The Elephant in the Room

Show notes:

The ESG backlash is real, and it is polarising. The rhetoric around it exacerbated because of roll backs by corporates and governments on climate/energy commitments. According to a leading ESG publication, Trump’s victory in the world’s second largest democracy, is likely to result in roll backs on climate and ESG regulation in the country and retreat from the global stage. Despite all the noise against ESG - asset managers globally are expected to increase their ESG related AuM to US$33.9 trillion by 2026 (84% growth). The driver for growth for ESG activity is not altruism but value creation.  

In India the world’s largest democracy there are reasons for cautious optimism, with the government introducing a slew of policy changes over the last decade, that makes it obligatory for organisations to adopt an ESG lens for sustainability reporting. Since 2022-23, the top 1000 listed companies are obliged to follow the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting framework. The driver of course is India’s ambition to be a 7 trillion economy by 2030. There is lots to be done but the country is on the path.

To discuss India’s journey on ESG and Sustainability reporting I spoke with Arvind Chari and Chirag Mehta, Quantum Advisors in the 124th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast. The focus of the conversation was global and local trends and Quantum’s own approach to ESG investing. We spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 The drivers for sustainable investing

👉🏾 Responsible (patient investing) and what it means. Adding a 5th P to the 4 Ps investment management - predictability or patient capital 

👉🏾 The reason for developing Quantum’s own due diligence process or integrity screening mechanism

👉🏾  How weightage on governance can drive better E and S performance for an organisation

👉🏾 Sustainable investing in the Indian context (considering India needs approx. $200 billion a year), where the country is on the sustainable investing journey

👉🏾 Public equity markets as the low hanging fruit for sustainable investing in India

👉🏾  Whether Indian companies are prepared to meet the regulatory requirements in particular BRSR

We also spoke about the ESG backlash, social license to operate, whether ESG funds perform better than funds that don’t have an ESG lens, the EHG trilemma and The 🐘 in the Room. If sustainability, sustainable investing, transparency and accountability is your thing check out Quantum’s ‘The Little White Book of Governance’.

Disclaimer: Quantum Advisors are not my client and I remain sceptical of the investment management & PE industry and their relentless pursuit of profits. However, we know how critical they are to achieving global and local climate and SDG targets. I was drawn to Quantum's mantra ‘Be good and Do good’ and intrigued by the integrity screen.

Check it out for yourself – links in the comment 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

#esginvesting #esg #sustainability #impact investing #governance #Climatehange #SDGs

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good morning, Arvind and Good Afternoon, Chirag. Wonderful to have both of you on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Arvind: Sudha, it's good to have us. Your name of the podcast itself is so interesting, and there are always a lot of elephants in the room to be discussed about so great to be talking to you.

Chirag: Yeah. I echo Arvind and pleased to be here.

Sudha: So, let's get started with a quick introduction. Tell the listeners about probably who you are and what you do.

Arvind: Quantum Advisors the firm that we both work me and Chirag, it's an India based, India dedicated investment management firm. It's the oldest firm in India in that space.

Quantum was founded in 1990 by Ajit Dayal and so we've been championing the cause of investing in India, either through research and advisory or through managing on their own name for now close to 40 years, right?

Quantum specializes in thinking about long term India investing from a very sensible risk adjusted approach. And we also believe, and as you will know over the course of this talk, that we believe in be good and do good. And we've employed that not only in our investment philosophy, but the way we run the firm and the choices that we've made as a firm to be able to deal with putting the investor at the centre of everything that we do.

 We have two pools of capital, one is the global investor, the global pension fund, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, family offices, investing into India. Quantum manages and has strategies and products for that pool of capital. And then there is the Indian investor that the Indian retail or Indian high net worth investor who is investing into India and we have the mutual fund, the Quantum Mutual Fund for that.

I'm Arvind Chari. I'm the chief investment officer of Quantum Advisors, now of Q India UK, I moved to London about two years back to be able to be closer to the global investors. So, I basically fly two flags, one is to tell global investors that they are missing out by not investing in India and, more and more investors need to think about India dedicated.

And to fly the Quantum flag in terms of how Quantum can help long term investors allocated to India in a sensible risk xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Chirag, who's here as well, Chirag Mehta is the chief investment officer of Quantum Mutual Fund, which is Quantum AMC.

