Many CEOs seem to have reversed cause and effect. Brand trust and reputation are the result of a company’s sustainability actions. Are we being set up for a decade of window dressing and cause-washing as companies cobble together sustainability programs to burnish their public image?

These findings were published last week by the United Nations Global Compact and Accenture. Internationally, 766 CEOs were polled on sustainability and business with 72% identifying brand, trust and reputation as their biggest motivator for sustainability, 44% citing revenue growth and cost reduction, 42% personal motivation, 39% consumer demand and 31% employee engagement and retention.

Seven years ago we would have celebrated the fact that 93% of these CEOs see sustainability as critical to their companies’ success. But really, how can that be disputed? Today, sustainability is fundamental. The remaining 7% will be swept along or swept away soon enough.

So the challenge I see is exciting business leaders and employees about the non-public facing side of sustainability. How can we communicate the subjective and financial value of creating a sustainable workplace? Or of reducing waste? Or switching to environmentally preferred materials?  We need more Interfaces–companies that transform their entire system and resource selection, not their advertising and marketing strategies–and less (Product) RED-like campaigns.*

*I have a lot of respect for the (Product) RED campaign for the money and awareness it has raised and for the way it’s allowed diverse companies to get involved. But we’re evolving past the stage of one-off (even long-term) cause marketing campaigns to significant systems change.

That’s the goal, but what does the job look like?  Beyond being strategic, passionate and resourceful, what’s expected of you, the social missionary?  I’ve been looking at different job titles and responsibilities lately to better understand how companies view social responsibility and what skills and characteristics are sought after across industries.  Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship lists nine responsibilities of the social missionary (whom they call a corporate citizenship leader):

1. Become the company’s expert on social issues, and the changing expectations of external stakeholders
2. Build strong relationships with key external stakeholders (community groups, NGOs, policy makers, media, etc.)
3. Identify risks and opportunities for the business based on stakeholder expectations and designing proactive mitigation and response strategies
4. Design and implementing the company’s social mission strategy
5. Build consensus among senior leadership across the company to adopt new social responsibility policies and programs
6. Build trusting internal relationships and becoming the central point of contact and resident expert on decisions regarding social and environmental issues and impact on company stakeholders
7. Embed socially responsible practices into all operations across organizational boundaries
8. Measure and communicating social mission initiatives and activities related to the company’s goals and performance
9. Scale social programs nationally and (often) globally

They’ve identified the challenges of helping a company develop or expand its social mission as:

1. Limited resources and a small support staff
2. Convincing leadership of the business value of adopting social mission strategies and practice
3. Lack of direct authority over other business leaders and managers who must be influenced
4. Managing tensions inherent in the iterative process of integrating citizenship practice into an existing operating model (involves overcoming internal resistance and resolving turf battles)
5. Staying tuned into the broad spectrum of information and issues relating to corporate citizenship/social mission
6. Identifying appropriate metrics and obtaining measures from multiple individuals and departments in the organization to measure the business and societal impact of program initiatives
7. Finding ways to communicate your social mission honestly and effectively both inside and outside the company
8. Finding win-win solutions that will benefit the business financially as well as meet social needs
9. Understanding stakeholder expectations and managing relationships
10. Adapting to regional and cultural differences

Right, so lots to do and lots of obstacles to weave around while seeing your vision through. In addition to the qualities I see as critical (strategic thinking, passion for the mission and resourcefulness), the study identifies eight leadership competencies of effective social missionaries:

Personal Maturity: An ability to achieve satisfaction by empowering others rather than through personal recognition.

Optimistic Commitment: She draws on optimism and strong personal belief in the potential of a socially driven businesses to overcome social and business challenges.

Peripheral Vision: An interest in the world and social and business issues that enables one to see new opportunities and risks.

Visionary Thinking: He thinks strategically and creatively, connecting the dots to find new ways to enhance the social mission.

Systems Perspective: She uses an understanding of how elements of a system relate and interact to frame risks and opportunities.

Collaborative Networker: He uses empathy and interpersonal understanding to build mutually beneficial relationships and connect and engage diverse groups of people.

Change Driver: She combines vision with the persistence and drive to mobilize people around a higher purpose.

Strategic Influence: He leverages organizational awareness to influence others to commit to the company’s social mission.

What do you think?  I’m midway between thinking these are jargon-y qualities that won’t even survive the commute, to thinking there’s some truth in these surveyed commonalities.  I know what Ben Franklin would do. He’d systematically practice one principle every day until it became natural behavior.  Then he’d add another, and practice them together until he was a near-effortless embodiment of all eight competencies.  And I’m pretty sure I know what Seth Godin would do too.  He’d shred the list and encourage fresh and independent thinking.  I fall somewhere in between instinct and independence and studied success.  What about you? Do you find these types of studies and lists helpful or suffocating?

As the director of The eBay Green Team, Amy works to engage eBay’s 89 million users to buy sustainably and economically by reusing and repurposing products.  Prior to joining eBay, she co-founded Conservation International’s Environmental Leadership in Business to help companies align their interest in environmental responsibility and profit.  During this time, she spent three years in Rio de Janeiro engaging Brazilian companies in environmental responsibility. Amy has launched partnerships with Starbucks, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Intel, Office Depot, Aracruz Celulose, Fiji Water and Bank of America.

Amy, you spent three years working with companies in Brazil to increase their environmental efforts. Are there differences in how South American and U.S. companies think about sustainability?

