Problem
Most large companies now have a person in charge of sustainability. But for years, that person sat outside the room where strategy was made. They managed communications, handled donations and reported on environmental targets. They rarely shaped how the business grew, what it made or how it competed. No one had studied whether this was changing, or what it looked like when it did. That gap mattered. If sustainability is only ever a communications job, it stays separate from the decisions that change a company. The question we set out to answer was whether the most advanced companies had found a different way.
Science
We interviewed 37 Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) at large companies across nine countries and 17 industries. Participating companies included Unilever, Shell, BASF, Schneider Electric, LEGO, Standard Chartered and Société Générale We asked each CSO how their role connected to their company's core business decisions, where they sat in the organisation's structure, and what was stopping them from going further. We also sent a structured survey to each participant before the interview. Finally, we drew on the GOLDEN Sustainability Dataset, the Leonardo Centre's database of over 900,000 corporate sustainability initiatives from more than 9,000 companies over 20 years, to measure what the companies we interviewed were actually doing, not just what they said.
Outcome
Where a CSO sits in a company's structure shapes what they can change. In companies where the CSO reported directly to the CEO or sat on the executive team, sustainability was shaping product decisions, supply chain redesign and growth strategy. In companies where the CSO reported into communications or marketing, sustainability strategies were the least advanced. Half the CSOs we interviewed had been in their role for less than a year, pointing to a rapid generational shift in who companies are hiring and why. Yet across the 22 companies we could measure directly, the average share of sustainability effort going to innovation was just 5%. More than half of all activity was still focused on donations and communications. The gap between where CSOs sat and what their companies did was striking.
Change
The evidence points in one direction. The CSO needs to sit at the top table, not report into communications or marketing. Companies that have made that shift are using sustainability to build new products, redesign operations and drive growth. Those that haven't are spending most of their sustainability budget on activity that doesn't change how the business works. Our research gives boards a direct question to ask: where does our CSO report, and does that position match the ambition we say we have? It gives investors a new signal to track: not what a company says about sustainability, but whether the person responsible for it has the authority to act.