By Erik Foley, Sustainability Practice Lead at Antea Group USA
NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / April 15, 2025 / In today's business landscape, sustainability professionals face more pressure than ever to demonstrate their value-not just for environmental good, but for the bottom line. In this blog, Erik Foley, Sustainability Practice Lead at Antea Group USA, shares why the key to lasting impact isn't leading with sustainability at all.
Drawing on decades of experience and real-world examples, Erik outlines four essential roles sustainability leaders must play to stay relevant and drive business value-from strategist and collaborator to risk analyst and bridge-builder. Most importantly, he explains why sustainability conversations need to start with business priorities and not ESG acronyms.
Read the beginning below and then head over to Erik's blog for the full piece:
To save you and I both some writing and reading time, I could summarize my point this way:?make it a business meeting, not a sustainability meeting.
But you would wonder what I meant....fine. Here's what I mean:
Several years ago, I was helping a large pharmaceutical distribution company establish a sustainability committee. I was working with the new--and first ever--sustainability officer, an excellent natural leader. She had done great work establishing a committee of well-respected leaders from across the company. This is not an easy thing to do. She had spent time studying the company, the competition, and understanding relevant sustainability frameworks and regulations. She was set for a great kick-off meeting. People were in their seats. Anticipation hung in the air. She cleared her throat and welcomed everyone to the meeting. Then she made a critical error: she opened the meeting talking about sustainability. I winced.
No one else noticed. It was a sustainability meeting after all, right? You are supposed to talk about sustainability...aren't you? The fact that a sustainability meeting is expected to be about sustainability is exactly the problem she was feeding into. By meeting this expectation she was, ironically, making her work in the future to mainstream sustainability at the company that much harder. She was splitting sustainability away from core business, a dislocation that can take a long time to mend.
At the time, I had been in sustainability for over 25 years and knew the topic teetered on a razor's edge between the ethical and the strategic, the nice-to-do and the must-do, between social responsibility and fiscal discipline. It easily becomes a sideshow while the main event plays on. A significant part of my life's work has been to get sustainability in the big tent, but they talk differently in there and they don't let just anyone in.
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SOURCE: Antea Group
