ESG: What’s at stake for your stakeholders?

Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.

ESG mapping, where X marks the value of 'why'!
How lucky are we to be in a position to impact the sustainability of our world? Whether we call it the ESG, Sustainability, CSR, or Circular Economy agenda, most organisations have an Environmental, Social and Governance framework in place today. The most effective ESG strategies align sustainability efforts to the core of what our businesses exist to do.

What core business function translates to an ESG superpower?
Write it down.

Consider: What do our stakeholders expect of us today, and what do they expect of their future?

Practice: Aligning ESG strategy with core capabilities and operations 

Decide to: Map a targeted ESG journey that will shift industry standards

What do your stakeholders have at stake?

Purpose is an ESG enabler; it is much easier for an organisation to operationalise ESG when it clearly connects to the business model. Millennials have a reputation for leading the emphasis on brand purpose. However, recent studies show that the concept of a social license to operate matters to all generations. Whether we are talking about customers, employees, supply chain counterparts, or the communities in which we operate, our ESG strategy should connect our core business value with our core stakeholder values. 

McKinsey recently published a useful guide to value mapping the ESG journey. Akin to a design thinking collaboration session, the model starts with critical stakeholder expectations, moves to divergent thinking to understand trade-offs and systemic touch points, sharpens the proposition for engagement, and syncs ESG efforts to operations in order to 'make ESG real'.

Why not gather your team around an ESG mapping challenge this week? Embedding sustainability into our leadership and our lives is the ultimate measure to ensure knowing better, leads to doing better.

Love your Mondays