Part 1: Corporate Alignment - Leadership Engagement

Explanation: Active executive participation on internal committees and leading initiatives reinforces the sustainability mission throughout the organization. This helps to ensure that the company has the appropriate structure, accountability, and mechanisms to ensure success.

Explanation: Leadership engagement means more than obtaining their sign off on programs. Top performing programs include executives in planning and defining strategies and even connect executive compensation to performance. This helps bring sustainability initiatives on par with corporate financial targets.

Explanation: Aspirations that connect to a company's mission can provide inspiration, purpose and guiding direction.

Explanation: Business-relevant goals link sustainability to revenue, innovation, or the product portfolio. These kinds of targets help build a common understanding of what progress looks like and connect roles across the company to delivering on sustainability. Examples include a goal to achieve sustainability improvements across 50% of the product portfolio or a target to drive 20% of sales growth through sustainability. While setting clear product sustainability goals is a standard practice for product sustainability programs, having an approach that is connected to the core of the business is one of the defining strategies of the leaders.

Explanation: Issue-focused goals and programs address the impacts that are most meaningful to the company and ensure that the desired end state is articulated. Organizing the product sustainability program around a few focused issues facilitates internal alignment and execution. Leading companies may have four to six priorities that are identified through an informed process using tools such as life cycle assessment, social impact evaluation, and chemical/health analysis.

Explanation: Successful product sustainability programs embed sustainability into product development from concept to commercialization with a combination of focus, tools, and reviews. These efforts establish category priorities, stage-gate reviews, scorecards and decision tools.

Explanation: Procurement staff can integrate sustainability into supplier qualification and selection processes and business reviews. As the majority of sustainability impacts occur in the upstream supply chain for most companies, engaging suppliers is a top-rated strategy according to our research. Communicating throughout the supply chain, collaborating, and building capacity are the key approaches to effectively engage suppliers.

Explanation: Manufacturing and operations typically integrate sustainability metrics into tracking and improvement programs with a focus on continuous improvement and investment.

Explanation: Metrics relevant to the business are a common gap for programs and align with the best practice of having business relevant goals (question 5). Tracking and measuring progress to these types of metrics provide accountability and incentive as improvements relate to what is important to the business such as cost savings, revenue and growth. These metrics may include:

• The portion of revenue from sustainability-driven products and brands
• The growth rate of sustainable products/brands compared to the rest of the company portfolio
• The portion of product launches or product portfolio with sustainability improvements, e.g., product sustainability-driven cost savings, risk reduction, revenue, growth rate, and portion of product line

Explanation: Leading companies leverage tools that track performance to provide real-time modeling and reporting, facilitating team decision-making. A graphical and easy-to-understand format also enables a broader audience in the company to engage with the information.

Explanation: Linking sustainability targets to bonuses for employees across departments and at all levels of the organization establishes accountability and enhances performance. This tactic motivates teams to collaborate to achieve goals and provides a sense of ownership and pride over the sustainability program. This engagement can translate to greater employee performance.