Chirag, if you want to give a quick intro of yourself.

Chirag: Sure. So, I've been associated with Quantum for more than about 18 years now and, it gives us pride. Arvind joined in 2004, I joined in 2006, so we both have been here pretty tenured and have seen cycles, and we really know how the Quantum way of investing benefits investors across these cycles.

So, I am the chief investment officer at Quantum Mutual Fund as Arvind said. I do look at many funds at Quantum. including spearheading our integrity efforts. When you say integrity, the outside world knows it by various other names like sustainability, responsible investing, et cetera. So, I do spearhead that and manage a team that looks at these aspects That's a brief introduction and I managed funds across the board in terms of right from multi assets to gold to small caps to what is called in India as ESG funds. We would like to call it integrity, but it's called ESG funds in India. So that's been a snapshot of what I do.

Sudha: Awesome. So, the focus of our conversation today, as I'd mentioned earlier is responsible investing. What does it really mean for Quantum Advisors when you say responsible investing?

Arvind: Sudha, we actually do not like to use the words, sustainability, responsibility, ESG. Either they've been abused or misused or it is not exactly relevant. What we call ourselves as a measure is integrity investing. And integrity is of course a higher measure to hold onto, but also suggests that there are certain morals or certain ethical framework that you use for your investments or for running the firm, and you don't change it, you live by those standards. We think of ourselves as integrity investing as an idea and everything that we do comes about from that perspective.

I'll just give you a history of the firm, which explains how we got into this aspect of why sensible risk adjustment and integrity is essential to what we do. We started the firm in 1990 and there are two seminal partnerships that Quantum had one was between 92 to 95 with a group called Jardine Fleming which we call Quantum Jardine. That's where we learned two very important aspects of an investment management firm. One is to be independent, right? When you are an investment firm and you're independent, the only thing that matters to you is your unit holders or your investors.

If you're independent, then all you're doing is investing long term capital for your fiduciary investors, which your unit holders. The other thing that we learned from the association is what we built as a integrity screen. Subbu who joined Ajit in 1996, so Ajit and Subbu are the longest serving equity managers maybe around the world now that Charlie Munger passed away. They've had a long history and that's when they built this integrity screen, which is basically a screen to avoid bad management, no matter how large they are, no matter how big they're part of the sector, no matter how big they're part of the indices.

If they don't fit our integrity screen, we will stop, we will never invest in them, we will never put client capital into that. So that was the first learning about being independent and having this integrity screen way back in 1996. And then we learned the process of investing of long term process through an association that we had with Hansberger Global Investors.

Tom Hansberg was the originally founder of the Templeton Group, which we call Templeton Galbraith Hansberger. A lot of our investing style of proprietary long-term value came about from that association with Hansberger Global Investors. And Ajit used to work with Hansberger, and they had a mandate from Vanguard. The Vanguard International Value Fund was managed by Hansberger and Ajit was a lead manager for that product. And that's when we learned about, how do institutional investors allocate long term capital?

Why are those, you know, those four P's that you call about in investment firm people, the philosophy, the process, and the performance. And we added a P on the performance called predictability. How can you ensure that your returns or your managing of money is predictable for investors? We learned all that. From our association with Hansberger and Vanguard. And we added a fifth P to that, which is patient capital because India needs long-term capital and India needs, patient long-term capital to come and benefit from the long-term growth prospects that India has.

So the four Ps of how we have and the then we and the desire a fifth p from our investor. The way we think about allocating is when investors allocate to India, either you're global investors or you're an Indian investor allocating to equity markets or taking on risk, you're increasing your risk profile, right? You don't need to do that, but you're looking to choose a higher return or a higher opportunity and you're increasing the risk profile. And our job at Quantum is to manage that risk. And I spoke about risk not being only standard deviation and market volatility, which can be managed.

 There are risks which come about through liquidity, that come about through valuations. And there are risks which are predominantly of our governance, so which companies you invest with? Who do you partner as your local partner? What kind of projects are you investing? And the various aspects of governance that goes into it can have a big impact on you as an investor.

