In the Weeds is a series addressing the real, operational challenges faced by the people responsible for HRDD, ESG and ethical trade inside organisations. If you have a problem you’d like addressed in a future post, share it via our contact form.
If you voted “lack of leadership appetite” in our recent LinkedIn poll asking about the biggest barriers to effective HRDD implementation, you were not alone. It’s a common frustration across business; so unsurprisingly it was the second most selected answer in our poll (after lack of resource – see our previous blog on that one).
If this resonates for you, the underlying challenge is probably this: you know what needs to happen, but you are not the person who gets to decide. The work of getting ESG/HRDD/ethical trade taken seriously is, in large part, the work of influencing upwards. Influencing upwards is one of the harder things a practitioner is asked to do – which means it is also one of the most important skills a practitioner can develop. This post may help.
The challenge at hand
Leadership appetite for HRDD is not a static personality trait or a fixed cultural given. It is not something organisations either have or don’t have. It is something that can be created, sustained and deepened – and equally, something that can be undermined by the wrong conditions, the wrong framing, or the wrong moment. Acknowledging this matters because it changes how you think about your job as a practitioner.
Trying to influence upwards – without formal authority, often without direct access, and in competition with a dozen other commercial priorities – is the core challenge this post is about. And the most useful frame for that challenge, in our experience, is this: the goal is not to find leaders who already care, or to make the case so compellingly that caring becomes inevitable. It is to create the conditions in which acting becomes the path of least resistance. (Caring ≠ acting). This is a subtler and more durable objective than winning an argument – and it requires a more deliberate approach than simply making the case louder, better or more frequently.
It also requires understanding which version of the problem you are actually dealing with. Because “lack of leadership appetite” covers several quite different dynamics, and the approach that works for one will not work for another.
The Diagnostic: Which Version of the Problem Is This?
Effective upward influence starts with an accurate diagnosis. The approach that works for Version 1 will not work for Version 3 (and confusing them will waste the limited opportunities you have to make the case.)
- Version 1: Genuine lack of knowledge Leadership hasn’t connected ESG or HRDD to anything they recognise as important. They may associate it with NGO campaigns, compliance paperwork, or niche sustainability concerns – rather than with business-critical decisions, supply chain resilience, litigation exposure, or commercial risk. This is the most benign version of the problem and, in some ways, the most straightforward to address. The case hasn’t been made in language that lands. That is a communication and framing challenge.
- Version 2: Understands but doesn’t prioritise Leadership gets the argument – at least in theory – but HRDD keeps losing when it competes with immediate commercial pressures, short-term targets, and the dozen other things also demanding attention. This is an incentive and structure problem as much as a knowledge one. The issue is not that leadership doesn’t understand the case; it’s that the case doesn’t feel urgent enough, or proximate enough, to displace whatever is already at the top of the agenda.
- Version 3: Active resistance This is the hardest version to name honestly, but it exists. Sometimes leadership appetite is low because the implications of genuine HRDD are uncomfortable – findings that might require changes to buying practices, pricing, supplier relationships, or commercial terms that leadership is not willing to make. There may be a vested interest, conscious or not, in not looking too closely. This is a cultural and political problem and requires a different kind of approach.
- Version 4: Misalignment between levels Appetite exists somewhere in the organisation but not consistently throughout it. A sustainability director who is deeply committed but a CEO who isn’t engaged. A board that is ahead of executive leadership, driven by investor pressure or NED expertise. A procurement director who gets it but commercial leadership that doesn’t. The challenge here is vertical and horizontal alignment rather than wholesale absence of appetite.
With that diagnosis in mind, here is a list of some approaches we found can actually work:
The Solutions: What Actually Moves Leadership?
1. Starting by knowing your audience – and tailoring accordingly
The instinct of many practitioners when faced with low leadership appetite is to prepare a compliance briefing: here is what the law requires, here is when it applies, here is what the penalties are. Compliance briefings have their place: they are useful for getting legal teams, general counsel and risk functions on side, and they can open a door. But they rarely shift leadership mindset entirely. Compliance arguments tell leaders what they must do. They don’t tell them why it matters in terms they personally connect with – and they rarely create the kind of genuine understanding that produces lasting commitment.
Effective upward influence requires calibrating the argument to the person:
- A CFO may respond to supply chain resilience and financial risk exposure.
- A commercial director may respond to customer requirements and market access.
- A CEO might respond best to competitive positioning and reputational risk.
