Most sustainability communicators don't have the title, the budget, or the C-suite access to force anyone to do anything. So how do they get things done? That's the question at the center of this conversation with Aman Singh, Director of Global ESG and Sustainability Communications at Kenvue—the company behind Tylenol, Neutrogena, Aveeno, Listerine, and a long list of other household names. Aman has spent her career figuring out how to move organizations from the inside—at Walmart, at Edelman, and now at Kenvue—and her answer isn't what most people expect. It's not about better data, sharper messaging, or more compelling reports. It's about relationships, timing, and learning to speak other people's language before you ask them to speak yours. In this episode, we get into what "influencing without authority" actually looks like in practice, why the old volume-equals-visibility playbook is finished, how to navigate the current era of greenhushing without hiding in fear, and what makes sustainability communicators effective versus annoying. We also talk about our shared career paths—journalism, agencies, consulting—and what it really means to build a purposeful career in a field that didn't exist when most of us started. If sustainability communication is your full-time job or your side hustle, this one's for you.
Most sustainability communicators don't have the title, the budget, or the C-suite access to force anyone to do anything. So how do they get things done? That's the question at the center of this conversation with Aman Singh, Director of Global ESG and Sustainability Communications at Kenvue—the company behind Tylenol, Neutrogena, Aveeno, Listerine, and a long list of other household names.
Aman has spent her career figuring out how to move organizations from the inside—at Walmart, at Edelman, and now at Kenvue—and her answer isn't what most people expect. It's not about better data, sharper messaging, or more compelling reports. It's about relationships, timing, and learning to speak other people's language before you ask them to speak yours.
In this episode, we get into what "influencing without authority" actually looks like in practice, why the old volume-equals-visibility playbook is finished, how to navigate the current era of greenhushing without hiding in fear, and what makes sustainability communicators effective versus annoying. We also talk about our shared career paths—journalism, agencies, consulting—and what it really means to build a purposeful career in a field that didn't exist when most of us started.
If sustainability communication is your full-time job or your side hustle, this one's for you.
Mike Hower: How can sustainability communicators influence stakeholders when they have next to no authority to do so? Today, we're going to find out.
If you've ever felt like you're doing important sustainability work that nobody seems to care about — or worse, work that you're not allowed to talk about — this episode is for you. My guest today is my friend Aman Singh, Director of Global ESG and Sustainability Communications at Kenvue, the company behind brands like Tylenol, Neutrogena, Aveeno, and Listerine. Before Kenvue, Aman spent nearly four years at Walmart, and before that she built her career across journalism, agency work at Edelman, and even ran her own sustainability comms shop.
Aman and I have a lot in common. We both started as journalists. We both worked the agency side. We both ended up as sustainability communicators trying to figure out how to get companies to actually talk about the things that matter, and in the right way. So this conversation felt less like an interview and more like two people who've been in the trenches comparing notes.
We get into what it really means to influence without authority inside a big organization, why the old "volume equals visibility" playbook is dead, and how to think strategically about greenhushing — because staying quiet out of fear isn't a strategy, but neither is blasting press releases into the void. We also get into what actually moves people: not just educating them, but understanding how humans make decisions and working with that, not against it. Aman was also kind enough to be featured in my book, Sustainability Storytelling, so you'll hear some of those threads come up here too, just with a little more candor than you get on the printed page. Let's get into it.
Hey, Aman. It's so good to have you here today.
Aman Singh: Thank you, Mike. Happy to be here.
Mike: So the first question I want to ask you is the million-dollar question — and I'm sure the whole episode could be about this — but what is the hardest part about being a sustainability communicator in 2026?
Aman: Oh, man. You're right, this is a full episode's worth of conversation. Or therapy. Having been on the agency side and in-house, I think we're in a moment where we really have to come back to being agile, be willing to adapt to different situations, and also be willing to go back to methods we thought were passé. Like going back to storytelling and asking what influence actually looks like now.
Someone was asking me the other day, "What does influence without performance look like?" And I thought, what does that even mean? What she was trying to get at was: how do you influence internally on things like sustainability without being in the C-suite, without having the corresponding title, without having the access to the right rooms? And that's actually very apropos for what comms people do. We're always behind the scenes. We have to figure out the channels to influence and get people where we need to get them — and often that's internal.
