Sue Garrard is a strong advocate for embedding sustainability into commercial goals and daily business decisions – during her decade at Unilever, as EVP of sustainable business and communications, she was part of the team that led the integration of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan into the company’s present and future strategy, establishing the consumer goods giant as a bastion for positive change.
Since 2019, she has headed up her own consultancy, Sue Garrard Consulting, working with clients such as Mars, Primark, O2, Nat West Banking Group, Danone, Heineken, Natura, the RHS and the BBC on the development of sustainability strategies and ensuring they are aligned with business objectives.
She is also chair of Blueprint for Better Business; sits on the sustainability advisory board of Fonterra and Zespri; is a Fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership; Visiting Fellow at Cranfield; and a Fellow of the RSA, as well as being a dynamic motivational speaker.
In this interview with The Sustainability Speakers Agency, Garrard examines the need to balance strategic acumen with human-centred insight when it comes to sustainability, bridging the gap between technical goals and everyday business realities.
With over a decade of experience at Unilever, what did you learn about embedding sustainability in large organisations?
Well, that’s a huge question to start with. I learned an enormous amount. Obviously, boiling it down, there were some pretty critical things really that I learned which have stood me in good stead for the work I’ve done since.
I think the most fundamental one is that it needs to be a part of business strategy, and yet the gap between where we are now in most leaders’ perceptions of sustainability and where it needs to get to is very big. And it’s the responsibility of the people who are leading for sustainability to bridge that gap.
That’s difficult because there are decades of experience of people working in businesses with sustainability folk who, in the nicest possible way, tend to be very technical, super detailed, quite intimidating and fairly depressing.
That’s a bit of a generalisation, but that, for better or worse, is the perception that is held by a lot of senior executives about both the topic and the people who lead for it on sustainability.
So, unless you can really work with the DNA of the organisation and understand the pressures that they have in leading that organisation and delivering the multiple things that particularly big listed companies have to do, then you are largely destined to operate in the margin of that organisation rather than at the heart of it.
You’ll be seen as somebody technical, not to be seen as a partner and colleague that’s trying to future-proof the organisation, build its resilience and equip it for the things that it’s going to face.
So, what you’ve heard me talk about a lot are not the technical skills of sustainability – which are complex and very difficult in their own right but can be fairly easily learned – what you’ve really heard me talk about there are the soft skills, the human skills, how you work within an organisation and how you take people with you.
That’s all about getting them to want to lean in, whereas at the moment still a lot of business leaders are leaning back from this topic, even now, in the face of everything that we’re experiencing.
Every business has different goals; how can they align their sustainability strategies with their unique objectives?
Every business does have different goals, but you’d be surprised that there’s actually a lot – in my experience at least – more similarity than there is difference. Most companies have a growth objective, most companies have a profit objective. So that’s, in business language, top and bottom-line growth.
Most businesses need to find funding to expand, so thinking about where you attract investment from is absolutely critical. Most businesses are fighting to get great quality people to work for them. We’ve seen at the moment in particular that there is a dearth of people to employ, so once you’ve got them you need to keep them – keeping and retaining the best staff possible.
Most businesses, particularly once you become a company of a certain size, start to attract followers who will criticise you, particularly in the NGO world, based on how you operate, and there are sectors of the media that will do the same thing. When I engage with businesses, I find that there are huge similarities almost irrespective of what sector they’re in.
Of course, when you get down into the detail it differs, and there what I said previously applies – that you need to start by saying, ‘what are the most material issues for that organisation?’ So, if you’re a food business, obviously the security of supply of food is crucial.
We’ve seen droughts, we’ve seen huge amounts of flooding, we’ve seen record temperatures just this summer – all of which is going to affect the security of supply of food. The food supply chain is one of the most fragile of any global industries.
If you’re in the food business, you have to think about where your food is sourced from and the security of supply of that food, because you’re going to go out of business very quickly if you don’t plan to mitigate some of the risks. And they’re not future risks – they’re starting to happen now.
If you’re in the chemical industry, you have to look very carefully at the sourcing of your chemicals. Have they got a big carbon footprint? What’s going to happen with the volatility of supply? We’ve seen how supply chains have been massively impacted by the war in Ukraine.
Those are just two examples. So, one of the things that business leaders find really difficult is not just the technicality of sustainability, but that the scope just feels completely overwhelming. It feels like there are scores and scores of issues, and no business can put their arms around something that’s got multiple issues to tackle.
So, one of the very early things you need to do is to say, ‘okay, what are the most material issues to my business, which also matter to all those external audiences we listed earlier on?’ And then find that point where those two coincide – very material to your business, and very material to key stakeholders at a global or a local level, depending on the scale of your business.
Then, be ruthless about picking your long-term priorities that you’re going to drive for change on. That, I would say, is what sits at the heart of taking a seemingly ‘boil the ocean’ type issue and really focusing it down on things that the senior leaders will own for the long term, which will link in with business strategy.
This interview with Sue Garrard was conducted by Jack Hayes of The Champions Speakers Agency.
