Why Hiring a Full-Time Sustainability Team Is Often the Wrong First Move

When a company recognizes it needs sustainability expertise, the instinctive response is almost always the same: post a job for a Head of Sustainability, build out a small team, and treat this the way you'd treat any other new organizational function. This instinct is understandable — but it frequently creates a structural mismatch between the organization's actual stage of sustainability maturity and the fixed capacity it just committed to.

What "enough" structure actually looks like at scale — and why most companies aren't there yet

Consider the two ends of the real spectrum. Leonardo, the Italian aerospace and defense multinational, eventually built a sustainability function of 11 corporate-level staff plus 15 divisional Sustainability Coordinators embedded across its business units — a structure appropriate for a company with over 66,000 employees operating in dozens of countries. At the other end, Consilient Health — a mid-sized pharmaceutical company with roughly 90 employees and €65 million in revenue — ran its entire sustainability strategy development through a small, temporary team: a Sustainability Champion, a Deputy Champion, and the CEO himself, supported by an external advisor, for a defined multi-month project.

Neither company started by hiring a large permanent department before knowing what it actually needed. Leonardo's 26-person structure evolved over years, growing (by the sustainability lead's own account) even further as the function matured. Consilient Health's structure was explicitly temporary and project-based — built to develop the strategy, not to become permanent headcount before anyone knew what ongoing capacity would actually be required.

The sequencing problem most companies get backwards

Taticchi's research on sustainability education is direct about one thing: the upskilling of employees, managers, and executives is a clear enabler of successful sustainability transformation — but skills development and organizational structure are two different problems, and companies frequently solve the wrong one first.

A company at an early stage of ESG maturity — still figuring out its materiality priorities, its regulatory exposure, its actual data infrastructure needs — often doesn't yet know what specific expertise it will need in six months, let alone what a permanent, full-time hire should be doing on day one of a multi-year commitment. This is exactly the "pre-work" and "why" phase that Sally Taylor's framework describes as necessary before defining strategic pillars — work that doesn't require permanent headcount to complete.

Why fixed headcount is the wrong tool for an evolving need

Sustainability transformation moves through genuinely different phases, each requiring different specialized expertise: an ESG maturity assessment requires different skills than a circular business model redesign, which requires different skills than building CSDDD-compliant supply chain due diligence documentation, which requires different skills than structuring a green financing framework for a bond issuance like Iberdrola's.

A single full-time hire — even an excellent one — cannot plausibly be a specialist across ESG assessment methodology, circular economy business model design, human rights due diligence, and sustainable finance structuring simultaneously. Companies that hire one generalist "Head of Sustainability" and expect them to cover this full range often end up with someone stretched across areas where they have only surface familiarity — while the organization believes it has "solved" its expertise gap because a title exists.

The alternative: precision deployment over fixed capacity

The alternative to fixed headcount is a model where an organization can access the specific specialist it needs, for the specific phase of transformation it's currently in — a circular economy engineer during business model redesign, a due diligence specialist during supply chain compliance work, an SROI methodologist during impact measurement setup — without carrying the fixed cost of all of that expertise sitting idle between projects.

This isn't simply "using consultants instead of employees" — traditional consulting models often carry the same problem in reverse: a single consulting relationship that treats sustainability as one undifferentiated service line, rather than precisely matching the right specialist to the right need at the right moment.

What this means practically for a mid-sized organization

For a company genuinely early in its sustainability transformation — the situation most LATAM mid-sized organizations, closer to Consilient Health's scale than Leonardo's, are actually in — the practical sequencing that avoids this mismatch looks like:

First, get the diagnostic work done (maturity assessment, materiality analysis) before committing to any permanent structure — exactly what Consilient Health's temporary team accomplished before the company decided what ongoing capacity it actually needed.

Second, access specialized expertise precisely matched to each specific phase of implementation, rather than one generalist hire expected to cover everything Leonardo's 26-person structure was built to handle at a completely different scale.

Third, build permanent internal capacity only once the organization has enough clarity about its ongoing, steady-state needs to justify a fixed role — rather than as the first reflexive response to recognizing a skills gap. If and when that internal team grows, it should grow the way Leonardo's did: deliberately, tied to demonstrated ongoing need, not assembled all at once speculatively.

How Iconet® solves this precision-deployment problem

Iconet® is built specifically around this principle: on-demand access to 93+ vetted independent specialists across the full sustainability stack — ESG strategy, circular economy design, SROI measurement, life cycle assessment, human rights due diligence, sustainable finance structuring — deployed precisely for the specific phase of transformation your organization is in, without the fixed cost and structural mismatch of hiring generalist headcount before you know exactly what you need.

Every Iconet® engagement is tracked against verified impact metrics, contributing directly to the platform's documented 7.5:1 SROI — meaning the precision-matching isn't just operationally efficient, it's measurably effective.

Explore Iconet® → sustek.co/iconet

Frequently asked questions

Does this mean companies should never hire in-house sustainability staff? No — the point is sequencing, not permanent avoidance. Leonardo's eventual 26-person structure shows that in-house teams make complete sense at the right scale and maturity stage. The mismatch happens when companies try to build that structure before they have Consilient Health's kind of clarity about what they actually need.

How is an expert network different from traditional sustainability consulting firms? Traditional consulting often treats sustainability as one service line delivered by whoever is available, rather than precisely matching a specific specialist's expertise to a specific project phase — the network model is built around that precision-matching specifically, across a much broader range of specializations than a single consulting relationship typically offers.

Is this approach only suitable for smaller companies that can't afford a full team? Not necessarily — even larger organizations benefit from precision-matched specialist access for specific project phases (like due diligence documentation or SROI measurement setup) that don't require permanent, full-time capacity once that specific project phase concludes, even if they eventually build a core team the way Leonardo did.

Sources: Taticchi, P., Demartini, M. & Corvaglia-Charrey, M., "Leonardo," in Sustainable Transformation Strategy (Springer, 2023); Taticchi, P., "A Sustainability Strategy for Consilient Health," UCL School of Management Case Study (2021); Sustek.co — Iconet® (sustek.co/iconet).