Mike: Another way I've heard people describe it is influencing without authority.
Aman: That's it. Yes. And I think that's the real challenge today. There are too many priorities, and they're changing too quickly — because of geopolitics, the external environment, supply chain fragmentation. How do you get people's attention? How do you keep a priority a priority? In communications, everything ultimately comes down to reputation, and that's all changing very quickly too. Being a core member of a comms team and making sure your issues stay front and center — that's the work.
Mike: So digging into that — you're currently at Kenvue, you were at Walmart before, and you've had a lot of different roles where you've had to be that person who influences without authority. How have you done it? Can you share what you've learned?
Aman: Totally. Being at Walmart when it was the Fortune One company was literally a learning lab every single day in terms of issues management, communications, and reputation. A few things really helped.
First, I very quickly realized I'm a small cog in a giant machine. What I really need to do is help people see how this work can make them better — better at their job, better at hitting whatever their goal is for the year. So I started talking about sustainability from the perspective of other people's goals. Can this help them do things differently or better? Can I provide them with an additional audience group? Can I amplify their work? It became about "how can I support you" rather than "how can you help me get my message out." That attitude helps because people instantly relax. They realize you're not coming in with an agenda. You're there to support them.
The biggest part of our job is connecting the dots for people. What isn't a sustainability issue if you think about long-term resilience and business growth? Being able to talk their language and make that connection has been very helpful.
The second piece is endless meet-and-greets. Endless. You need to make as many friends as you can across the organization — not to promote yourself, but to say: here's what I do, I sit in this team, I'm here to support you, let's figure out what that looks like. Half of those conversations will lead to something really interesting; the other half will hopefully become friendships. Either way, you become a resource for people when they need a counselor — at Walmart it was everything from a product-related issue to a corporate commitment question.
Mike: Cross-functional relationship building is so important, and it's something I think a lot of sustainability professionals fall into a trap around. We have the ability to think long-term — the problems we work on play out over years — but most people in corporate jobs are focused on this quarter, or maybe the next six months. That's the ultimate challenge: how do you work within a system that focuses on the short term while also getting people to take actions that help long-term resilience?
Aman: You don't always have a seat at the table. Not in the first round. But I've realized especially in the last couple of years that stories are really helpful — and you can't tell stories or influence people through stories if you don't know them. Connecting sustainability to someone's allergy, or their kid going through something, or the water issue in countries like India — you don't pick up on any of that until you know people. Once you do, those connections open people's minds differently than "we have this goal and we have to hit it by 2030."
Mike: Thanks, by the way, for being interviewed for my book. One of the things I wanted to tie back to is the distinction I draw in the book between what I call formal sustainability communicators — people like you and me, who are equally comfortable in a sustainability strategy meeting or a PR engagement — and informal sustainability communicators. That's the vast majority: directors of marketing or comms who are generalists, where the sustainability team hands them a net zero goal and says "make an announcement." If you're not living and breathing these issues every day, it's really hard to stay on top of them. That's one of the main reasons I wrote the book. But what advice would you give an informal communicator who wants to do a good job and avoid greenwashing or greenhushing?
Aman: First: make sure you understand the facts and the substance behind what you're communicating. Go back to the team that's asking you to do something — they're handing you a task, not necessarily strategic counsel. Back it up. Make sure you have the evidence. Think like a lawyer. And then tag a friend. Get a gut check, especially on topics like human rights, biodiversity, or palm oil — areas where you really do need to understand the technical and attribution dimensions. Lean on the sustainability team. They will appreciate the support. In my experience, nine times out of ten, sustainability team members are happy to explain what they do, how deep it runs, and the mechanics of whatever communication you're working on.
Second: become really good friends with public affairs and government affairs. They're excellent gut checks. Does the language make sense? Does it sound bipartisan? Should you be saying "climate change" or "energy security"? There's a lot of important work on language and framing — those are guardrails that a lot of non-sustainability communicators aren't close to, and they should be.
Mike: That challenge is real. Even just the perception that sustainability is an offshoot of philanthropy — a lot of communicators treat it the way they'd think about corporate giving. "Oh, Earth Day. Let's do a cute Earth Day post." But that's not what this is.
