Lee Stewart on wellbeing and maintaining passion as a sustainability professional

As a university student in New Zealand doing business studies in the early to mid-1990s, Lee Stewart had no idea of the career that he had to pursue in sustainability. “New Zealand’s quite sheltered,” he admits, but like so many young Kiwis he crossed the Tasman to Australia, roved the world, and had his eyes opened to “what was going on” with industry and the environment.

Over two decades later he and his young family returned to New Zealand so he could take up his “dream job”, as head of corporate sustainability with the country’s biggest business, and largest carbon emitter, the farmer owned dairy giant Fonterra. It was the first half of 2020, and COVID was enveloping the world. Ultimately, that role didn’t work out as he’d hoped, and Stewart took a long break over the summer of 2022-23 before moving back to Australia, starting his own consultancy, ESG Strategy, and completing a book now self-published as: How to Build Sustainability into your Business Strategy.

As Stewart writes, his book is born from “bruises, frustration and burnout” and the “trials and triumphs” of global corporate roles. “I have spent a lot of time reflecting and soul-searching since leaving my last big corporate role. For the past 18 months, I have been fully dedicated to writing my first book. This is my ‘why’ …”.

The interview

You’ve done everything from the startup world through to big corporate jobs, and lots in between. Does anything stand out as a learning or surprise from that journey?

The best thing I did was take on a sales role – financial, data, paging, technology sales – for the first part of my career. It was hard, cold calling, literally stuffing envelopes, sending them out that way, trying to get leads, relationship building with people. What was fun about that is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes all the time. Help them. What are they thinking? How do I help them? And I’ve used that approach to sustainability quite a lot. Actually, put yourself in the other person’s shoes, you’re trying to convince them of a better way of doing things. What are their fears? How do you try to alleviate their fears? How do you align what you’re trying to say with their values or their thinking? That’s really put me in good stead.

Writing a book is about one of the hardest things you can do. What was the process that led you to say “I’m going to add author to my CV”?

It’s something that’s been chipping away at the back of my mind for about a decade now, and it wasn’t until I had the space of leaving a fulltime job at Fonterra. And quite honestly, the Fonterra role, I was close to burnout, probably was burnt out, talked to my wife and family, and I just needed the space to digest that role and then also convince myself that good can come from this whole experience of moving the family between countries, through COVID, and uprooting them, and all that turmoil,  and thinking, “Oh, what have I left with that? What’s the legacy of that? And then, what can I do to create an impact?”

You found you had a story to tell?

I started talking to friends. I’ve got a unique story. The background is different. I’m not just a consultant. I’ve done the ins and outs of companies. I know what bad practice looks like. I’ve learned a lot of lessons and gathered a lot of scars. And I’ve tried to help people. That’s why I wrote the book, and it’s probably written for myself too, just to make a bigger impact. It feels quite good to have one on your desk. You can have a really shit day, but I could just look at this and go, “Well, I’ve written a book.”

You write in your book that the work of sustainability professionals frequently becomes “deeply personal”, and that this “emotional connection” can lead to “neglecting your own well-being”. In regards to experiencing burnout, are those just normal corporate challenges, or is there something around sustainability?

There’s a combination of both. Obviously normal corporate challenges have stress. But it’s kind of when you take on the external weight. So, Fonterra is a classic role I took on, with a bit of pride on the heart of my sleeve, saying, “Hey, I’m helping to fix half the country’s emissions.” And when I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere near, you just felt like, “Oh, I’ve not just let you down and let me down. I’ve let my family down. I’ve let the country down.” You take on a lot , and you can’t, and that’s my big learning. That’s not possible.

Is there a parallel between the individual and the corporate in this? We see companies setting the bar too high, and then failing and walking it back, as well as people taking on too much?

Yeah. And with limited resources too. I haven’t met a sustainability team that’s been appropriately resourced in any company. And with more coming at them, all the clutter and the disclosures, the legal stuff, they just seem to say, “Oh, we’ve got a sustainability team. They can take care of that.” It’s just like, “Hold on. Are we going to report? Are we going to do something? What are we?” And you’ve often only got a team of three or four people. It’s just not doable long-term, right, in most cases. So, you’ve got to be strategic and don’t take on too much if possible.

