Mary Fehlig knows what’s good for business, but she also knows the good that business can do for the world. For her, these two things are aligned. Since 1993, Mary’s organization, The Fehlig Group, has, in Mary’s words, helped “companies identify, implement, communicate and evaluate their responsible business practices.”
For Mary, creating sustainable businesses is about ensuring that a business can remain profitable without doing harm. “How do you respect and treat your people well? And then also make sure it’s contributing to your profitability. So that’s the whole planet, people, profits. And then also how do you do that in a way that also doesn’t hurt future generations.”
How It All Began
For many of us, an interest in sustainable business practices might be new, and perhaps a response to wrongs we wish to see righted in the world. For Mary, though, this passion for positive impact has evolved over decades of work. During a time in her life when she was working in technology sales, she found herself being pointed in a consistent direction.
“Every personality test and vocational training thing I did said I should be working for a nonprofit. I saw some sort of social work, some sort of social mission. So where does social mission and commercial success intersect? And that’s when I actually pursued…Business for Social Responsibility,” a sustainable business network and consultancy on whose board Mary would later serve.
Mary began her career working with other well-known figures in sustainable business practices, like Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, the wildly popular ice cream franchise known for the deeply held and practiced values of its founders.
“It was Ben who would always say to me and in these presentations that whoever’s in power should be the one that steps into that role or responsibility,” says Mary.
Changing Times and Critical Moments
It’s tempting to think of sustainability as purely related to environmental stewardship, and while that’s an essential piece, true sustainability encompasses much more, including human rights, diversity, equity and inclusion, proper governance, ethical standards, and employee wellbeing.
For The Fehlig Group, the key to long-term success has been the ability to shift with the moment and discover what most needed attention at any given time.
In fact, long before the firm focused on environmental concerns, it largely centered on philanthropy and volunteerism, later labor issues (i.e., fighting human trafficking and sweatshops), and then on identifying the key concerns that resonated with what people were experiencing.
“For many years, I would be called in to different companies to say, ‘You know, what’s, what’s the issue du jour? You know, what are we working on now?’”
Mary is clear that The Fehlig Group’s role is not to dictate what should be important to a business at any given moment, but rather to help businesses operate according to the values of the people who own and work for them.
“After George Floyd, that was a huge shift too. It’s all important…it’s helping people live their values and then not dictating, ‘Well, we want you to go back and work on philanthropy.’ It’s showing up where the critical issues are and then surrounding it with the full platform of what was possible.”
It Has to Benefit the Business
For Mary, personal values alone are not enough to keep businesses operating with positive impact in mind. While at the start of her career many colleagues promoted the idea that business leaders should do what’s right simply because it’s right, Mary understood that within the landscape of business, that reasoning wouldn’t be enough to create lasting change.
“One of our core principles, guiding principles, is that it has to benefit the business. When I started this, I had a bunch of people at the BSR community that were like, ‘No, we’re just good people and this is the right thing to do.’ And my IBM and Xerox background said, ‘It’s not sustainable.’ So it’s not enduring if the business is not benefiting. So I was kind of a little bit of a black sheep, in that I would always pursue and always communicate what the business benefit was.”
Black sheep or not, Mary has always had her finger on the pulse of business priorities and what it takes to get leaders involved in considering their sustainability footprint and, as Ben said all those years ago, using their power responsibly.
Empowering Sustainable Mindsets
When asked what stories stand out most, one quickly comes to mind.
“It’s Climate Action Week in New York. …The people in charge of corporate responsibility and sustainability [for Marriott International] are at the Climate Action conferences. The Fehlig Group is responsible for their Carbon Disclosure Project, we now call CDP.”
In the course of the evening, Mary connected with the Senior Vice President of Operations. Together, they created a global team of engineers who met over the following decade to discuss their impact.
“It was really an exciting turn from words on a page to being able to directly talk to and have them go, ‘It matters? Cool. Let me tell you what else we’re doing,’ or ‘I’m thinking about doing this.’”
Mary finds that people feel more empowered to adopt a welcoming mindset toward sustainability and corporate social responsibility when they realize much of what they’re already doing may be setting them up for success.
That framework led The Fehlig Group to expand from primarily large corporations to working with small businesses as well through the introduction of their Pulse Report.
“We have a Pulse Report, right, where we come in and say, ‘All right, this is who you are. This is kind of what’s expected of you based on your industry, your competitors, your, your customers…When we come to, ‘This is what you’re already doing,’ businesses went, ‘Really? I’m already doing all this?’ Yeah, based on what’s expected of you, you’re already doing it. You don’t know that’s what’s considered under the lens of sustainability. And that’s really a pleasure. I mean, that floats our boat when people realize they’re doing so much of this, they just don’t understand it fits into this definition of sustainability.”
Shifting Focus to Small Businesses
Though The Fehlig Group began by focusing on large businesses, Mary worked to expand its reach to include small businesses. The motivation traces back to her childhood in St. Louis, where she watched her father keep his wholesale manufacturing and custom millwork company rooted in an area experiencing economic downturn because that is where his people needed him to be.
“…everybody else was moving out of town, he stayed there because it was like, ‘Everybody works here. How are they going to get out to us?’ There were just so many stories of watching how they were so connected and their values, his values showed up in that business.”
Mary has been encouraged by large corporations’ realization that positive impact and social responsibility must include “the full value chain, which means us, the small businesses.”
“Remember it’s not just about getting that legislation, or meeting that one client. It’s about, ‘Is this good business?’ It’s access to markets. It’s attracting talent. It’s risk mitigation. The climate’s all about risk mitigation.”
Values Over Acronyms
When Mary reflects on her work 30 years ago and how it looks today, she notes that issues that once required warning have now become unavoidable.
“Now we say that the climate, you know, it’s no longer a theory. We’re all experiencing the extreme weather events. We’ve seen what happens with health inequities, with the pandemic.”
Mary believes that reminding people of their values and the business benefit will sustain commitment through changing times, even as she has concerns over the ways acronyms (like ESG, CRT, and DEI) are weaponized and misused and may promote dismissiveness of the important concepts behind the letters.
“Back to that whole concept of it has to be beneficial to the business for it to be enduring…we always talked about trying to have people hold on to the business objective but not forget the soul part of it, too. You still get to feel good about it. You still get to live your values.”
Joining The Movement
Engaging in sustainability can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to. Mary suggests reframing sustainability as a strategic business advantage.
“I believe it’s a business operative, to open new markets…You’ve got to think about, ‘What’s important to me and our company,’ but also, ‘Who cares? And where is it going to enhance those relationships?’ And if you’re leveraging all of them, it’s a price performer.”
She also believes that what a company promotes as its values should align with its brand.
“What you’re doing builds your brand equity. ‘Well, this is who we are. Not because it’s just a nice thing to do. It’s good. This is our competency.’”
Impact Is Outcome
To Mary, impact means achieving a desired outcome, not simply stating intentions.
“We don’t want it to be words on the page. We don’t want it to be busywork. You know, it has to have the desired outcome.”
With decades of positive outcomes behind them, The Fehlig Group is not slowing down. The future includes moving more into a collective model and bringing others along.
Despite political and societal shifts, Mary and The Fehlig Group remain committed to helping businesses do good in the world in ways that strengthen the business itself.
“I get to live my values and it contributes to my commercial success. That’s pretty cool to me…That is the core of what this is all about.”
Learn more about The Fehlig Group or reach out to us at info@riveocreative.com to be connected with Mary directly.
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