Aman: Right. Our sector has moved from corporate social responsibility to "how do we use this work to drive growth" — but it hasn't necessarily brought everyone along. Our CEOs may be systems thinkers who can think long-term, but that doesn't mean they've brought their C-suite peers with them. And now we suddenly expect everyone to be there. The education and awareness gap is real.
Mike: What's interesting is that when I was researching the book, there's a chapter on communicating the business case for sustainability. The survey data on Fortune 500 CEOs is striking — the vast majority say they believe sustainability makes business sense, and yet they're still not prioritizing it. CFO surveys show the same thing. They'll acknowledge that sustainability is an opportunity, and still not act on it. That's why I think it's fundamentally a storytelling problem. People can know that something is the right thing to do and still not do it. Educating them isn't enough — you have to understand how humans make decisions and then activate that.
Aman: That's it exactly. Having moved from a retailer to a consumer health company where everything we do is about products, it's been a real lesson in consumer insights. My role becomes: how do I make sure the consumer insights these brands are gathering to inform innovation actually include sustainability? Because it's not front and center for the average consumer. Even something as simple as asking: would you buy a refill over a regular product at the same price and value? Do you know how to recycle your packaging where you live? That's influence without authority — can I work with the consumer insights team to make sure those couple of questions are in there? If nothing useful comes from it, fine. But if we keep collecting the data year over year, we'll see the trend, and it'll give us something to respond to from a product innovation perspective.
Mike: Let's shift to your current work. For those who aren't familiar, Kenvue is a spinoff from Johnson & Johnson and owns a lot of well-known brands. Can you explain what Kenvue does, what some of those brands are, and what your high-level strategy looks like for communicating sustainability?
Aman: Sure. Kenvue was spun off from Johnson & Johnson about three years ago — essentially all the consumer health brands moved into one company. Everything from Aveeno and Neutrogena to Listerine, Motrin, Tylenol, Zyrtec, and OGX. It's a pretty long list. We're in 65 countries and roughly half our business is outside North America.
I joined about 15 months ago to lead sustainability communications, and a lot of the work has really been about introducing Kenvue to the world. People know J&J. People know the brands. People didn't know corporate Kenvue — what we stand for. So my strategy has been about prioritizing the audiences that the corporate entity engages with most directly: customers — meaning retailers, hospitals, pharmacies — consumers through the brand lens, investors as a public company, and what I'd broadly call influencers, which today includes not just sustainability voices like Andrew Winston but also NGOs, scientists, and healthcare professionals.
Given that broad audience set, my priorities this year have been customers and retailers — there's a direct tie-in to consumers through them, and the product lens creates interesting storytelling opportunities because that's where the real work shows. And then consumers, where partnering with my brand communication peers is really powerful because you can become part of the culture naturally.
Mike: There's a lot of talk right now about whether sustainability reporting is dead. It's not — companies are still hiring me to do it. But for too long, reporting was treated as the default communication tactic. It's one tactic among many. Beyond reporting, what tactics have you found work well, especially for reaching consumers who are clearly not downloading your PDF?
Aman: A few things that go beyond any specific company or sector. Keeping your audience absolutely central is the foundation — busy environment, very noisy out there.
What I've seen work well in recent years is setting up listening sessions: with consumers, core NGOs, or suppliers. Half a day with a clear agenda where you're asking questions and getting feedback on your strategy or reporting. That builds trust, creates real synergy, and generates something useful you can take into your programs.
Showing up at the right events is important, but specifically the conversations that are more closed-door, Chatham House Rules, with a clear outcome — not just keynotes and panels. Because a lot of what we do at sustainability conferences is preach to the choir. Something I started doing at Walmart was asking: how do we get to the non-sustainability conferences? How do we place someone at Adweek or the National Retail Federation's expo — places where sustainability is part of the conversation but not the whole thing? Taking our spokespeople into those spaces feels like it has longer legs.
Mike: Right. Most of my friends and family have no idea what I actually do. They think I'm "saving the world" somehow. And even friends who are aware of sustainability still operate with this binary — pro-economy or pro-environment. Twenty-plus years into corporate sustainability as a real field, and we're still fighting that perception. Getting out of the sustainability conference bubble is part of the answer.