That could be some reputation risk that you invest in a company and that company has a governance problem, it blows out and it comes on the press. Or it comes openly saying that, this big, large investor has invested in this company, and they failed all factors. So, our job as a manager is to manage those kinds of risks, market returns, xxxxxx division we can manage, but these are risks that everybody should be aware of. And we as the manager should be able to manage that risk. So that is essentially what we do across asset classes, be it public equities, in the mutual fund, we also have fixed income and through our associates, we have reinvested in private equity. In all these aspects this factor becomes a very important factor about, whom we are shaking our hands with.

And when we shake hands, do we get our five fingers back and we count that. And if we do not get our five fingers back, we avoid our investing in those firms. So that's the way we think about these entire aspects of responsibility and sustainability for us it all starts with integrity for us as a manager.

And for how we deploy client capital.

Sudha: Wow. Yeah, that's so deeply rooted, from the time that you were set up and you'll have come to this premise where you have the five P's for responsible or sustainable investing. And of course, there's an ethical framework. In the global context. Arvind, now you sit in London, what would you say are the drivers for sustainable investing?

Sudha: And are there trail blazers or peers that you look up to?

Arvind: We don't necessarily look up to any particular peer or maybe in India we don't even think that we have a peer in terms of who thinks about risk in the way we think about it.

But in terms of global, that entire aspect of sustainability depends on the asset class in the first place. In the sense that there could be a lot of public equity investors who look at governance as a factor and there are many who do that, right? We are not the only one who look at governance as a factor. There are many who think about that as a filter or a factor before committing money. The sustainability could also be depending on if you're a climate specific investor, but your goal is say - decarbonization, or your goal is say on the climate aspect so there are firms who bracket themselves as sustainable or responsible from that perspective.

There are a few impact, the impact could be again, climate, the impact could be social, the impact would be inclusion. There are various aspects of it. So the entire bucketing of it depends on what asset class and what is a problem that you're trying to solve. And those can define the different drivers in the global context.

We also know that many are gaming it as well. And it is not all right, we know instances where firms or investment management firms or companies are saying that they are responsible, sustainable, but their actions and their products or their services are not that right. So, people say all kinds of things, if you have a very particular focus and it makes it otherwise, you're all over the place.

In terms of global investing, there's the other aspect of passive investing. So much amount of global capital is now invested passively, which is basically following an index. And if you look at the traditional indices S& P 500, Dow Jones, MSCI, these are the large equity indices that global investors do. These indices do not sift for any aspect of sustainability or governance or responsibility, right? So, there are firms which are saying they're responsible and they're allocating passively through these traditional ETFs, which have no sifting for any of these aspects that you mentioned.

So, there is a lot of dichotomy in terms of what is being said and what is being tried to achieve and the actual outcomes. I'm not saying everybody is doing that. There are some great firms who are doing it and especially if they're asset class specific then they're very much focused.

And that's why as you said, there has been a push back to say, ESG as a factor of investing. Or, calling yourself response sustainable when you are having ETFs or passive indices, which clearly do not meet those requirements. I think there is still a lot of evolving to happen.  Firms which put responsibility and sustainability or integrity at the core of everything that they do should be able to do better is what we believe.

Sudha: So clearly passive is very different from what patient investing is which you all are doing. I agree with what I see, my background is communications and reputation. I see that a lot of people have been very quick to jump on the bandwagon and be opportunistic, but it's not something that is embedded deeply into the organization and they're not, truly doing sustainable investing or responsible or even that impact investing. There are lots of words people use, it doesn't show through in how they behave or act.

You referred at the start to the integrity investing. And I read on your website about the integrity screen. What exactly does it mean and why do you have it considering that there are numerous auditing standards and frameworks could you not just work around those to develop the due diligence because this is like a due diligence that you have the integrity screen.

Arvind: Correct. I gave the history of the firm. So, Ajit met a South African gentleman, he doesn't remember his name in 1989. And that gentleman asked Ajit, my founder that, ‘young man, what do you want to do in your life?’

And Ajit said, I want to set up an investment management firm. And he said, I'll give you one piece of advice. When you shake your hands with someone and when you get it back, count your fingers. If there are not five fingers, then never shake their hands again. So that is what we took as a genesis of our integrity screen.

