ESG career journey series: Stephanie Sterck

March 6, 2024

I come back to this notion of integration. We’re heading toward ESG becoming a part of business as usual.

—Stephanie Sterck, Audit & Assurance senior manager, Deloitte & Touche LLP
 

Work, reimagined

Normal. Routine. Day to day.

That’s what success may look like for sustainability. Innate is the aspirational goal.

“When companies first started with sustainability,” Stephanie Sterck explains, “they had corporate social responsibility programs—or portfolios—which were typically managed outside of core business units.” Now, she says, more organizations aim to fully integrate sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations with their day-to-day operations.

That’s where Stephanie comes in. As part of Deloitte’s Audit & Assurance Sustainability and ESG Services team, she advises organizations to redesign and realign their current practices with a sustainability lens. “We work with companies to help them develop their strategies, prioritize initiatives, measure impacts, disclose performance, and more,” Stephanie says. “We’ve been doing this for a long time and have a demonstrated set of practices and methods. Recently, we’ve been growing our pool of professionals, further varying our core capabilities to help clients adjust their business as usual.”

Hitting the accelerator

Stephanie has deep roots in advising on sustainability. After a start in designing and delivering microfinance offerings for a large bank in Australia, she worked for a boutique consulting firm that specialized in helping organizations build and execute ESG strategies. In 2016, Deloitte Australia acquired the consultancy, bringing Stephanie along with it. Eventually, Stephanie moved from Melbourne to her present home in the San Francisco area.

“The size of the market here in the United States is so much more significant. The scale of the companies is much greater, allowing me to focus on significant business challenges,” Stephanie says. “At the same time, my work in Australia provided me with exposure to mature sustainability practices.” The practices range from disclosure to risk mitigation to designing for positive ESG impacts. “Those more mature organizations absolutely exist here in the US. But because the market is so big, there are many other organizations that have a lot of work to do and could learn from early movers around the globe.”

Stephanie’s arrival coincided with a shift in the stateside ESG momentum. “A significant wave of energy had begun just before my arrival. Many large asset managers began focusing on the ESG practices of US organizations. More recently, we’ve seen significant developments from global regulators. These include the Security and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate rule and the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which will affect many US companies.”

Staying abreast of change

Stephanie says that the speed of change in the business environment has left many companies grappling with what it takes to achieve operational sustainability. “There are many challenges that an organization needs to think about. The scope of change is such that companies are in it for the long haul.” For that reason, she says, her team “meets a company where it is today. Patience, flexibility, and tenacity are key.”

Fortunately, Stephanie says, the tools for understanding sustainability challenges are strengthening. “How we help companies today is not the same as yesterday. The science has evolved, the methods are evolving. And as an organization, we’re continuing to reimagine, redesign, and advance the way we advise companies.” That change is probably the best part of her job, Stephanie says. “It keeps us fresh. And it provides many opportunities to lean into a variety of unique opportunities.”

We exist because problems exist—and with sustainability, we’re helping clients tackle a whole raft of challenges.

What does the future look like for sustainability? “I come back to this notion of integration,” Stephanie says. “We’re heading toward ESG becoming a part of business as usual. The only way we can provide insights on these global challenges is by rethinking the way we do business—whether that’s through changing products and services, instituting greater due diligence for mitigation efforts, or completely redesigning the business model.”

An extraordinary world

“Deloitte is a fast-moving, hard-working organization,” Stephanie says. “We exist because problems exist—and with sustainability, we’re helping clients tackle a whole raft of challenges.” She says that Deloitte’s culture of flexible working and leading with empathy helps her find the flow between her professional and personal lives.

With a toddler at home, Stephanie’s free time is currently filled with family activities. But she eagerly looks forward to resuming the kind of travel that once took her through the switchback roads along the cliffs of Bolivia and the arid desolation of the Great Indian Desert. “We stayed overnight under a meteor shower,” she says of the latter. “Everywhere you looked, there was a shooting star. And it was spectacular—this ravishing crystalline sky.”

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