The reality of most sustainability roles? You’re a team of one.
When I transitioned into a dedicated sustainability role after years of juggling it alongside my primary operations work, I had big ambitions. Finally, I could focus full-time on the sustainability agenda! Except… I was still the only person doing it. No team. No dedicated budget for consultants. Just me, a very long wish list, and the weight of trying to transform how an entire organization approached environmental and social responsibility.
Sound familiar?
Here’s what I’ve learned leading sustainability solo: your constraints aren’t weaknesses. They’re your competitive advantage. Small teams move fast, build authentic relationships, and focus ruthlessly on what actually matters. But only if you stop trying to do everything.
This is what I wish someone had told me on day one.
Reframe What “Impact” Means
Stop Trying to Boil the Ocean
My desk is littered with projects I haven’t finished. In larger organizations, some of these would occupy entire roles—not just a portion of mine. It’s easy to look at that backlog and feel like a failure.
Here’s the reframe that saved my sanity: even the smallest movement is still movement toward the end goal.
When you’re solo, impact doesn’t mean tackling every sustainability challenge your organization faces. It means identifying the highest-leverage opportunities where your limited capacity creates disproportionate value.
For me, prioritization comes down to two questions:
- What’s the value for the business? This could be actual revenue, cost savings, risk mitigation, or brand value that opens new commercial opportunities.
- What’s the value for other stakeholders? Our partners, customers, and the communities we visit all have needs. Projects that deliver for multiple stakeholders simultaneously are worth their weight in gold.
Early in my focused sustainability role, I could have chased carbon offset programs, pursued multiple certifications, overhauled procurement policies, and redesigned our entire supply chain. Instead, I chose to reframe how we talked about sustainability publicly—focusing on two core pillars where we were genuinely delivering impact, with concrete examples that gave everyone in the organization clear talking points.
Was it the sexiest project? No. Did it require cutting our communication pillars in half and saying “not yet” to topics we cared about? Yes. But it gave our entire commercial team something authentic to say to prospective customers, it aligned internal understanding of our priorities, and it laid groundwork for everything that came after.
The lesson: Strategic focus beats scattered effort every single time.
The Essential Toolkit
Excel, PowerPoint, and the Power of “Good Enough”
Let me tell you what’s in my sustainability toolkit. Are you ready for the cutting-edge technology?
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- A project tracking spreadsheet
- Reciprocity
That’s it. No fancy carbon accounting software. No expensive sustainability management platforms. Just tools we already had, used strategically.
Excel Can be Your Best Friend
As a medium-sized business, Excel does the job 98% of the time. I use it for carbon inventories, data tracking, stakeholder mapping, and about a dozen other sustainability functions. Is it perfect? No. Does it work, and does everyone in the organization already know how to use it? Yes.
Small team principle: Use tools your colleagues already understand. The barrier to collaboration should be as low as possible.
PowerPoint for Complex Concepts
I’m a visual thinker, and I’ve found that building slide decks helps me distill complex ideas, strategies, and projects into consumable sizes. One of my most effective communications was breaking down the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) ship carbon intensity rules—a genuinely complex regulatory framework that affects our operations.
After an executive meeting where I got pointed questions I couldn’t answer clearly, I sat down and figured out how to communicate the system visually in a way that was both accurate and digestible. The result? Even the executive who’d questioned me (and probably didn’t remember giving me that pointed feedback) found it clear and useful.
Small team principle: If you can’t explain it simply, you can’t implement it at scale. Visualization forces clarity.
The Daily Prioritization Spreadsheet
My project tracking spreadsheet is deceptively simple. It’s housed in Excel, is organized by project and season, since we work in seasonal cycles, and it lets me set due dates and statuses.
Each day, I identify tasks that are overdue or required to unblock other work. Those get tagged “most important.” Anything due soon becomes “to do.” When I complete something, I mark it as “following” if I’m waiting for someone else, or “done” and note the date that I last updated it. At the end of each week, I have a tangible list of what got done.
With so much to do, it can be hard to feel like anything’s actually moving. That “done” column is my evidence that progress is happening, even when the backlog feels endless.
Build Your Internal Network
You Can’t Do This Alone
Here’s the truth: I sit in Product on our organizational chart, but I’ve been most effective when I work across the entire organization. Sustainability touches everything—operations, marketing, finance, customer experience, partnerships. You need allies.
The nice thing about sustainability is that there’s usually at least a handful of people within your organization who already care about it. Find them. Especially the ones with senior-level influence.
For me, my key allies are in marketing and operations. They bring our work to life for our customers. But those relationships didn’t happen by accident—they’re built on reciprocity.
