‘Blamed for the sins of the father’: We need to talk about Chief Sustainability Officer burnout

Chief Sustainability Officers and their peers are being increasingly vocal about the risk of burnout in their high-pressure and fast-changing roles.

When she published a parody of America Ferrera’s famous Barbie monologue on Linkedin, tweaking the end of “It is literally impossible to be a woman” to “impossible to say anything right as a sustainability officer”, Anastasia Kuskova probably didn’t expect the post to go viral. 

But her words clearly resonated within the sustainability community: a few days later, it raked up more than 3,700 ‘likes’, 300 comments and hundreds of reposts.

Kuskova, who co-founded AI-backed sustainability software Sirius for mining and metals companies in 2022 after leading ESG transformation at raw materials firm Eurasian Resources Group for eight years, says she has seen too many sustainability professionals getting berated for complaining about the complexity of global ESG regulations online.

“Whatever you say as a sustainability officer, it's wrong. Whatever you do, you are blamed for all of the sins of the father – the company,” she tells CSO Futures.

Posts like hers are increasingly common, and tend to receive a lot of support from people in similar positions – and some criticism from outside the corporate world. They are symptomatic of the increasing pressure felt by Chief Sustainability Officers and their peers, which in turn is leading to a wave of burnouts. 

The CSO role is still relatively recent, yet it is fast becoming a staple of the C-suite. Unlike other C-suite members, however, their job is too broadly defined, leading them to take on a multitude of responsibilities from ESG reporting and compliance to business transformation to public communication. 

A crushing ESG reporting burden

Many firms first get a Chief Sustainability Officer to ensure compliance with the growing patchwork of sustainability regulations and standards – and this responsibility alone appears to be growing in complexity every week that goes by.

“Can somebody make it stop! Sustainability teams are heading towards breaking point,” Joe Franses, Vice President of Sustainability at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, recently cried out on Linkedin. 

Franses listed Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and its European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), the US Securities and Exchange Commission (currently stayed) climate disclosure rule, the Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS), the Science-Based Targets for Nature (SBTN), the Task forces on Climate- and Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD and TNFD) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to illustrate the ESG standards patchwork many often call an ‘alphabet soup’.

Most of these standards and regulations have come out in the last three years, fundamentally changing the workload balance for CSOs and their teams.

“A few years ago, it was manageable. You could do few regulations and a few impact initiatives, then also do a lot of stakeholder management work,” Kuskova recalls. “But now it's a storm from every side, and internally, you're seen as a cost centre.” 

A cost centre with no quick returns

“So many of us are in this field to drive change and impact. We want to feel how our daily actions are creating a better future,” write Nola Richards, Executive Head, ESG and Sustainable Business at South African telco Vodacom. “At this stage it feels like the reporting leaves little time for the change that is required,” she adds, noting that this is compounded by the limited resources allocated to deliver”.

Another issue facing the Chief Sustainability Officer is money: between the talent and the time needed to do the job, sustainability reporting alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Some of Sirius’ clients – mostly large mining multinationals – have told Kuskova their spending is in the millions. 

And while it is necessary to avoid fines (also in the hundreds of thousands for non-compliance with CSRD, for instance), this reporting investment does not bring any other returns. 

Beyond reporting, CSOs also require a budget to implement transformation initiatives – from adopting renewable energy to transitioning to low-carbon materials and phasing out plastic packaging. These can bring more visible savings and returns, but often take a few years to materialise. 

All in all, many companies still see the sustainability department as a cost centre – and when the going gets tough, it is one of the first functions to experience cuts and restructurings, adding extra responsibilities to the already thinly-spread sustainability head.

CSO burnout: Balancing too many stakeholder interests

Besides juggling a large number of tasks and priorities, CSOs often have to balance the expectations of countless different stakeholders, from board members to department heads to customers and NGOs.

Speaking to CSO Futures last month about her book How to Be a Chief Sustainability Officer, Anna Krotova pointed to these conflicting interests as one of the most challenging parts of a CSO’s work.

She gave the example of a Chief Commercial Officer whose goal might be to grow revenue by selling more products: “Those products might be inherently unsustainable, and if your goal is to decarbonise the business or to make it less polluting, then you have a conflict already.”

According to her, these conflicts can be an opportunity to “uncover synergies” – as long as CSOs can manage their frustration if they don’t get the buy-in they are looking for. “It's very much about the awareness of where the other person sits right now with their mindset, their needs, their limitations, before you come in and bring your own agenda,” Krotova added.

For Kuskova, CSOs are “more professional negotiators than anything else”, and have to be able to communicate in many different languages, from that of investors and the CFO to that of the communities where they operate.

A scapegoat for public criticism

In their efforts to communicate with all stakeholders, Chief Sustainability Officers face one more burden: the risk of being accused of greenwashing. One example is a comment under the aforementioned post by Coca-Cola’s Franses on ESG regulation: “Perhaps the worst contributor to plastic pollution complains about unbearable reporting burden”.

Sustainability leaders get into this field with the hope of transforming business models from extractive, profit-driven and polluting to responsible towards the planet and its inhabitants – but we are still at the beginning of this transition. Companies may be making progress, but they are still (for the most part) doing more harm than good for the environment.

But because CSOs are often the face of this sustainable transformation, they are an easy scapegoat when progress is deemed too slow. “You cannot communicate your wins: either it is seen as greenwashing or your goals are not ambitious enough,” says Kuskova.

This is leading many companies towards the now famous trend of ‘greenhushing’, ie, staying quiet on sustainability to avoid negative feedback. And at a personal level, it’s a significant contributor to CSO burnout.

For the Sirius co-founder, we must urgently change the rhetoric around the top sustainability role to protect people from mental health issues. 

“When people feel seen, they stop normalising and thinking that this is only their problem, and they are doing something wrong,” she says.