Sustainability Work Isn’t One Job

Last year I gave a talk that started with a simple problem. Ask ten people what it means to “work in sustainability” and you’ll get ten different answers, because the honest answer is that it depends. It depends on the size of the business, how mature its sustainability strategy is, what stage of growth it’s in, and who’s already on the team.

I wanted a way to show that range rather than just describe it, so I built a framework. Nine archetypes, mapped across two axes: the type of work someone does (operational, enabling, strategic) and the core skill they bring (expert or doer, storyteller or influencer, diplomat or negotiator). The optimizer who fixes inefficiency. The translator who turns data into stories people actually act on. The bridge-builder who connects people who need to talk but never do. Nine ways of working, because sustainability isn’t one job. It’s many.

Vogue Business picked the framework up and asked me to help develop it further for the fourth year of their Sustainability Leaders Survey, this time looking specifically at how sustainability teams organize themselves and what structures actually hold up. Bella Webb interviewed me for the piece, and alongside that, the team looked at six brands, Tekla, Vivobarefoot, Reformation, Tapestry, Kering and Veja, to see the archetypes playing out in real teams of very different sizes and maturities.

A few things came out of it that I think are worth pulling apart here, both because they’re genuinely useful on their own and because they’ve sharpened how we think about team design in our own work.

The archetypes are fluid, not fixed

The framework was never meant to sort people into permanent boxes. In one meeting you might be playing translator to your COO, explaining what a metric actually means for the business. In the next, your CEO wants your take on where the whole organization should be heading, and you’re in visionary mode instead. Small teams especially can’t afford to specialize. Everyone ends up flexing across roles depending on what the moment demands.

That fluidity is part of why we’ve seen so much demand for fractional and freelance support at The Now Work. You don’t need all nine archetypes on staff permanently. You need the right one available at the right moment, which is a very different hiring problem than most businesses are set up to solve.

As teams mature, the job shifts from making the case to handing off the case

Early on, a lot of sustainability work is about winning the argument, making the moral case for why any of this matters. As businesses mature, that shifts. The stronger move becomes the business case: tying sustainability to supply chain resilience, risk, and long-term value, then handing pieces of the work to the departments that should really own them.

That handoff only works if someone can make it land. This is where translators and bridge-builders earn their keep, turning what could read as a naggy list of asks into something marketing wants to own because it makes for a better story, or operations wants to own because it cuts cost.

It’s also, frankly, becoming a survival skill. In a volatile market, some sustainability teams are being cut. The ones still growing, still being given resources, tend to be the ones that know how to make that business case rather than lean on the moral one alone.

There’s no single right structure, only the right one for you

Across the six brands, the range was wide. Some lean almost entirely on external partners and industry bodies because they don’t have the headcount to build deep expertise in-house. Some have thrown out the traditional hierarchy altogether in favor of cross-functional groups people opt into based on what genuinely interests them. Some have folded sustainability into supply chain rather than keeping it a standalone function, because where a team sits sends a signal about how seriously the business takes it. At least one brand has no dedicated sustainability team at all, on the logic that if it’s everyone’s job, it can’t become no one’s.

None of these is more correct than the others. What they have in common is that each was built deliberately for the business it serves, not copied from a template. Which structure works depends on your size, your maturity, the complexity of what you’re solving for, and who’s already in the building. Understanding how work actually gets done inside your organization has to come before you can design around it.

The challenge used to be technical. Now it’s organisational.

A decade ago, most of the hard work in sustainability was figuring out what businesses should actually do to become more sustainable. That was a genuinely technical challenge. It’s largely settled now. The harder question is how you build the structures and culture that make it stick, and that’s a people problem far more than a knowledge one.

And that’s a bigger shift than it sounds like. It means the skills a sustainability team needs most aren’t always the ones a job description would list, and it’s a big part of why we built The Now Work the way we did.

How this shapes our own work

This is the lens we bring to every team we help build. Before we recommend a single person, we try to understand how work actually moves through an organisation already, who’s already playing translator without the title, where the real gaps sit, what stage of maturity the business is at versus where it thinks it is. The archetypes give us a shared language for that conversation, both with clients and with the specialists we bring in to work alongside them.

No two sustainability teams look the same, because no two businesses are solving quite the same problem. That’s really the whole idea.

Read the full article with sustainability team case studies here.