The Need for Strategic Focus

Corporate sustainability leaders need to have a clear strategic focus, now more than ever. Corporate sustainability has always been a struggle: a fight for resources, decisions, support and hearts and minds. What we’re facing now isn’t just a stress test or some pushback. What we’re facing now is a full-fledged counter-attack like nothing we’ve seen in 30+ years of corporate sustainability. The other side has brought in the heavy guns and begun blasting away. They have  air support, shooting down our ability to even use words like “climate” and “diversity.’ They’re cutting off essential supply lines of scientific data. 

We’ve already taken casualties: jobs lost, funding lost, corporate commitments rolled back or just forgotten. Don’t dismiss this as just a new version of the ESG push-back from recent years. The current situation is more like the 2008 Great Recession – with a vengeance. 

Focus is crucial now if you want to navigate through this, continue to have a positive impact, and keep your company focused on managing risk and building resiliency (and also keep your job and your credibility).  Focus your resources, focus your defenses, and carefully and selectively focus any offensive efforts.

There’s an opportunity here. Does your company really need to compete for scores in every reporting and ranking regime out there? Does your company really need 34 separate metrics for sustainability? Does your company really need to address all 17 Sustainable Development Goals? 

Strategic focus is more than just picking your fights. It’s about making thoughtful decisions about where to invest your time, your effort and your credibility. There are four steps to strategic focus:

1.    Choose your focus (or at least update it) 

2.    Test your focus

3.    Communicate your focus

4.    Live your focus 

1.  Choose your focus

If you did your materiality analysis as a real strategic process, you already have a pretty good hypothesis on your focus: the critical few items in the upper right-hand corner of your materiality matrix. 

(It doesn’t really matter if you did conventional or double materiality. Either way, if done properly, you took into account three overlapping concerns: impacts on your company, impacts of your company, and concerns of stakeholders who matter to your company.)

If you have a good materiality matrix, focus on that upper right-hand corner. What are the 3 or 4 top items? Ask yourself: “Has anything changed that would make me revise this now?”  

If you don’t have a good strategic materiality matrix, then now’s a good time to develop one. It’s better to do it quickly and crudely now than to wait for a long formal process that may take you 6-12 months. You don’t have the luxury of waiting, and you can always revise it later.

Now comes the hard part. Focus means both where you put more effort, and where you put less or different effort. Make three lists (or think of three flip charts if you’re doing this with your team):

1.    Focus areas: topics on which you need to put more time, effort, resources and credibility.

2.    Defensive areas: topics on which you are not looking for progress, but need to make sure the company doesn’t develop real vulnerabilities through inattention.

3.    All other: all the rest, topics which you may monitor but which are going to get a lot less attention for the next year or two, at least.

If you don’t have a good number of topics in #2 and a lot of topics in #3, that’s not focus. That’s denial, pretending that you can put more effort into #1 without having to cut back other places. 

2.  Test your focus

Second, are you following your focus? Do the “effort vs importance” test:

• Take your three lists from above.
• Score the topics to show your current relative level of effort. You can measure effort in FTEs or budget, but you can probably be just as accurate by labelling the dots intuitively – what are you really spending your effort on now? Don’t overthink it, just label them as high, medium or low. 
• See how your effort matches importance: Are there topics on list #1 that are getting medium or low attention now? What are the topics on list #3 that are getting medium or high attention now?

You’ve just created your own gap analysis – both the gaps between high importance and lower effort and vice-versa.

3. Communicate your focus 

This gap analysis creates two clear communication imperatives: 

• Raising awareness and urgency on the need for continuing or more action on the areas of strategic focus; and
• Lowering expectations on areas that are outside the strategic focus.

Inside your company, it’s probably time for a new “elevator pitch”. You’ll need to have your slide deck ready with all the explanation and back-up, but no one will care (or see your slides) unless they already believe there’s a need to pay attention. You have two or three short sentences to make your pitch. It probably starts out with something like “to protect the business with everything that’s going on, we need to …”. In that short pitch, you need to include the reasons for change, the business case, and the key action needed. And do that in business language, not sustainability jargon.

Externally, the communication may be more subtle. But that is a strategic issue itself. The usual corporate default is silence: just stop talking about the topics getting less attention. That’s one important step: stop your communications people from writing checks you’re not going to be able to cash. However, you may have external stakeholders who are watching to see where you may be “green-hushing.” You may have explicit commitments to external stakeholders, meaning you need to go communicate with them and negotiate down those expectations rather than just failing to meet them. And you may have key stakeholders (customers, suppliers or investors) who are going to explicitly ask you how you are going to address the current political climate.

Communicating with employees will be a particular challenge: they are both internal and external stakeholders. You can bet they are wondering and asking each other about your policies and commitments, with or without clear communication from you and leadership. Communicating on these sensitive topics with employees is always challenging – but would you rather they speculated or had real information?

4. Live your focus

This is actually the toughest part. The hardest part is making those day-to-day decisions about where to spend your time, sticking to your strategic focus. It’s easier to keep doing the same things the same way. It’s hard to stop working on a topic you’ve invested time and effort in for years. It’s tempting to put off that difficult stakeholder conversation (internal or external) where you have to negotiate down expectations – often, expectations that you worked hard to create!

Stick to it. Test everything you ask for and that’s asked of you against that focus. Review your adherence to your focus weekly if not daily, until you’re comfortable that it’s truly become your new day-to-day reality.

In these uncertain times, you probably need to revisit your strategic focus every quarter to see if it still holds, and maybe to tweak (but not redo) your priorities. This won’t make you invulnerable to what’s going on, but it gives you a fighting chance. And in the fight we’re facing, you need every chance you can create.