Powering On: The Leadership Imperative for Sustainability in 2026

Climate ambition is beginning to bend the emissions curve. Yet progress remains slow, and operating conditions are increasingly complex. The next phase of sustainability will not be defined by new pledges but by whether organizations can execute—consistently, credibly, and at scale—under sustained pressure.

In 2026, sustainability is a defining leadership and talent imperative—and a competitive opportunity. Moving from promises to proof requires embedding measurable outcomes into organizational design, leadership capability, and systems.

When new demands are layered into organizations without redesigning decision rights, accountability, and leadership capability, execution slows, and resistance rises. The Korn Ferry Institute found that expanding the scope without redesigning the organization slows execution. Cheryl D’Cruz-Young, senior client partner at Korn Ferry, has warned that green skills shortages are emerging faster than organizations can fill them.  

Sustainability leadership is no longer discretionary. It is infrastructure for delivery.

Execution Under Pressure

Across recent global convenings—including Climate Week NYC and COP30 in Belém—a clear shift emerged. The language of ambition gave way to the language of execution: speed, simplicity, and systems.

Leaders were not calling for bigger promises. They were calling for practical collaboration and faster delivery.

As Heather Quinley, managing director of sustainability at Duke Energy, says:

“Sustainability is not valuable if it operates in a silo. We must consider what the business value is and how we have helped our customers.”

Three realities shaped these discussions:

• Delivery now defines credibility. Stakeholders expect outcomes, not ambition. Climate commitments are moving from voluntary to expected. Progress must be measured and visible.
• AI is an operating assumption. AI can compress cycle time, but it also raises governance, ethics, and energy-use considerations.
• Adaptation is central. Resilience across supply chains, infrastructure, and labor markets is now a board-level concern. Climate risk is business risk.

Taken together, these realities elevate sustainability from a functional initiative to an enterprise execution challenge.

The New Sustainability Leader: Connector, Collaborator, Catalyst

The Korn Ferry Institute’s research reveals a consistent pattern: the most effective sustainability leaders operate in three modes. These modes move sustainability from a functional initiative to an enterprise capability.

Connector: Translates sustainability into enterprise value: risk mitigation, growth, resilience, and cost of capital.

Rachel Hurley, head of sustainability at Paine Schwartz, explains:

“So much of a sustainability professional’s job is connecting the dots. Being that connective tissue is a critical first step for building the trust and alignment that allow for collaboration and catalyzing change.”

Collaborator: Builds coalitions across functions and value chains so sustainability becomes embedded in how decisions are made, rather than managed as an adjacent workstream.

Hui Wen Chan, senior director of sustainability at Crusoe, says:

“Collaboration is foundational. The scale of the transition ahead means no single organization can go it alone. We have to work across industries, sectors, and value chains to drive meaningful change.”

Catalyst: Removes friction, sustains momentum, and converts intent into scalable execution.

Virginie Helias, chief sustainability officer at P&G, emphasizes this imperative:

“We need to ignite change… to turn good intentions into irresistible vision and tangible action across value chains.”

Together, this triad reflects the Korn Ferry Institute’s enterprise leadership model: aligning people strategy directly to business value.

To operationalize the model, organizations should:

• Staff intentionally. Build teams that include connectors, collaborators, and catalysts, not only domain specialists.
• Clarify decision rights. Define who owns trade-offs among cost, carbon, resilience, speed, and equity—and how those decisions get made.
• Measure outcomes, not activity. Track progress against targets, operational milestones, and resilience metrics, not meetings held or reports produced.

Kate Shattuck, managing partner at Korn Ferry, reinforces that sustainability leadership is converging with enterprise leadership at the highest levels. “Agility,” once a differentiator, is now a baseline CEO success metric—and will remain so. The capacity to navigate ambiguity, integrate competing demands, and accelerate decision-making is central to both roles.  

AI Raises the Leadership Bar

AI is rapidly redefining the work of sustainability. It is increasingly effective at repeatable tasks: data cleanup, reconciliation, workflow automation, and first-pass disclosures. That automation creates efficiency, but it also changes what “good” looks like in sustainability roles.

As routine tasks move to machines, the premium moves to human judgment:

• Designing robust scenarios
• Interpreting outputs and stress-testing assumptions
• Managing trade-offs across cost, carbon, resilience, speed, and equity
• Navigating stakeholder scrutiny and internal politics
• Owning accountability for real-world consequences

Roles centered on coordination are more exposed to automation. Roles grounded in judgment, influence, and accountable decision-making become more valuable.

AI does not diminish the importance of sustainability leadership. It raises the bar.

Designing for Delivery

To strengthen sustainability execution in 2026, boards and executive teams should focus on five priorities:

• Embed sustainability into leadership systems. Integrate climate and transition literacy, scenario thinking, and resilience fluency into assessment, succession, and development. These capabilities must be core, not niche.
• Scale green skills beyond the function. Embed sustainability literacy across finance, operations, HR, and technology through targeted academies, rotations, and micro-credentials.
• Redesign decision structures for speed. Clarify trade-offs, elevate sustainability into strategy and capital allocation processes, and eliminate shadow governance that slows execution.
• Use AI for decision advantage—with governance. Automate low-value reporting while strengthening responsible AI and data governance to manage ethical and environmental risk.
• Align culture and incentives to measurable outcomes. Reward progress reflected in emissions reduction, resilience, innovation, and performance. Sustainability becomes part of how the business runs.

The Next Phase Will Be Won Through People

Climate Week 2025 and COP30 did not offer a simple narrative of victory or defeat. They revealed a more complex truth: the world is both off track and moving, often at the same time.

The question is no longer whether organizations support sustainability, but whether they have designed the leadership systems, roles, skills, decision rights, and incentives to deliver the transition already underway.

By clarifying purpose, assessing maturity, building green skills, and embedding transition-ready leadership capabilities at scale, sustainability shifts from a reporting obligation to a strategic advantage.

The next phase will not be won by ambition alone. It will be won by organizations that align purpose, capability, and accountability—and execute with discipline at scale.

To learn how Korn Ferry helps organizations change to create a sustainable future, explore our ESG capabilities.