The two roles of the chief sustainability officer: Brian Ferreria, Gartner

The chief sustainability officer (CSO), whose main job is managing a company’s ESG goals can have one of two personalities: an influencer or executor according to Brian Ferreira, VP and managing executive partner, board and c-suite advisory at Gartner.

He told Digital Nation Australia that the executor makes the decisions and an influencer pushes ideals onto other heads of departments.

He said, “Do you give this person a centralised manner to make decisions on behalf of all the other functions like finance, HR, technology and operations? Or is this person an advisor and influencer of setting the strategy, the principles and then execution happens in each of the functions?”

“If you are going to give somebody the mandate, and the execution mandate to do this, I would suggest to you they report to the CEO. If they're going to be a support function to the rest of the business, you would put them under the chief operating officer or under corporate services,” he explained.

An influencer CSO sits with corporate services and will lay out certain strategies and targets to achieve from a sustainability point of view, Ferreira said.

“Those points of view will then for instance, be given to the CIO and they've got to then through procurement and negotiations to let's say, cloud providers. If we're going to do business with Amazon, Microsoft, Google or SAP, these are our sustainability targets, can you offer that and then negotiate those. The CSO will bring some thinking and advisory to the table, set some targets and the CIO through procurement will then go negotiate some of those in that space.

“That's where they give influence and what they do is they set the strategy and the principles, and execution happens somewhere else,” he explained.

A CSO that is an executor will have a mandate, Ferreira said.

“They will be tightly involved with the CIO when they go to the negotiation table later and for part of that execution team, where the CIO will make sure that the functionality of the cloud is negotiated well, and the terms of reference,” he said.

“The CSO will be a counterpart as part of that procurement process, which says, and here's all of my sustainability metrics, this is what I want to achieve and we're going out to the shareholders to say that we will be carbon neutral by X date.”