Aman: Totally. The energy piece is something that can be genuine common ground. Everyone wants power. Everyone wants an affordable car they actually enjoy driving. Those kinds of entry points can open the door.
Mike: What are the biggest mistakes companies make when they communicate sustainability — when they're actually trying to do a good job?
Aman: One of the biggest is expecting one size to fit all. You put out the most beautifully written press release and expect flowers to fall from the sky. It's a recipe for disaster — A, because nobody looks at press releases anymore, and B, because they're written for one audience only, which is reporters, and reporters aren't really reading them either.
Mike: That's fascinating, because I was just talking to a friend who does sustainability comms at a large company, and he said that with AI, his company has actually started putting out more press releases because AI is pulling from them. If someone asks Claude what a company is doing on sustainability, it's going to surface the press release. So companies are starting to write for the robots instead of for humans.
Aman: Oh, that hurts my head. But it is fair — it is going back to basics in a way.
The real point is that a well-nourished sustainability story uses the same core content and the same facts but tells them differently to each audience. Then you can actually measure it and figure out engagement. At Walmart, when they achieved their Project Gigaton goal early — their scope three supplier engagement goal — we took an audience-by-audience approach. The average consumer doesn't care about that. But we got our CEO to mention it in the earnings release because it was such a significant company milestone. We engaged our NGO partners on what the next ten-year goal should look like. The supplier side had its own strategy. Thought leadership had its own. Earned media had its own.
On earned media in particular, a lot of what we ended up doing was educating reporters — because carbon accounting is relatively new, there are more questions than answers, and there are so many standards out there. The questions we were getting were less about how we achieved the goal and more about the underlying framework: the accounting, the auditing, how do you verify it. You can't always assume a reporter will give you a fully balanced, informed story. On some of these issues, you actually have to get them to a baseline of understanding first.
Mike: And even well-meaning journalists covering sustainability often don't have the deep expertise. I remember walking my dog, listening to a podcast from people who clearly support sustainability, and just yelling at my headphones because of how they were describing ESG. There's almost no one who does this beat full-time. Even at Bloomberg you have climate reporters who aren't necessarily sustainable business experts.
Aman: The other common mistake I was going to mention: do not think you can preach to anyone or teach anyone anything. That's a fallacy. People don't want to be told what to think or taught. You have to meet them where they are and open the conversation differently.
Rothy's is a good example. They do their product so well they don't need to go outside their lane to tell a sustainability story. People who love the circularity are all in. Everyone else loves them for the design and the constant innovation. The tension is gone from the storytelling. Toms did something similar with buy one, give one. The sustainability folks often know more than anyone and spend every waking hour trying to solve these problems — but that doesn't mean you put the burden of that knowledge on your audience. You still have to meet them where they are.
Mike: Let's talk about the topic everyone in our space is afraid to discuss: greenhushing. For those who don't know, greenhushing is when a company is actually doing sustainability work worth talking about but chooses not to communicate it — or not to communicate it as loudly. A year into this administration, companies went underground fast. I've been trying to tell companies that greenhushing isn't inherently bad — you don't have to blare it from a megaphone constantly — but you can't just hide out of fear either. There's a difference between being strategically quiet and being paralyzed. What do you see happening, and what would you tell a company that's afraid to communicate right now?
Aman: When I was at CSRWire in the early 2010s, the model was volume — volume, volume, volume. That was another wave where programs were setting goals for the first time, making new commitments, the Paris Agreement was fresh, 1.5 degrees was everywhere. The strategy was just: get it out there.
What I was telling clients even then was that a one-way street has a short lifespan. Stop just sending press releases. Get in front of your community on social media and actually have a conversation. Open your blog to comments and respond to every one. Let people understand that you are intentional about this work — that will give you much better feedback and much more staying power than blasting out every little thing you did.
I don't think we're ever going back to that model, and I don't think it served people well then.
Google is a good current example. They're continuing to do excellent work on sustainability despite all the noise about data centers and energy demand, and they are communicating about it — just not with a loudspeaker. Their sustainability lead builds it into her conversations wherever she goes. It goes on LinkedIn. It goes on the website. It runs through their taglines and visuals. It's built in. A few weeks ago they made an announcement about investing in addressing super pollutants — super nerdy, but done in a pure Google way. A blog post, the website, LinkedIn. It reached the audience it needed to reach.
