Ask ten organisations where sustainability "lives" and you will get ten different answers. In one, it sits in a small central team reporting to the CEO. In another, it is dispersed across procurement, operations, finance and HR, with no single owner. Both can work. Both can fail. The structure you choose shapes how much influence the function has, how quickly it delivers, and - increasingly - the kind of people you can attract to run it.
As sustainability, ESG and human rights move from voluntary commitments to regulated disclosure, the question of where the roles sit has become a strategic decision with real consequences for delivery and for talent.
The two ends of the spectrum
At one end is the standalone team: a dedicated function, usually led by a Chief Sustainability Officer or equivalent, with its own headcount, budget and mandate. It owns strategy, reporting and stakeholder engagement, and it acts as the centre of gravity for everything the organisation does on environmental and social issues.
At the other end is the embedded model: sustainability responsibilities are built into existing roles across the business. The procurement lead owns supplier due diligence, the facilities team owns emissions from buildings, HR owns social metrics, and finance owns disclosure. There may be a small coordinating function, or none at all.
Most organisations sit somewhere between the two, and the best ones move deliberately along the spectrum as they mature, rather than landing on a structure by accident.
Pros and Cons of standalone teams
A standalone team gives sustainability a voice, a budget and accountability. It signals seriousness to investors, regulators and employees, and it creates a clear home for specialist expertise: carbon accounting, human rights due diligence, disclosure under frameworks like CSRD and ISSB. When the work is technical and fast-moving, having people whose full-time job is to stay ahead of it is a genuine advantage.
The risk is isolation. A central team can become a silo that produces impressive strategies and glossy reports while the rest of the business carries on unchanged. If the function is seen as "the department that does sustainability," everyone else assumes it is not their problem. The team ends up policing rather than enabling...and burns out doing it.
Pros and Cons of embedded models
Embedding sustainability into line roles is how change actually sticks. When the procurement director is measured on supplier human rights standards, or the operations lead is accountable for energy use, sustainability stops being a side project and becomes part of how decisions get made. Ownership is distributed, and the work scales with the organisation rather than bottlenecking through one small team.
The weakness is coordination and depth. Without a centre, standards drift, reporting becomes inconsistent, and no one holds the enterprise-wide picture needed for regulatory disclosure. Embedded responsibilities also tend to lose out when they compete with someone’s "day job" - the quarterly target usually wins. And genuinely specialist work, like double materiality assessments or modern-slavery risk mapping, rarely gets done well by people doing it part-time.
A simple way to decide
Rather than picking a model in the abstract, work backwards from three questions.
- How mature is the organisation? Companies early in their journey usually benefit from a standalone team to build capability, set the strategy and establish credibility. As practices embed and literacy spreads, the central team can shrink and shift from doing to enabling.
- What is the regulatory and reporting burden? Heavy, technical disclosure requirements argue for dedicated specialists who own the process. Lighter obligations can be absorbed into existing finance and legal functions.
- Where does value - and risk - actually sit? A manufacturer with a complex, high-risk supply chain needs deep human rights and procurement expertise close to operations. A professional services firm whose main footprint is travel and talent has a very different centre of gravity. Put the specialist roles where the material issues are, not where the org chart is tidiest.
The model most organisations end up with
In practice, the durable answer is usually a hub-and-spoke structure: a small, senior central team that owns strategy, standards, reporting and expertise, paired with accountable owners embedded in each business unit. The hub sets direction and holds the enterprise view; the spokes deliver in context. It captures the credibility and depth of a standalone team while getting the reach and staying power of an embedded model.
The catch is that hub-and-spoke only works if the spokes are real. Naming a "sustainability champion" in each department and giving them no time, budget or authority is embedding in name only. The embedded owners need it written into their objectives and reflected in how they are measured; otherwise the hub quietly absorbs all the work and you are back to a silo.
The talent implication
Structure and hiring are two sides of the same decision. A standalone model needs deep specialists and a leader with the seniority to influence the board. A hub-and-spoke model needs something rarer: a central team of translators who can move between technical detail and business language, plus line managers who are willing to take sustainability into their remit.
That second profile - the operator who can carry sustainability inside a commercial role - is one of the hardest to find and one of the most valuable. Organisations that get their structure right, then hire deliberately against it, build functions that outlast any single leader or reporting cycle. Those that copy someone else’s org chart tend to end up with roles that look right on paper and deliver very little in practice.
Get the structure right first. The right hires follow from it.
If you would like help with structuring your sustainability team, Leonid's Talent Intelligence service can provide insights and data to help you make informed decisions. Please get in touch with Adam Bond, Leonid's ESG, Sustainability & Human Rights expert, for more information.
