna shares that she had great success at Annie’s (with General Mills) on developing a Regenerative Agriculture strategy and plan. Focused on collaboration, a cross-functional group came together representing  leaders in  sustainability, procurement, quality, marketing and agronomy. Due to the varying perspectives, this tiger team could address everything from supplier strategy to brand strategy to soil health impacts. 

[fs-toc-h2] Step 3: Find Good External Allies

Being a sustainability leader can be lonely. This is why it’s important to look outside of your company to find people who can make you stronger and better, in addition to building internal allies. Credible global and local nonprofit organizations and consultants can be tremendous leverage to a sustainability leader, whose role is to bring in their expertise and help them navigate the internal nuances and culture of an organization. Equally important is building community with other sustainability leaders across organizations and industries. Learning what peer companies are doing in a similar space - what is working, what is not - brings significant insight and benchmarking to a sustainability leader’s work and can help identify potential troubleshooting solutions. External allies can not only help a sustainability leader feel supported, but they can also help her stay abreast of the ever-changing external landscape. 

<span class="small-blockquote">“Companies benefit from having an outside perspective. Subject matter experts can help illuminate: What does the nonprofit world say? What do the scientist expert groups say? Who should we be paying attention to?”</span>

[fs-toc-h2] Step 4: Measure, Measure, Measure!

Measurement is the linchpin of sustainability success. There is a lot of truth in the old saying: “what you measure gets managed.” An exceptional sustainability leader must understand exactly what to measure, and how to measure it. 

Identify key metrics and data points relevant to your sustainability initiatives and goals, then set clear, quantifiable targets. This data-driven approach allows you to track your sustainability journey, make informed decisions, and demonstrate meaningful progress to stakeholders.

While measurement is critical to showing progress, it is inherently challenging. How good is the data? What practices are the data sets based on? What are the assumptions behind the data? These are some of the questions that Shauna grapples with on a daily basis. Additionally, increasing regulatory requirements continue to raise the need for a deeper understanding of measurement. This is where Shauna sees the role technology and tools can increasingly play to help make data collection easier and more robust. 

[fs-toc-h2] Step 5: Communicate with Credibility

Once your internal foundation is strong, telling your story to consumers is where the magic happens. A strong sustainability story can drive behavior change and lead to greater trust and loyalty. Successful sustainability leaders understand the importance of sharing your sustainability milestones and showing your work to build credibility. Transparent and authentic communication not only enhances your brand's reputation but also inspires others to follow your lead.

While every company wants to shout their sustainability commitments from the rooftops, rushing this step is where companies can go wrong. The role of a sustainability leader is to ensure that the strategy is sound and the work is underway before communications begin. The stories in the media of greenwashing are far and wide. Sustainability leaders must build excitement across the organization while also tempering the desire to speak too far in advance. This is a delicate balance to strike. 

[fs-toc-h2] The Winning Recipe to Sustainability Success

Building a winning sustainability strategy can be summarized into the following key areas: Focus on your business. Find excellent partners, internal and external. Keep a maniacal focus on measurement. Communicate only after you’ve done all of the above. Rinse and repeat. Simple enough? 

Of course, this type of work is never easy and not one size fits all. Driving change has also become more complex as sustainability has become more intertwined with business operations. 

However, according to Shauna, it has never been a more rewarding time to be a sustainability leader. 

<span class="“The truth is: the potential for sustainability is everywhere, it’s in everything. That is what makes it both so beautiful and so challenging. A lot of what we’re trying to do as leaders in sustainability is make the invisible visible.”</span>

It’s a tall order, but change is possible. Sustainability leaders have the ability to transform both their organizations and their industry by spotlighting their climate success. 

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