Costco is another example. Whatever else is in the news about them, sustainability is so core to their recruitment and retention strategy that there's no decoupling it. Their employees love them for it. It's load-bearing.
What I realized at Walmart — I was there nearly four years and we did maybe one press release in that entire time — is that when it's built in, it sustains. It becomes a decision-making framework, not a campaign.
Mike: That really tracks with my experience as a journalist. During that era I would go to CSR Newswire every day just looking for stories because there were so many releases coming out. And I think you're right — the companies that were talking about everything all the time, including topics that weren't material to their business, helped create the conditions we're in now.
Maybe when we come out of this era of silence, the next round of sustainability communication will be more targeted — quality over quantity. In the book, I talk about what I call a sustainability storytelling assessment: essentially a communication-focused materiality analysis where you look at which sustainability topics are actually important for you to talk about, assess the risk-relevance of each, and ask whether you've actually done enough work to have earned the right to speak on it. For so many years companies were trying to be seen as sustainable without actually doing the work. DEI is the obvious recent example. Maybe this moment of quiet leads to something more honest and more durable on the other side.
Aman: Exactly. Where it's built in, it'll stay.
Mike: Last question — and this one's the softball. You've told me the hardball stuff. Now tell me about your career. None of us had a linear path. How did you get here?
Aman: Throughout school I thought I was going to be a mathematician. I loved math.
Mike: I am the complete opposite of that.
Aman: My parents were pushing accounting or finance. I grew up in India, where you're competing with a billion other kids for a small pool of jobs. But somewhere in high school something shifted. I did my undergrad in India and then again here because of how the credential system works.
Mike: You had to go to college twice?
Aman: Twice. Double undergrad. What undergrad taught me was that writing was where I thought I could make a bigger impact. The more I got into it, the more I wanted journalism. Some of it was the political environment in India at the time — early 2000s, pre-9/11. But mostly it was that I was deeply purposeful. I wanted to make a difference. I felt like: I'm one in a billion, how do I do something I can be proud of?
Journalism felt like the answer. My first job was at the Wall Street Journal. Very quickly realized it wasn't for me — very hierarchical, very regimented. So I moved on. Then 2008 happened, and when nobody was hiring and nobody was talking about purpose, I started learning about something called CSR. That's when I got introduced to this field. I did the GRI certification, got into the frameworks and standards, and something clicked — maybe it was the math-brain in me, but I thought: there's a method to this. This isn't just companies giving away money. It's about how you make your money more responsible, how you do what you do more responsibly. I was hooked.
That took me to CSRWire, then to my own freelance practice — Singh Solutions — for a couple of years, then Edelman, then Walmart recruited me in-house. And here we are.
Mike: I wrote a piece recently on my Substack about my own career path, because I get asked about it so often. The metaphor I landed on is that life is like making a bunch of dots that look completely random in the moment, and in retrospect they connect. I wish I could tell my younger self to just relax. The key is to not be paralyzed by fear and to hold onto your principles while staying flexible on methods. Someone told me once: be stubborn about your goals but flexible about your methods. In a sustainability career especially — it's not like accounting, where you're accountant one and then accountant two. This field didn't exist in its current form when most of us started. You have to keep evolving.
Aman: That's exactly it.
Mike: Aman, thank you so much. And for what it's worth — keep an eye on that dormant Substack.
Aman: It's out there. I pay for it every year.
Mike: Before we go, do you want to say anything about the book?
Aman: Thank you for writing it. It is such an essential tool for growing our sector. One of my ongoing frustrations — and it might be self-serving — is that our core peer group is still so small. For those of us who do this full-time, not as a side gig, I'm hoping this book not only gives people practical tools, but inspires them to see sustainability communication as a credible, purposeful career.
Mike: That's exactly why I wrote it. Thank you.
Mike: That's it for now. Thanks for listening. If you want more on sustainability communication — new episodes, deeper dives into the ideas we talk about here — subscribe to my Substack newsletter, The Sustainability Story. You'll find the link in the show notes. And wherever you are in your sustainability storytelling journey, good luck and keep at it. We need you out there, and you're not doing it alone.