“When sustainability consulting requires: Get out of your comfort zone!”
fors founder Frank Sprenger on challenges and opportunities in sustainability management and sustainability consulting (part 2)
In our daily work as sustainability consultancy, we are increasingly finding that many of our contacts on the client side, be they sustainability managers, sustainability officers, corporate social responsibility managers or corporate sustainability officers, feel that they are not taken seriously in their companies and are often overwhelmed. The frustration is high, as is the resignation rate. Why is that? Our colleague Julia Winderlich asked our founder Frank Sprenger, who has been running his own personal sustainability marathon for over 30 years.
In the second part of the conversation, Frank addresses the new challenges that employees in sustainability consultancy also have to face, names some characteristics that they should have and explains which skills help him most in his daily work.
Frank, in our sustainability consultancy fors.earth we work closely with sustainability managers. If their role changes, as we found in part 1 of our conversation, to what extent does that also affect our profession?
Sustainability consulting has changed in scope. In the first 20 years it was mainly environmental-related. Now we have to ask ourselves other questions: "How can we enable environmental and sustainability managers in companies to be heard as well as possible in the organization? How can we help them to be perceived differently, more positively?" So that companies recognize: "Our sustainability department is not a burden but shows us opportunities and helps us avoid risks that could be expensive."
Sustainability consulting increasingly aims to
understand the micropolitics and culture of the company being advised
and to help those responsible for sustainability to set the right priorities.
Of course, sustainability consultants must have a thorough understanding of sustainability standards, legal compliance, statutory regulations, etc. But good sustainability consulting now increasingly aims to understand the micropolitics and culture of the company being advised and to help those responsible for sustainability to set priorities correctly. Instead of diving into the depths of compliance or the CO2 footprint, our contacts have to break new ground with marketing, product development or product management.
So, sustainability consultants should not only be technically proficient, but also have trained their soft skills?
Correct. Nowadays, much less technical advice is needed, but more support and further development. For us, this means more humility, more attention to soft factors such as culture, but above all an understanding of the various driving systems in companies, from the owners to the competitive situation to customer requirements.
Sustainability consulting must cover a broad range of topics so that effective sustainability projects can be set up. This goes far beyond knowledge of relevant regulations and standards, even if the temptation to torture yourself is great, according to the motto "If it's hard work, it must be right!".
Does that mean that sustainability can and should be fun?
Well, we do ask our customers: Get out of your own comfort zone! We are uncomfortable with that, and we ask that out of a sense of responsibility, because we all want to make a contribution. We have to get out of our comfort zone, but we can make it easier for our customers to get out of it, because we have already taken this path countless times, in hundreds of different constellations, with companies. That is the key bottleneck, and not whether you can read the ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards).
You mentioned the soft skills earlier, what else does the ideal candidate for sustainability consulting need in your opinion?
We need people who are willing to work on an equal footing with customers, who do not convey a kind of pseudo-security by slipping into the role of an expert, but who know that successful cooperation is based on mutual learning, development and understanding. Compared to classic consulting, this requires a much more reserved and willing-to-learn mindset. We are talking about very complex and dynamic processes here, you have to be able to react to many changes in the course of a project.
At the same time, you should be able to communicate convincingly, but not academically or condescendingly, with a wide variety of people, from production employees to environmental officers to the supervisory board, and you should do so authentically and honestly and without promising too much. And last but not least, there must be a certain intrinsic motivation that enables the sustainability consultant to endure frustration again and again and remain patient when things are progressing more slowly than expected.
Finally, a personal question: Which skills have you developed and perfected over the years help you most in your daily work?
I am a good listener, understand the culture of companies and master the "supreme discipline of order clarification", so I can assess well where the organization and the direct contacts stand to neither over- nor under-challenge them. In addition, a feeling for the right way to address people from various hierarchical levels. Furthermore, respect for the people involved and a sense of humility for the diversity of constellations – no company is the same. There is simply no one size fits all in sustainability consulting, you always come across new situations that must be analyzed and addressed together with the customers.
And last but not least: the ability to empower customers. In the spirit of SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) 17, we are happy to provide our customers with tools – such as the CSRD Gap Assistant for reporting in accordance with CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) – with which they can continue to work themselves. In the less technical things, they can then diligently develop themselves further. There are no tools for the difficult disciplines such as answering the question "How do I get sustainability into the core business?", so we at fors.earth are happy to help.