Understanding what each leader cares about most, and leading with that, is more effective than a generic HRDD pitch delivered repeatedly to a room that isn’t quite listening.
2. Approaching with genuine, insightful engagement
Where you have direct access to the C-suite, use it for real two-way conversations rather than presentations. Genuine, insightful engagement – that treats leaders as smart people who are capable of understanding the full picture – works better than any deck. Ask and answer questions. Pique curiosity. Try to surface what sits behind any resistance or scepticism. Where you don’t have direct access, find a trusted intermediary: a board member, a respected external adviser, a peer CEO, or a General Counsel who has already understood the litigation trajectory and the business case. The messenger matters as much as the message.
3. Framing it as resilience and future-proofing
For many leadership teams, the most durable argument for ESG/HRDD/ethical trade is not a moral one – it’s an operational one. The organisations that know their supply chains, have built genuine supplier relationships, and understand where their risks are concentrated are better placed to respond to disruption than those that don’t. Framing HRDD/ethical trading as supply chain risk management – in familiar language that connects to the strategic priorities leadership is already working with – tends to land differently from a core sustainability or ethics framing. It also tends to stick, because it connects to something leaders are already thinking about – risk management and future-proofing – rather than asking them to think about something new.
4. Referencing external events and recent litigation to make the risk feel real
Abstract risk arguments rarely move people. Concrete, recent, real examples do: The Dyson settlement in January 2026 (UK); The Yves Rocher ruling in March 2026 (France); UFLPA enforcement detentions (USA) hitting automotive, electronics and agricultural supply chains. These are not theoretical risks – they are recent, expensive, and reputationally damaging events affecting organisations that presumably had legal and compliance functions. Using them analytically, as evidence of a shifting risk landscape, makes the argument proximate in a way that generic risk language doesn’t. Timing matters here too: the same argument made in the wake of a relevant news story lands differently from the identical argument made in a vacuum.
5. Using peer benchmarking — it works on more than one level
In our experience, peer benchmarking is one of the most consistently effective tools available to a practitioner trying to move leadership interest. It works for two reasons that reinforce each other.
The first is competitive. Leaders respond to information about what comparable organisations are doing, particularly when that information is public and attributable. WBA Social Benchmark scores, KnowTheChain rankings, ETI membership lists, published HRDD disclosures from sector peers – these create a competitive frame that resonates with leadership in a way that abstract arguments about doing the right thing often don’t.
The second is behavioural. There is a well-documented psychological dynamic — social proof — whereby people are significantly more likely to change a belief or adopt a behaviour when they can see that others like them – their peers – are already doing it. Behavioural research has shown us that messaging on social norms like “80% of people in this neighbourhood recycle” is more effective in achieving individual behaviour change than a generic recycling campaign. This same mechanism applies, in a more sophisticated form, to business leaders. Nobody wants to be the negative outlier. Nobody wants to be publicly identifiable as the laggard in their sector.
It is also worth understanding which kind of leader you are dealing with. Some are motivated by being first – the innovator, the early adopter, the organisation that sets the standard others follow. For them, the benchmarking argument is about competitive advantage and sector leadership. Others are motivated by being solidly within the pack – doing what responsible organisations in their sector do. For them, the argument is about not being left behind. Almost no leader actively wants to be identified as the worst performer in a public ranking.
6. Connecting the dots (for organisations with established CSR or social impact activity)
Many organisations that struggle with leadership appetite for HRDD already have significant CSR, social impact or community investment activity. The challenge here is not absence of values – it is simply that leadership sees HRDD as something separate from, and additional to, what they are already doing.
The more useful framing is that genuine social impact and HRDD/ethical trading should be essentially two sides of the same thing – and if they’re not, it’s worth asking why. Organisations that have substantial philanthropic or social licence activity but weak HRDD tend to be addressing symptoms rather than causes. Reframing and examining existing activity through an HRDD lens – not to devalue what is already happening, but to show how it could be more coherent, more effective, and more directly connected to the organisation’s actual impact on people – tends to resonate with leaders who already have values but haven’t yet connected them to operational practice. Done well, this reframe doesn’t ask leadership to do more. It asks them to do what they’re already doing, better.
7. Finding your internal champion(s)
Direct access to leadership is not always available to the person responsible for implementing ESG/HRDD/ethical trade. Where it isn’t, one of the most effective investments a practitioner can make is in identifying and cultivating an internal champion – someone with the access, credibility and relationship capital to carry the argument into spaces the practitioner can’t reach. This might be the one board member with relevant expertise, a General Counsel who has understood the litigation trajectory, a CFO who has connected HRDD to supply chain resilience, or a senior commercial leader who has had a direct conversation with a customer about their requirements.
