The ESG Advantage: Build Trust, Drive Value, Stay Ahead

Margins are thin. Stakeholders demand more. ESG is no longer an option, it’s your role as a leader to make it your advantage.  

It is a core driver of competitiveness, resilience, and long-term value creation. ESG also defines brand relevance and customer preference in a crowded marketplace. In fact, "60% of consumers worldwide prefer to buy from brands they see as sustainable and 52% are willing to change their purchasing habits to reduce environmental impact."

Additionally, a 2025 consumer insights report notes, "57% of U.K. consumers believe sustainability gives brands a clear edge and that purpose-led brands resonate – 72% of high-value consumers support brands with clear, authentic values."

As stakeholders demand transparency and accountability, leaders must take notice and integrate ESG into strategy, operations, and culture. Here’s how:  

Despite the obvious need for an ESG program, it is not something a company can just jump into – it needs a plan. The entire organization needs to understand ‘why’ this is happening. The ESG vision must be authentic and therefore tied to the overall company mission and values. And the overall business case spells out the risks, revenue, people investment, and cost savings of pursuing such a significant effort. 

Smart leaders know how different ESG issues rank in terms of importance to the business and stakeholders. Therefore, starting with a materiality assessment helps prioritize different issues and initiatives and can suggest targets or topics for reporting. 

Leverage your ESG themes to record a baseline of existing policies, metrics, and engagements. Engage cross-functional stakeholders within the organization with the expertise in each priority ESG topic. Information can then be collected from annual reports, policies, and interviews with internal stakeholders to build a full picture of the current baseline. 

Conducting this internal assessment drives understanding of the current state of the business and gauges the maturity of an ESG mindset across the organization. It can also help identify any siloed activity in the organization.  

Using the baseline, leaders can set realistic goals for the business, and key stakeholders can agree that these goals are achievable and feel motivated to reach them. Essential metrics include:  

• Measuring the impact of your actions 
• Tracking your organization’s overall ESG performance  
• Benchmarking yourself against industry peers. 

A gap analysis makes a comparison between the current baseline and the target ESG model highlighting the disparities and opportunities for improvement. A better understanding of the scale and area of these gaps help with preparation ensuring the new ESG strategy is successful, and to highlight areas where the company may encounter problems down the line. 

With the first five steps complete, it’s time to design the ESG framework and build a roadmap including the tangible steps to achieving the goals. It helps to ensure accountability for key milestones, helps track progress, and allows you to share your ESG strategy both internally and externally with customers and key stakeholders. 

With the general roadmap in hand, it’s time to develop a detailed action plan and begin tracking KPIs that feed into the objectives and goals. The action plan focuses on the steps needed to integrate an ESG focus into existing processes and practices. It ensures the ESG remains a core focus of the organization. The KPIs established at this stage should track progress at an individual or team level – measuring the daily small but significant actions and improvements.

By this point, the company has done the work to stand up the ESG program, but it doesn’t stop there. According to the GA-Institute, a consultancy helping develop leaders in corporate sustainability and corporate responsibility, "A record 93% of Russell 1000 companies published a sustainability/ESG report for 2023 (up from 90% in 2022)." 

To develop an ESG report, it is important to decide what the report must accomplish. It can be a combination of communicating ESG strategy to stakeholders, sharing company specific ESG goals, and evaluating progress and engagements in key ESG areas. In conjunction with the official reporting, the company may release an external summary of the ESG strategy/progress. 

Updating the ESG strategy yearly ensures the organization stays aligned with current industry standards, stakeholders' and customers' expectations and overall business strategy. 

Leaders who follow these eight steps will put their company on the route to ESG success. While the journey may seem long, it is necessary to maintain customer and investor support. And it matters in the long run, just look at Unilever, Microsoft, Patagonia, Ikea and Nestle – they developed plans that reinvented the business and in others made them a household name with consumers seeking sustainable products. The question isn't if ESG pays off, it is how fast you can capture the value. The time to do this for your company is now. It really is a smart move.