I genuinely love helping other folks in my organization, even on projects that aren’t directly sustainability-related. And it’s an added bonus that I don’t feel bad asking for help when I need it. When working on a specific project together, I aim to be quick, accurate, and kind with my deliverables so I don’t hold up my colleagues’ work.
Concrete example: When I reframed our sustainability communications, there was substantial copyediting needed to keep language snappy and wordcounts down. I drafted what I wanted to say as plainly as possible, then brought in a creative team member to refine the language. I also engaged our design team to bring the words to life visually. This was a marketing-heavy project, so I made it easy for marketing to help by coming prepared with clear drafts and specific requests.
Small team principle: Make sustainability easy for colleagues to support. Come with 80% of the work done, ask for specific help, and deliver on your end fast.
Prioritize Ruthlessly
And Learn to Say No
I wish I’d learned how to prioritize and say no to projects sooner. My ability to prioritize quickly and understand the business value of a particular project has been hard-won, and I still have lots of work to do to get better at it.
But here’s what I’ve learned about saying no strategically: sustainability projects can be viewed from different angles, and finding the right lever, depending on your audience, makes all the difference for getting buy-in.
Let’s say I’m proposing a capital investment in decarbonization technology:
For finance and commercial teams, who tend to be numbers-focused: I show how the investment reduces operational costs over many years—lower fuel consumption means savings on both fuel and carbon taxes. Here’s the ROI timeline. Here’s break-even. Here’s long-term cost avoidance.
For operations and sales teams, who tend to be customer-focused: I pitch opportunities for customer engagement and addressing customer concerns about carbon footprints. This technology gives us a better story to tell and differentiates us from competitors who may not be able to credibly discuss emissions reduction.
Same project. Different value propositions. Both true.
When you’re a solo contributor, you don’t have the capacity to convince everyone through sheer persistence. You need to find the lever that makes the business case obvious to the specific stakeholder whose support you need.
And sometimes? The answer is “not yet.” There are projects I would love to do that are too big or too complex to take on as a solo practitioner. In larger organizations, some of these things would be managed through full-time positions. I’ve had to remind myself regularly that even the smallest movement is still movement—and that it’s okay to defer good ideas until capacity exists.
Measure What Matters, Not Everything That Could Matter
My week structure varies depending on where we are in seasonal schedules. At the beginning of each quarter, I dedicate more time to reporting. Leading up to a season launch, I spend more time on product development tasks, such as stakeholder meetings.
The key is knowing what actually needs to be measured and reported—and what’s just noise.
Small team principle: Report on outcomes, not activities. Leadership doesn’t need to know about every task you completed. They need to know: What changed? What value did we create? What risks did we mitigate?
For me, this looks like quarterly reporting on our core sustainability pillars with concrete examples of impact. Not vague commitments—actual things we did, with numbers attached when possible.
The Quick Win That Opens Doors
Early in my focused sustainability role, I revived our sustainability report after several stagnant years. It was a relatively small, fast project that got sustainability visible again—both internally and externally.
The report became a database of content we could share about small and big sustainability wins, even when sustainability wasn’t necessarily a big organizational focus. I did the majority of the preparation work over a few months, drafting text and sourcing images from partners, then our creative team built on my draft alongside their other priorities.
Impact: That report gave us credibility. It showed we were serious. It gave the sales team something to send prospects. And it created momentum for the bigger projects that came later.
Small team principle: Find the project that’s 80% ready to go and just needs someone to finish it. Quick wins build credibility that unlock resources for harder initiatives.
Your Constraints Are Features, Not Bugs
If I could go back and give advice to myself starting a solo sustainability role, here’s what I’d say:
First: Find as many allies as possible in the organization—bonus points if they’re senior-level with influence. Having people you can work with in small capacities makes getting projects moving exponentially faster.
Second: Make it easy for everyone to talk about sustainability, not just you. I did this by building clear communication pillars and identifying real, tangible ways we were delivering in those areas. When your colleagues can authentically represent your work, your impact multiplies.
Third: Accept that you will not do everything, and that’s okay. Your job isn’t to implement every sustainability best practice—it’s to implement the ones that create the most value given your organization’s reality.
Being a solo sustainability contributor is hard. But it’s also uniquely powerful. You’re nimble. You build relationships across the entire organization. You’re forced to focus on what actually matters instead of bureaucratic process. You see the whole picture in a way specialists can’t.
The projects on your desk that you haven’t finished yet? They’re not failures. They’re your pipeline. Work on them when capacity allows. Celebrate what you’ve already accomplished. And remember: even the smallest movement is still movement toward the end goal.
What’s one thing you can do this week? Not ten things. One thing. Make it small, make it strategic, and make it happen.
What’s been your biggest challenge as a solo sustainability contributor or leading sustainability with a small team? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you—drop a comment below.
