Seven barriers to company sustainability achievement

At the heart of most sustainability programs is the desire to achieve environmental and social goals. But as deadlines edge closer, how do companies go from well-meaning intentions to actually delivering on their goals?

Closing the ‘gap’ between intention (goal) and achievement (actual impact) is central to success. Mike Stopka has set out seven barriers holding businesses back from achieving their sustainability goals, and more importantly, how to spot them.

Closing the intention to achievement gap

Based on experience working with 50-plus companies over the last 15 years, many of them Fortune 500, a few lessons have emerged to can help organizations succeed. Most importantly, the gap between intending to achieve goals and actually doing so often arises because big companies fail to take the requisite step of identifying the barriers in their way.

Barriers vary widely from technology limitations to lack of sustainability project experience on the team to ineffective oversight. For example, a company wants to be zero waste, but isn’t getting it done. Instead of identifying the root cause, which might be a lack of communication, the wrong physical infrastructure, or overburdened staff that don’t have the headspace to think about zero waste, they jump straight to ordering new bins, creating signs, or calling new waste haulers, usually in a well-meaning, but non-strategic, shotgun approach.

If barriers aren’t identified it’s difficult to make progress on sustainability goals and a vicious cycle results: lack of progress > leadership/team frustration > increased difficulty securing resources > lack of progress.

The barriers to achieving organizational sustainability goals

Experience reveals seven organization-wide barriers, or root causes, that consistently block company attainment of environmental and social sustainability goals. First, they often lack accountability structures and sustainability experience in their ranks, and most managers don’t even know what their current sustainability performance is. On top of that, they don’t know what sustainability success looks like, or how it ties to company purpose. On top of that, the companies often find their hands are tied: They’re unable to deviate from business as usual, and so they can’t transition to a less certain but more sustainable path forward. Many can’t translate strategy into tactical actions, and very few are able to communicate the business value of sustainability.

The following list was distilled from working with many companies over time to identify trends and seven common barriers that show up repeatedly. This can be applied at a company-wide scale (the whole sustainability program) or at the initiative scale (waste reduction, transportation, etc.). Each barrier is listed followed by the telltale signs of its existence.

You can also download our screening checklist to see if barriers are present in your organization. If you believe a statement applies, check the adjacent box. The more boxes you check, the greater the likelihood that the barrier is impacting your organization delivering on its sustainability goals.

Thank you to Kirsten Melling, Kathleen Hetrick, Isabelle Kavanaugh and Isaac Smith for their contributions to this effort.