Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

How She Got Her CEO to Prioritize Sustainability (The Smart Way) | Susan Heinking (Podcast 472)

10 May 2025 · 1 min

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A short podcast segment in which Susan Heinking describes how she persuaded a long-tenured, family-successor CEO to prioritize sustainability by reframing it around the CEO's immediate concerns—specifically air quality (and related risks like flooding on job sites). She explains flipping her message to focus first on what the CEO cared about, then linking those concerns back to sustainability actions.

Chapters

Working with a CEO, you know, at first wasn't all, like, sunshine and butterflies. They have a job to do running this company. They've got to read the market. They need to understand financials. They need to do what they think is best for the company with the information that they have at hand. When I first met the CEO, you know, like, I'm just coming in brand new, and he's been here basically his entire life, right? Because his dad was the CEO of the company, and his. His grandpa was the CEO of the company. Now he's just next in line. And so talking about sustainability, what I learned was it wasn't about sustainability. It was about. To him, it was about air quality. And so I kind of had to flip my script with him to focus on what he cared about at that moment and then tie it back to, okay, well, this is why sustainability is important. This is why sustainability can mitigate the air quality or the flooding on the job sites, and this is why we do the things we do.