And we applied that to when we are investing in companies, we apply that as a filter in some sense, right? You said due diligence. It can be filter, it can be a positive filter or negative filter but that's where it started. And then I told you about the experience that we had with our joint venture with Jardine Fleming where we had an issue with a very large Indian corporate and they had done a measure which was completely anti minority.

And we had to take a call of not investing and that's when we build this integrity screen as a non-negotiable. That's why we call it integrity it is a moral that we will never give up. We'll learn, we'll understand, we'll change. But there's an aspect of, if we don't get our five fingers back based on whatever standards we apply, we will not invest in that fund.

So that's when it started in about 1996. It was initially about 12 odd parameters, some from the balance sheets, some from related party transactions, but it was still intuitive. So, there are certain questions that we still ask and we used to ask back then to the management, to the CEOs or to the family...

Shownotes:

Not many people in the western world have heard of Hansen’s disease or Leprosy – for most who are familiar with it arouses fear and aversion. It is a tropical disease that occurs in more than 120 countries, has been referenced in the bible and Victoria Hislop wrote The Island inspired by a visit to Spinalonga, the abandoned Greek leprosy colony, which sold over a million copies.

My earliest interaction with the disease was on the Main Street of the city I grew up in. Along the street, one aften came across a small group of people begging for alms, those badly affected being pulled on makeshift carts by the more able bodied. The easiest thing to do was to ignore them or pretend one could not see them or their plight. That was my first experience of shame. Shame at the lack of knowledge, confidence or ability to engage with respect with people disfigured and ostracised by disease. However, this is not about me but about people who are disenfranchised, excluded from accessing healthcare, education, economic opportunities and social support because of fear and misinformation.

A couples of months back, I happened to be seated on the same take table at India Week as Sian Arulanantham, head of programmes and research of Leprosy Mission UK. We got chatting about the incredible work they are doing across the world and in India and I invited them to be a guest on my podcast to speak about the important work being done to eradicate an ancient disease that stigmatises and makes outcasts of over two hundred thousand people every year.

In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast, Daisy Mansfield Policy and Advocacy Adviser at Leprosy Mission talks about the work being done in India and across the world. We spoke about a) how they deliver on their goals in this highly complex geography b) behaviour change campaigns for education and removing social stigma c) Strategies to empower individuals and families d) Roles models with lived experience of disability and stigma e) WHO 2035 goal for eradication of the disease and challenges to getting to the target

The most important thing to remember is that if detected early, the disease is curable with multi drug therapy (MDT) and the good news is that the WHO has made MDT available free to all leprosy patients around the world (with the help of big pharma).

Head to the podcast to listen and see how you can support the cause 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Daisy. Lovely to have you here today. I'm so glad that I met with Sian and Louise at India Week recently in London. And that's how I came to know about the work of Leprosy Mission UK. So, let's start with a quick introduction. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Daisy: Hello. Yes. It's so nice to be with you on the podcast today. Thank you very much for having me. I'm Daisy and I work for the Leprosy Mission and have done for about three years now in a number of different roles. So, my current role is called a Programs and Advocacy Officer. Which means I am a point person, look after some of the projects that we fund in India and work in partnership with our team over in India. And previously I had roles in fundraising and also advocacy and policy working with UK stakeholders in parliament and also in international spaces such as the UN and WHO to advocate for people affected by leprosy.

Sudha: That's very interesting. So, we are here today to talk about leprosy or Hansen's disease. How prevalent is it globally? What is it and what are the symptoms? There seems to be a lot of ignorance, especially I'd say in Western countries. And it doesn't exist in lot of Western countries. So tell us a bit about it.

Daisy: Yeah, certainly. Actually, when I first joined the Leprosy Mission, I thought, Oh, I know what leprosy is. And I quickly realised that there was a lot of misunderstandings or misconceptions about the disease that I had thought were true.

And leprosy is one of the oldest diseases known. We see it back in biblical times, but there's so much of the disease that is so misunderstood in today's world and as you said, part of that is because it no longer exists here in the UK. It did many years ago and affected many thousands of people.

But today we see it across the world, particularly in places where poverty exists and slightly poorer communities, rural communities. So, you might be surprised to know there's 200, 000 new cases every year. And so. if you do the rough maths on that's about one person every two minutes.

