Your leadership buy-in questions answered: Insights from our expert webinar

You asked, we answered: Insights from our recent leadership buy-in Q&A

Question 1: Sustainability is such a broad concept that it can easily feel abstract or vague. How would you define it in a way that makes sense and resonates with leadership?

Sustainability is a broad concept because, ultimately, it touches how a company creates value over the long term. But leadership rarely needs an abstract definition. They need translation.

The definition has to reflect the language of the room. With a CFO, I speak about cost stability, regulatory exposure, and capital allocation. With operations, I speak about downtime, resource efficiency, and continuity. With procurement, I speak about supply disruption and dependency risk.

For leadership, sustainability is not philanthropy. It is the company’s ability to remain competitive and operational in a changing regulatory, environmental, and geopolitical context. Sometimes redefining the narrative is more important than defining the concept.

Question 2: How can we embed sustainability into existing operational processes and daily operations, without creating parallel systems? What is your experience in this topic?

In my experience, if sustainability requires a parallel system, it will rarely scale. It has to be embedded into processes that already exist: capital allocation, enterprise risk management, procurement criteria, and performance dashboards.

One practical tool is the Double Materiality Assessment. Used properly, it is not just a reporting exercise. It becomes an annual review of the business context, impacts, risks, and dependencies. If water stress or climate risk are identified as material, that information should feed directly into investment decisions and risk registers, and not sit in a sustainability report. Stakeholder engagement is also key. It helps identify operational blind spots, supply chain vulnerabilities, and emerging sustainability trends, not just material issues.

I often use a concrete example to show how sustainability has been embedded within operational efficiency: in one case, food processing plants with stronger water efficiency systems experienced roughly 30% less downtime. Machines failed less often, they managed to function even during drought periods, or government water restrictions, and operations were more stable. At that point, sustainability stopped being only an environmental issue and became a production continuity priority.

Question 3: How do you approach ownership of sustainability targets? As a sustainability manager, I’m often asked, ‘What are our targets?’ I believe the level of ambition should ultimately be decided by leadership, but framing and communicating it is also crucial. I’d love to hear the panel’s experience on this.”

What I often see behind that question is a governance tension. Sustainability teams are asked to define targets, but they don’t control capital allocation or strategic priorities.

In my view, the sustainability team should not carry the burden of defining ambition alone. Their role is to provide analysis, scenarios, risk exposure, and benchmark comparisons. Leadership must decide the level of ambition, because ambition has financial and strategic consequences.

If the sustainability function sets targets without executive ownership, those targets risk to remain symbolic. Real ownership starts when ambition is formally endorsed at executive level and embedded into performance management and incentives.

Question 4: How can sustainability in the supply chain be measured, and what are some key KPIs to track it?

There are established frameworks that help structure data collection and comparability; for example CSRD and ESRS in Europe, TCFD for climate-related risk disclosure, or Science Based Targets for decarbonisation. But frameworks are tools. They help you gather data, without automatically making your supply chain resilient, or sustainable.

From an environmental performance perspective, relevant KPIs include:

• Scope 3 emissions, especially Category 1 (purchased goods and services)
• Emissions intensity per supplier
• Percentage of suppliers with validated SBTi targets
• Water risk exposure of suppliers located in high-stress regions

These indicators help you understand where your footprint and dependencies are concentrated.

However, metrics alone are not enough. One of the strongest tools to understand supply chain sustainability maturity is supplier engagement. Engaging with suppliers helps you understand how many are actively involved in decarbonisation or improvement programs, how many provide primary environmental data rather than estimates, and how many have credible transition plans.

Question 5: Resilience can feel abstract, especially since it’s a long-term concept while business decisions often focus on the short term. So, how do you measure resilience with this in mind?

Resilience is the difference between a company that reacts to shocks and a company that anticipates them, it is often misunderstood as something abstract and long-term. In reality, it can be measured today through exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.

Exposure:

• Percentage of revenue or assets located in climate-vulnerable regions
• Share of suppliers in high-risk geographies
• A supplier dependency index; for example, measuring how much revenue or production relies on a single supplier 

Sensitivity:

• Degree of dependence on volatile inputs like energy or water
• Supplier concentration ratios

Adaptive capacity:

• Presence of diversification strategies (i.e. geographic diversification)
• Integration of climate scenario analysis into CAPEX decisions
• Time needed to recover from supply chain disruption

Traditional risk assessment often focuses on likelihood and impact of isolated risks. I often work with methodologies that map clusters of interconnected risks; for example, how likely it is that water scarcity, and supply disruption can trigger each other. Instead of managing long lists of risks, I find it more effective to design mitigation strategies that address risk clusters systemically, maximising resources and people’s time. 

Question 6: Given the challenges of where sustainability sits in an organization and the concerns that arise when engaging with leadership, what practical tips can you share for successfully gaining leadership buy-in for sustainability initiatives?

First, be very clear where sustainability sits in your organisation: CSR, ESG compliance, business transformation, or systemic resilience. Confusion here is one of the main reasons sustainability professionals struggle to gain credibility.

Second, link sustainability explicitly to strategic objectives: risk management, operational performance, cost stability, market access.

Third, speak the language of trade-offs, timing, ROI, and accountability. Anticipate pushback and address it upfront.

Fourth, bring internal evidence. Benchmarking competitors helps, but showing internal operational data (like downtime reduction or energy cost stability) is much more powerful.

Fifth, start with manageable initiatives that demonstrate tangible results. Quick wins build credibility.

Leadership buy-in is not about persuasion. It is about alignment.