A company still has products to make and customers to serve. It needs to grow, invest in technology, enter new markets and remain competitive, which means sustainability has to find its place within those decisions rather than operate through a parallel process.

Theresa describes a gap that can emerge between the people managing requirements at the “point of origin” and the commercial and operational teams making decisions further through the organisation. People in procurement, finance, marketing and operations need enough understanding of sustainability to recognise how it affects the choices they make, while sustainability specialists need to understand the commercial context in which those choices are being made.

She has seen the difference leadership can make in connecting the two. In one previous organisation, a senior leader had spent years championing the relationship between nature and the long-term viability of the business. Biodiversity loss was understood in practical terms: if the natural ecosystems on which production depended deteriorated, the business itself would eventually be negatively affected. Environmental considerations became connected to the future of the business rather than existing as a separate conversation or stand-alone risk management strategy.

Making Sustainability Everyone’s Job

For Theresa, one of the most practical ways to integrate sustainability is through the mechanisms organisations already use to manage performance: job descriptions, objectives, KPIs and incentives. If it remains the responsibility of the sustainability team, other parts of the organisation can continue to treat it as someone else’s mandate.

IKEA offers an interesting example. Its Country Retail Managers also hold responsibility as Chief Sustainability Officers in their markets, placing sustainability accountability alongside commercial leadership. Theresa believes companies need to go further in this direction, building sustainability into objectives and performance measures at different levels of the organisation, including senior leadership.

This also changes what is expected of sustainability professionals themselves. A technically strong strategy still has to compete for investment with other business priorities, and Theresa argues that sustainability teams therefore need greater fluency in building the commercial case for what they want to achieve.

“Businesses are designed to generate growth and revenue for shareholders.”

Working within that reality means understanding how sustainability ambitions can be translated into terms that allow them to compete with other priorities for attention and investment.

The Problem With the Long Term

One of the greatest barriers Theresa sees today has less to do with awareness than with time. Senior leaders are operating through a succession of immediate pressures, with economic uncertainty, geopolitical events, supply-chain disruption, changing regulation and rapidly evolving technology all competing for attention. Sustainability, meanwhile, often requires decisions whose benefits may emerge over multiple years.

Maintaining that horizon becomes difficult when an organisation is continually responding to what is happening right now. As an example, Theresa remembers an energy-transition project that had struggled to gain priority until a heatwave arrived. Air-conditioning demand increased sharply, energy consumption rose, and suddenly the economics of the project looked very different. Something that had previously been viewed through a longer-term lens had become an immediate operating issue.

The challenge for sustainability teams is to make those future consequences visible enough to influence decisions before circumstances force them to the top of the agenda. Building a strong business case becomes particularly important when leaders are deciding how to allocate limited resources between immediate demands and investments whose benefits will take longer to materialise.

Sustainability as Competitive Advantage

Younger companies have a different opportunity. Established organisations often have to retrofit sustainability into systems, processes and incentives that were designed around different assumptions, while new businesses can build some of those choices into their model from the beginning.

For companies under pressure to grow, Theresa sees the possibility of turning sustainability into part of their competitive advantage, particularly when it strengthens the proposition to customers or creates more resilient ways of operating.

The regulatory environment is also changing the commercial landscape. European companies are navigating an expanding framework covering sustainability reporting, human-rights and environmental due diligence, and forced-labour risks in supply chains. The details and scope continue to evolve, but the direction is pushing sustainability further into established business practices.

Responding to those changes will require more than compliance capability. People across the business will need to understand what they mean for the decisions they make, reinforcing Theresa’s broader argument that sustainability can no longer remain the domain of a specialist team.

The Leadership Skill Theresa Would Choose

When I asked Theresa which capability impact leaders would need most in the years ahead, she chose influence.

For her, influence means knowing which issue to raise, with whom and at what moment. It requires an understanding of the priorities of teams, peers and senior leaders, and the ability to make a case in language that resonates with them. Sometimes that will involve data and a strong commercial argument; at other times, it will depend on relationships, judgement and the ability to bring people with you. Theresa describes it as a combination of “hard and soft” influence.

Her own career has changed her understanding of how important those relationships can be.

“I grew up on the assumption that the quality of my work would shine through.”

Over time, she realised that good work can be amplified by the relationships built around it. Authentic connections across different parts of an organisation create access to different perspectives and people, and eventually become part of a leader’s ability to get things done.

If asked today what her younger self should be most aware of, she would tell her to understand the power of networking and influence earlier.

It is particularly relevant for sustainability leaders, who are often trying to change decisions they do not directly own, work across functions they do not manage and defend investments whose full return may not appear for years. Their expertise matters, but so does their ability to make that expertise travel through the organisation.

From Knowing More to Getting More Done

Theresa’s definition of success brings the conversation back to implementation. She is interested in finding solutions, identifying what works and creating the conditions to do more of it.

Sustainability can easily become dominated by the scale of the problems still unresolved, while Theresa’s attention tends to go towards the mechanisms that allow change to happen inside an organisation: building a viable business case, creating clear accountability, developing relationships across functions and influencing the decisions that determine what ultimately gets done.