And that's new cases of leprosy, but also there's thousands of people or millions of people that are living with the causes of leprosy which could be disability. It could also be the stigma that is surrounded by a leprosy diagnosis, which I'll talk a little bit more in detail about later. So, leprosy is a bacterial disease that is spread through prolonged and close contact and many of us think that leprosy is actually caught by touch, but that is a myth. It is not caught by touch it's transmitted through water droplets in the air, so between coughing and sneezing. But you need to have that prolonged contact with someone to catch leprosy.

Some people may remember many years ago. Princess Diana was heavily involved in work with people affected by leprosy. And she was over in India and there was a very iconic picture that hit the news of her with her hand, her arm around somebody affected by leprosy and everybody had told her, You can't touch them, don't touch them, you're going to get leprosy, and actually she'd been told by medical experts in these hospitals that it was okay, it wasn't caught by touch. And so, there's another example of a miscommunication that many of us have.

And let me just talk a little bit about the symptoms of leprosy as you've asked. So, leprosy affects the nerves and particularly in people's hands and their feet and they lose feeling in their hands and their feet. And you can perhaps imagine that you're cooking, and you've got a saucepan on the hob or something, and yes, it might be hot, but until you touch it, do you know how hot it is and actually. If you put yourself in a slightly more rural position where you perhaps you're cooking on an open fire, and you have a pan there if you have no feeling in your hand, there is nothing to tell you to remove your hand from this hot pan and you can so easily burn your hand and you can get really severe wounds and ulcers. And particularly many people experience ulcers on their feet. And these can get infected and if they're not looked after properly, sometimes there's no other choice other than amputation for people's legs particularly.

And so, we see one story is a young girl called Shakti who was in one of our hospitals in Nepal. She was only 16 years old and because her leprosy hadn't been diagnosed for many years. She'd hidden it away but also medical centres which she'd been to had not necessarily diagnosed it, she hadn't received the treatment particularly early and actually at 16 years old, she had to have an amputation of her leg. And the impact that had of her not being able to go to school and she had dreams that she wanted to become a doctor and the implications then of how her life changes at such a young age. One really key thing is to be able to find and treat people with leprosy as early as possible. The sooner people receive medical help, then the less likely they are to have implications.

Sudha: Daisy, is there a cure for leprosy? I know in India; all children are given the BCG vaccine just a couple of weeks after they're born. But I'm aware that again, in Western countries, it is not so prevalent and it's not something that is given. And also, there is the anti vax movement, which is pretty strong.

Daisy: Yeah, so actually the good news is there's a cure for leprosy and it's relatively straightforward. It's antibiotics as we know. These antibiotics are called multi drug therapy, MDT. And they're taken for between 6 and 12 months, depending on the load of bacteria in somebody's body.

And for patients affected by leprosy, these antibiotics are free. But actually, they only cost 24 pound so, they're not expensive to provide for people affected by leprosy. And the link that you mentioned to the BCG vaccine obviously children get this vaccination when they're first born.

And this actually, offers a small bit of protection against leprosy. The primary job of that vaccine is tuberculosis, but the reason that there's a link is because the bacteria of leprosy and the bacteria of TB are almost like cousins. They share some similarities and so that vaccination doesn't necessarily fully prevent people from getting leprosy, but it does provide an extra level of protection.

And so, there's lots of research across many of the countries around the world research centres are studying how leprosy is transmitted, the actual bacteria and particularly a lot of research into the tools to diagnose leprosy. We want to be able to diagnose leprosy within communities and easily be able to identify, diagnose, and treat people as soon as possible.

 We have some world leading research centres within the leprosy mission that are researching these things, and we continue to do this and this is really a key part of what we do to fully understand leprosy. It's a very complex disease and so we need more research and more funding to understand this to be able to provide the right treatment for people.

Sudha: Yeah. We discussed that leprosy is not necessarily prevalent in Western countries. And about two thirds of the incidences are found in India, followed by Brazil and Indonesia. Is there a reason why there are more incidences of the disease in these countries. Is the climate is the weather or is it poverty?

What contributes? I'm sure there's some data and research around that.

