In a keynote conversation at SB’21 San Diego, two leading execs in their respective industries — Katie Decker and Nancy Mahon — discussed how their
sustainability strategies have been embedded within their businesses, as well as differences and similarities between the companies’ approaches.
One year ago, Johnson & Johnson Consumer
Health announced its
Healthy Lives Mission — a 10-year, $800 million pledge to improve the
sustainability and impact of its products and brands.
At SB’21 San Diego, in a keynote entitled, ‘Driving Organizational Change in
Support of Sustainability’, Katie
Decker — Global President of
Essential Health and Sustainability at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health —
explained how the mission has been embedded within the business.
The session also featured Nancy
Mahon, SVP of Global
Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability at The Estée Lauder
Companies. Here we distill
the conversation to learn from the experiences, differences and similarities
between the companies’ approaches.
How did Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health’s Healthy Lives Mission start?
KD: Johnson & Johnson has been running as a business for over 130 years and
had environmental goals for more than 40 years. We asked: “What do we need to do
to remain relevant and drive this change across our organization so we can start
operating differently? What is it that unites all Johnson & Johnson people?”
The answer is a passion for health. Everything we do is in service of positively
changing the trajectory of health for humanity. While that’s a broad and
ambitious goal, the effect is tremendously clarifying. Social impact and
environmental sustainability have clear and proven connections to human health,
which has helped focus our priorities and give extra meaning to our work in
enhancing the sustainability of our products and practices. You can’t have
healthy people without a healthy planet for them to live, work and thrive. This
led to creating the Healthy Lives
Mission.
How do you drive organizational change and support for your sustainability mission?
KD: Our Healthy Lives Mission has three pillars: Healthy people, healthy
planet and empowered employees. This third pillar was the key to it becoming a
movement within the company. While we had senior management who really bought
it, the way to get the movement going within our culture was through activating
at grassroots level. We started with a network of 200 Healthy Lives Champions
all around the world in different markets and different functions, and trained
them on the science and healthcare aspects — including the health impacts of
climate
change
and the impacts of plastics on the
environment.
That is the groundswell that has really propelled this forward.
NM: In order for me to integrate into the business, I have to have enormous
empathy and understanding for the people in each piece of the value chain. The
secret to getting stuff done is to focus on empathy, on understanding, and on
where you can drive value. Consider how you show up and how you drive value,
which will be very different for the HR department versus R&D. So, partner,
empathize, and then really understand the levers of change in your organization.
For our organization, we are very strategy-focused. So, we needed to have a very
clear strategy that everybody accepts. And lastly, you need to focus and
prioritize.
L-R: Nancy Mahon and Katie Decker talk with moderator Angelica Beard on October 20 at SB'21 San Diego | Image credit: Sustainable Brands
How do you bring people along to achieve your goals?
KD: We recognise the need to connect hearts and minds. If you can connect
the logical side of data and information with the emotional side, and bring
those two things together, it becomes easier for everybody to find something
that they can get on board with. “You can’t have healthy people without a
healthy planet” became a rallying cry and you hear that played back.
It’s also about breaking it down. These are big lofty goals. We needed to pick a
focus so we started with eight Leadership Brands – which include some of the
most iconic and far-reaching brands like Aveeno®, Listerine® and Neutrogena® —
where we knew that even small changes could make significant impact.
We decided if we start here with these teams and figure out how they can embed
this into their strategy, then we will have examples and it will set the example
for the rest of the company. Secondly, we worked out a series of micro goals for
2022 and 2023; because if someone can achieve the 2022 goal, then they know they
are on the path to where we need to be in 2025 or 2030.
NM: Five years ago, we set 11 targets in nine key areas and now we’re adding
more targets. The areas where we see increasing opportunity are in
climate
and responsible sourcing. You’ve got to do the math of the people who are going
to own it. We have goals for our
packaging
that each brand President owns; we check in on a quarterly basis and our team
reports to the Board of Directors. It’s important to sustain and build our
teams, so we build career tracks and rewarding opportunities for sustainability
and social impact practitioners in our companies.
How did publicly talking about your commitment help?
KD: One of the most effective things we did was making a public
commitment
that we would invest $800m over the next 10 years in the Healthy Lives Mission.
Being vocal about our goals and progress not only helped win the hearts and
minds of our leadership and employees; it also generated more opportunities to
impact change. When we started our supercharged sustainability journey, we
truthfully knew that we could make ourselves better partners to some suppliers
by sharing our position and goals on sustainability publicly. Once we started
educating our most important stakeholders and telling our story, it helped them
see that we’re serious about these changes and it made us a more attractive
partner.
How have partnerships been instrumental in moving your journey forward?
KD: We know the type of change we want to see can’t be accomplished alone.
It takes a village filled with trusted suppliers, industry partners, consumers,
employees and many more — all committed to a shared vision of a better world. As
part of this journey, we joined the Consumer Goods Forum’s Plastic Waste
Coalition of
Action;
and through it, we have worked with like-minded companies to develop and endorse
new, global industry design rules for sustainable packaging. I’ve also loved how
our teams have been able to collaborate with one of our North America
suppliers, like the Menasha Corporation, in 2021 to remove a projected 60
tons of plastic and reduce nearly 1,000 sq ft. miles of corrugated cardboard.
Both are two examples from this year alone that prove what we can accomplish by
directing the best minds and resources toward the same goal.
NM: Our framework is called Beauty Inspired, Values
Driven; and we focus on women
consumers. We have recently made a large commitment to a group called
Co-Impact, which has launched a gender venture capital fund. Our interest is
in how you can raise the living standards and educational outcomes for women and
girls across the world. We’re clear on the intersectionality between climate
justice and gender justice. Through our net-zero and RE100 work, we worked
with NextEra Energy Resources to launch a wind farm in Oklahoma that
covered over half of our electrical footprint. We invested in the
Massachusetts Tri-City Forest Project for offsets. We use the company’s
social impact work to fuel the business actions. As we double down on blockchain
within our supply chain, we are also focusing on partnering with BSR to
provide education and literacy training within our suppliers’ facilities. Don’t
overlook important very close partners.
Published Dec 8, 2021 7am EST / 4am PST / 12pm GMT / 1pm CET
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/ This article is sponsored by
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This article, produced in cooperation with the Sustainable Brands editorial team, has been paid for by one of our sponsors.