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Throughout the past few months, we’ve discussed how to set sustainability strategy through an approach we call Sustainability Tension Management, which allows practitioners to adapt and operate fluidly in both the profit and loss culture of business and the policy and impact world of sustainability. But it’s always helpful to see what this strategy looks like in practice and we’ve gotten that opportunity by observing the UPS sustainability team led by chief sustainability officer Scott Childress.
Childress brings a unique profile to the CSO role. An economist by training, he spent most of his UPS career in the finance and accounting department, rising to serve as the CFO for specific business lines. Someone with Scott’s background represents a prime example of a business insider leading the function. Our research has found business insiders often lean towards making modest, incremental moves, while sustainability experts from outside of business frequently push for more ambitious impact.
While it may sound as if insiders’ lower ambition might make them less impactful, their ability to leverage business acumen, internal relationships and navigate corporate bureaucracy provides them with a set of Akido-like capabilities, where force is not met with force but by redirection.
These skills can drive tangible impact for people and profit, as we’ve seen with Childress and his team. Below are five lessons we’ve learned from UPS’ sustainability transformation.
Lesson 1: Use data to drive change
Disclosure and reporting processes, while essential, can make incredibly rich, varied and strategic emissions and energy data start to look and feel static and siloed. Our research finds the most successful sustainability leaders prioritize creating systems and processes that go beyond disclosures and foster the use of data to drive insight and impact for people, planet and profit. To advance this, the UPS Sustainability team moved away from ad hoc data management via Excel and centralized the data collection process, working with tech partners and the IT department to create a solution that fit UPS’s approach to information management.
Childress and his team intuitively understood that sustainability needs to align with the organizational culture and entrepreneurial style of UPS. At its heart, UPS manages logistics with an engineering firm’s approach: laser-focused on data-driven efficiency. “We view validated, high-confidence data as a huge enabler,” he said. That’s because robust data and analytics encourage decision makers to devote resources to improve energy performance and keep the company on track towards its 2050 carbon neutrality commitment.
Lesson 2: Get data in the hands of the right decision makers
Too much sustainability data often remains visible only to a company’s sustainability team. Childress and his team saw that data collection was set up to respond to the requirements of specific government reporting standards. However, it was missing the opportunity to better inform internal operational decision makers.
The UPS team set up their group to serve as the central hub for all sustainability data,