Who do you regard as the core target reader for your book?

There’s two really, there’s existing and emerging leaders. Hopefully it resonates to someone who’s looking to gain a competitive advantage in their career and hopefully see sustainability as that opportunity. This book is a guide to doing that. Someone can read it on a weekend. You can actually read it very quickly, over a few days, say a week, and start asking questions in your business. And you can actually make some changes a week later. That’s what I’m trying to do. I didn’t write it for the sustainability tree hugger type person. It’s a business book.

You even chunk it down to a simple framework of “three C’s”, confidence, commitment and consistency. Is the idea you want them to see a small hill to climb first off, rather than Mount Everest?

That’s the key to enabling people to start doing things for themselves, rather than a lot of people I see now just paralyzed with the subject matter. They don’t know where to start.

Outside of the larger corporations, do you see that more people in small to medium sized companies will have to take on sustainability?

Absolutely, things like scope three emissions, I’m working with some clients now where I’m interviewing these companies, and they could be 10 to 20 people, and they are now getting asked, “Well, I need to know what your emissions are, and are you thinking about setting a target?”

Because they’re getting caught up in a big company’s sustainability program?

That’s happening now. I think it’s only a matter of time before you get asked that sort of question. Modern slavery is another one. Climate change is pervasive. Waste is coming through. Biodiversity is coming through. Then if you’re like a deer in the headlights, you don’t know, you could start raising some alarm bells across that big company’s supply chain. Because they’re starting to make calls now, long term, “Is that the right partner of choice in the future for us to hit our targets.”

When it comes to sustainability and ESG, what are the key things that companies just typically get wrong?

They forget about the consistency that’s needed. They run off and do a program, define a strategy, set some targets, and you know what? John, Michelle, whatever, leaves the company. You know, someone comes to write a report six months later, goes, “I need an update on this.” And guess what? There’s actually no update from last year’s report. They drop off the governance side of things. That’s the consistency. They set up a strategy, set some targets, but they do not assign accountability across the business.

So just the natural churn of people in companies can bring things unstuck?

They go in with the right intentions, but they don’t think about it. What does it look like? Year two, year three, year four, who’s doing it? What is this? What’s the effort needed? Who’s responsible for what?

Is it getting harder for boards and executives to know what to do, or to keep up with everything in the sustainability space?

A lot of boards have so much coming at them right now that they’ve got to have some basic level of confidence about the subject matter. Every board member needs it, and you’ve got to start getting out of the boardroom and across your business a bit more, including going on field trips. I really struggle with boards that just deal with the executives and they get the filtered messages, and that’s really hard. That’s where I think many of the boards are failing. They’re just stuck going through their papers and churn of filtered information.

They’ve got to go and do some ground proofing themselves?

Exactly. That’s probably true for more than sustainability, get out and see for yourself.

What’s the hardest lesson you’ve learned in advising companies?

Going too far trying to get someone to sign off on a commitment when they are not confident, and they don’t know the subject matter. You’re better off waiting, if you can, even months to say, “Okay, we’re not quite ready for this conversation. There are some readings. Here’s some workshops we’ve got to have, or here’s a competitive analysis I’m going to talk to you about. Here’s why we need this.” So, jumping ahead, saying we need a climate target, a net zero plan, blah, blah, when a board or a decision maker doesn’t understand what carbon is.

Are we’re seeing a run of big global corporations trying to walk back some of their more heroic sustainability ambitions?

Yep. That was one of the frustrations of the book. I still talk about Unilever as the pin-up, but I had to water it down, because as I was writing it, they’ve pulled back. So that’s frustrating. And I’ve been talking about this. I say the market’s still wide open for that leadership spot. But to own it, you’ve probably got to start saying, “You’re not the right customer for us”, and it’s a hard decision. You’ve got to start making some tough calls.

Lee Stewart’s book can be purchased via his website. See an excerpt of his book here. He is donating part of the sale price to his pro bono advisory work for the Kingdom of Tonga, which he visited in the last week of August, straight after his Sydney book launch, for the Pacific Islands Forum.