The champion doesn’t need to be a convert to the full HRDD agenda. They just need to be persuaded of enough of the argument to raise it credibly in the right rooms. Finding that person, understanding what part of the argument resonates with them specifically, and giving them what they need to make the case is often more effective than any amount of internal presenting by you and your team.
8. Embedding it in performance management
One of the most underused and most effective levers available to a practitioner – that I’ve seen genuinely working in this situation – is changing what the organisation measures and rewards. If HRDD metrics — e.g. supplier social risk scores, responsible purchasing practices compliance, audit finding resolution rates, grievance mechanism effectiveness – become part of how procurement, commercial and supply chain functions are evaluated, the dynamic shifts. HRDD stops being something the sustainability team is asking for and becomes something functions are accountable for delivering. Leadership attention tends to follow what the organisation measures. If HRDD is measured, it gets managed. If it isn’t, it competes perpetually with things that are.
9. Using customer requirements and market access as a commercial argument
For some leadership teams, the most compelling argument is not internal at all: instead, it is the requirements being placed on them by their own customers. As large companies face mandatory HRDD obligations under CS3D and equivalent legislation around the world, they are increasingly cascading those requirements down their supply chains as a condition of doing business. If your organisation’s customers are asking for HRDD evidence, that is a revenue argument, not a compliance argument. Leadership that has been unmoved by regulatory risk or ethical framing often responds very differently when the conversation is about contract retention and market access.
10. Not overlooking the board
In some organisations, the most productive route is not through executive leadership at all: it is through the board. Investor pressure, NED expertise, audit committee scrutiny of non-financial risk, and the personal liability implications of the evolving litigation landscape are all creating board-level interest in ESG, HRDD and ethical trading that sometimes runs ahead of executive engagement. Where that is the case, try to ensure the board has accurate, substantive, real-time information — rather than a sanitised version that sometimes reaches them through internal reporting. Doing so can create top-down pressure that complements – and is likely considerably more effective than – your own bottom-up advocacy.
From Initial Engagement to Genuine Commitment
Getting leadership into a room and getting them to nod is not the same thing as building genuine commitment. In our experience, the gap between those two things is where most practitioner effort gets lost — and it is where the influencing upwards challenge is most acute, because sustaining engagement requires a different approach from creating it in the first place.
The goal, ultimately, is to shift from influence to embedding. Once you have moved someone through influence, the aim is to build structural conditions in which the commitment no longer depends on your continued influencing effort. That means ensuring the initial engagement produces a specific commitment or next step – a named owner, a decision, a timeline – rather than a general expression of interest that doesn’t translate into action. This means connecting to existing governance structures – board risk committees, ESG reporting cycles, procurement governance – so that it has a structural home and regular visibility. And it means, where possible, getting leadership to make some form of public commitment, internally or externally, because public commitment is considerably harder to walk back than a private conversation.
The practitioner who has moved leadership from ignorance or indifference to genuine, embedded commitment has done something genuinely difficult. It deserves to be recognised as such.
The Honest Reality
Sometimes, despite everything above, leadership genuinely will not move. The organisation is not ready, the incentives are not aligned, the resistance is too deeply embedded, or the timing is simply wrong. That is a real situation and it is worth naming honestly.
Timing, in particular, is worth holding on to. The same argument made at the wrong moment — before a regulatory deadline, before a relevant news story, before a customer requirement arrives — can fail where it would otherwise succeed. Part of the skill of influencing upwards is knowing when to push and when to wait, and positioning yourself so that when the external moment arrives — and it tends to arrive — the groundwork is already done.
In the meantime, the practitioner who has made the case clearly, framed it well, found their champion, and built what they can within the system has done their job. Focus your energy on the parts of the agenda where progress is possible without full leadership mandate. That is not defeat. It is proportionate, strategic use of limited resource in a constrained environment – and it keeps you well positioned for the moment when the conditions change.
What’s your biggest operational challenge as a practitioner responsible for HRDD, ESG or ethical trade? Share it with us at info@clairelynchconsulting.com or via our contact form — and it may become the subject of a future post in this series.
Claire Lynch Consulting is a business and human rights advisory practice specialising in social impact, human rights due diligence and responsible sourcing. We help organisations move from insight to impact.
