The Role That Is Quietly Becoming Central

A 2025 Korn Ferry report finds that the Chief Sustainability Officer role is shifting from compliance and risk toward genuine strategic partnership. Sixty-two percent of executives surveyed plan to increase sustainability budgets. The CSO, the report argues, is becoming a connector, collaborator, and catalyst for business transformation.

Katja Tuomola reads the article with appreciation and a caveat. The research reflects large corporate reality.

“If you look at people whose titles are CSOs, you don’t typically find this in smaller companies.”

The deeper insight the Korn Ferry piece points toward but does not fully land is the one Katja has built her career around. The CSO role gains power not by championing sustainability, but by making sustainability indistinguishable from business performance.

From Applied Chemistry to Strategic Leadership

Katja Tuomola came to sustainability through chemistry and industry, not policy or campaigning. Twelve years at Kemira in research and applications work, then a move into Metsä Board and eventually VP of Sustainability Management at Metsä Group, where she led sustainability strategy for a business with approximately seven billion euros in sales. She rebuilt the function structurally, moving sustainability reporting into finance and controlling and establishing a new target programme with twenty-four ESG-linked goals.

She is now Head of Sustainability and Marketing Communications at MM Group, a fibre-based packaging company with over four billion euros in annual sales and fifteen thousand employees, reporting directly to the CEO.

The commercial background is not incidental. It is the foundation of the trust she has built with every leadership team she has worked alongside.

Sustainability Is an Umbrella, Not a Department

Katja’s first reaction to the Korn Ferry article captures something the report gestures at but does not quite resolve.

“Sustainability is no longer one thing. It’s not seen as sustainability only. It’s now seen as an umbrella. It touches everything.”

The umbrella framing describes what a strategically positioned CSO actually does. They do not run a sustainability programme. They provide the lens through which investment decisions, supply chain choices, and product development are evaluated. The function is integrative, not additive.

At MM Group this is institutionalised precisely. Katja is the final approver of CapEx projects exceeding two million euros before they reach the management board.

“I will check it. Has the CO₂ figure been considered? Has this been discussed with the supplier? What is the footprint of the product?”

The machines are the ones using the energy. Decisions made today determine emissions for a decade. That approval point is where the leverage is.

The Price of the Seat at the Table

The strategic influence Katja describes did not arrive because MM Group decided to prioritise sustainability. It arrived because she operates in a way that makes commercial sense.

“I am not doing this for sustainability. I am doing this for business. My number one priority is that the business does not go out, because then I will not have a job either.”

Her management team knows that when she raises an issue, it is commercially or legally grounded. That trust is the precondition for everything that follows. The sustainability outcome is real. The framing that produces it is deliberately business-first.

Better Decisions, Not Larger Budgets

Katja’s magic wand is elegantly practical. She would embed sustainability into every investment decision as a standard consideration. Not more money. Better decisions with the money already being spent.

“Whatever you’re investing in towards the future, it should be invested within the very tight scope of how do we have a better impact sustainability wise.”

The CapEx mechanism at MM Group is the working prototype. It does not require any department to champion sustainability. It requires every major commercial decision to answer sustainability questions before it is ratified.

Whether that model scales across organisations that have not yet given their sustainability function that structural reach is the episode’s open question. The opportunity is clear. The organisational will to realise it is not yet universal.