What astonishes me is that corporate responsibility is truly a global movement, without boundaries.  If you had told me, when I first started in this space in the mid 1990s, that 15 years later we’d see companies of all sizes, in all geographies, looking at how they can improve their environmental and social practices, I would have laughed.  There’s obviously a lot more work everyone can do, and different companies are in different places in the journey to embed sustainability into their core business strategies and business decision-making, but the momentum is clearly there.  In Brazil, I worked with a group called Instituto BioAtlantica, which was co-founded by some of the largest Brazilian companies, which shows awareness for this issues from the corporate sector.

What is your vision for the eBay Green Team in 10 years?

Ten years is a long time for a company that’s only 14 years old!  But our vision is clear.  We want the eBay Green Team to be a catalyst for bringing truly greener, smarter shopping into the mainstream—and for keeping it there.  In most cases, the greenest product is the one that already exists, but people don’t necessarily think about this today.  With a community of 89 million active users who trade $2,000 worth of goods on eBay every second, we have a unique opportunity and, as we see it, a responsibility.  Seemingly small actions really can add up to a big difference when taken together.  We’ve seen this firsthand with our employee Green Team, which was one of the inspirations for our larger initiative.  Together, those 2,300 eBay employees have driven greener thinking inside of eBay and have led us to some of our biggest environmental accomplishments, like having the largest private solar installation in our hometown of San Jose, California.

Do you see the Green Team as a model that other Fortune 500 companies can learn from and implement?

Certainly.  The most important part of the eBay Green Team is how deeply authentic it is to who we are as a company. It was created by our employees, inspired by our community of users and is in alignment with our overall business.  Tapping into the passion and ideas of your employees is a great place to start.  One resource for interested companies should be the “Making Your Impact at Work” guide that we partnered with Net Impact on.  The guide shares eBay’s employee engagement story along with those of several other great companies.

eBay’s Green Team was born from employee initiative. If a company’s sustainability efforts are driven from the top down, what can leadership do to involve employees in the company’s mission?

Make employees a part of the solution—from the beginning.  Value their opinion and nurture their desire to help the company succeed.  Don’t let big decisions get made in the C suite without consultation.  Inevitably, you’re going to need your employees to deliver on any big vision.  While major decisions certainly happen at the executive level, eBay’s sustainability efforts have been much more bottom-up and grassroots in nature.  We’re very much a values-based company, and our employee Green Team is a natural extension of that as the largest employee-based interest group in the company. What’s unique and exciting is that the eBay Green Team inspires employees to join projects on campus and to then take these interests and passions back to their communities and lives away from work.

It doesn’t have to be complicated to involve your employees. When we announced our three-year, 15% absolute carbon reduction goal we asked employees for their ideas for how to get there.  Since eBay is project to grow at a very healthy rate, it’s not an easy goal we’re setting.  We received over 600 ideas, all of them good ones, for cutting down on our corporate greenhouse gas emissions and operating more effectively.

For more than a decade you helped businesses become sustainable, and thereby more profitable. What are some primary takeaways from this work? Does it take a special type of business leader or company to succeed sustainably? Are there general best practices that you can share?

I’m convinced that there’s something to be gained by every company looking at sustainability.  What it takes, fundamentally, is a willingness to look at two things differently: your planning horizon and your audiences (aka stakeholders).  At an operational level, driving out inefficiency is just good business management.  Sometimes, as with eBay’s commitment to renewable energy, you have to be willing to look beyond next quarter to see the ROI or payback. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which operating more efficiently isn’t better for the bottom line.

Expanding your view on what audiences you serve (including employees, as survey after survey shows that a business’ commitment to sustainability is an important factor in recruiting and retaining top talent) also leads to similar conclusions.  What’s interesting is that in this time of economic downturn it seems more companies are asking themselves: What does it take to endure in the long term? The answers to this question inevitably lead to sustainability and better business decision-making.

What types of benefits do you look for when creating partnerships between businesses and non-profits?

Clear and shared interests and goals are a really important place to start.  For instance, with The Green Team’s most recent set of partners, The Uniform Project, PopTech and ecofabulous, we found that we shared a similar mission to help people think about using things that already exist in new ways that meet their needs.  While we’ve joined with three very different partners, we all share this worldview, as well as the perspective that the way to really ingrain this concept in society is to inspire and engage people in positive ways, rather than preaching to them.  We were able to bring this diverse group of partners together because we could rally around the single goal and concept that a greener lifestyle is really a trade up, not a trade off.  We all felt strongly that this consumer benefit had to be front and center in all that we did together.

Culture fit between partners is also important.  eBay’s a pretty fast moving company.  We don’t have time for a lot of bureaucracy so we need partners that can be as, or more nimble, than us.

Sirota Survey Intelligence asked 1.6 million employees from more than 70 organizations about senior management’s integrity, empathy and effectiveness and found a strong correlation between these qualities and management’s commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR).

• 70% of employees in organizations with a strong CSR commitment rated senior management as having high integrity, compared to 20% of employees in corporations with weak or inauthentic CSR commitments.

• Two-thirds of employees who see their employer’s as committed to CSR also view their employer as possessing a strong sense of direction and strategy, versus only 18% of employees in organizations with weak or no CSR strategy.

Overall, employees do not distinguish between altruism outside or inside or a company. The same  drivers that inspire a manager or organization to do good externally are seen as translating to their treatment of employees. Additionally, socially conscious employers are inspiring in their awareness of problems and confidence that they can make a difference in external environments.

Douglas Klein, president of Sirota Survey Intelligence, adds an important qualifier: The most effective leaders not only practice robust CSR, they understand and communicate the “strategic importance these programs play in supporting the interests of the business.”

So while CSR-engaged managers are more successful than philanthropic misers, they need to understand and be able to demonstrate the strategic relevance of CSR to reach full leadership potential.