Daisy: Yes. Leprosy has historically been endemic in lots of these countries. And leprosy has existed in India for decades. This year we actually have the hundred and fifty years of the leprosy mission, India. And back before the 1980s, there was no cure for leprosy.

So, for many of these 150 years, we could only provide love and care to these patients. But for the last 40 we've been able to provide the cure and that medical intervention to help and support people affected by leprosy.

But also, you can't ignore the fact that India is a huge country and has a population of almost 1. 4 billion people so it's not a surprise that the cases are quite high there due to the volume of people. But leprosy actually is a disease that's associated with poverty. So, it's associated with people who live in poor conditions, with people who for a long period of time have had poor sanitation, poor hygiene, unclean water, poor nutrition.

And therefore, they have a weak immune system, their immune system is lower, and so they're more susceptible to having leprosy. And then again, in some really rural areas there's limited access to healthcare, so people aren't able to or just don't know where to go to seek treatment when it's needed and the longer leprosy goes untreated, the more likely people are to have disabilities and severe implications of leprosy.

And another huge thing is the stigma the lack of awareness that contributes to the high level of cases. We see so much stigma and discrimination about leprosy across many of the countries that we work in. And a lot of that is based on those misconceptions that we were speaking about earlier.

Sudha: So, what is the focus of the leprosy mission in India, which is some of the work you lead on?

Daisy: Yeah. The leprosy mission, India we have several hospitals, leprosy mission hospitals across many of the different states and there we provide the medical care for people affected by leprosy.

So that could range from the cure to care for their ulcers. There's something called leprosy reaction. Which some people will experience, and they need to spend an extended period of time in hospital receiving medical treatment for that. And physiotherapy for people who lose feeling in their hands and feet and something else called reconstructive surgery.

Which helps with the mobility of people's hands and restoring movement and combined with the physiotherapy as well. So, the hospitals provide medical care but we have a, holistic view in that we don't just want to provide the medical care. We want to support people affected by leprosy in a range of different ways.

We have, vocational training centres in India, which is where people affected by leprosy students, young people. They come and they study a course. And the reason they may go to one of these centres is because of leprosy and stigma either they have leprosy themself or one of their family members, they might have been kicked out of school, for many years so they may have missed education and need extra support, or perhaps they've been in education, but because of leprosy struggle to find opportunities, job opportunities and so they come and they learn a skill. And then they're supported to go through the employment process.

These VTCs that we have, the centres, have a lot of partnerships with local businesses and organisations and spend time raising awareness within the organisations about leprosy and the needs of people affected by leprosy. And another huge part of what we do is advocacy and research. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of ongoing research to improve the treatment and understand the disease, but also a lot of advocacy to ensure people are accessing their entitlements, to ensure they're aware of their rights and their entitlements.

In India people all have access to disability certificates, which will allow them pensions. And other rights things like bus passes as well. So, it's supporting people within the community to advocate for their own rights. But then at a national level to ensure that leprosy is on the agenda.

India has one of the largest leprosy eradication programs the government run a national leprosy eradication program. So, the government are doing a lot of work to support people affected by leprosy to find, to diagnose and to treat. So, a lot of what we do at the Leprosy Mission India is we work alongside the government.

We work with them and align our projects ensure that we are providing the best possible care for people affected by leprosy.

Sudha: Yeah, that's a whole lot of stuff that you're doing a leprosy mission in India. And as you said that you align the work that you do with what the agenda for the national government is. India has a huge leprosy eradication program.

And I think they've been successful in how they've been treating TB, which is also highly prevalent in the country with the outreach at the grassroots level, but India, like we discussed earlier, it's a very complex country and delivering healthcare and also support to communities is not easy considering there are states and there are national government and then there are local governments and priorities.

So how do you deliver on your goals in this highly complex geography? How important are collaborations and partners on the ground?

Daisy: Yeah, I think it's a huge thing to be aware of in India you can cross one state boundary and that can be completely different ways of doing things. As I was talking about the entitlements and the disability pensions, you can go from one state where people might be entitled to 3,000 rupees and then you cross another state, and they're entitled to 6,000 rupees. And so, the changes between different states is huge and one of the key things is working alongside government health workers within these states. And yes, we have the leprosy mission Great Britain here in the UK, but actually we partner with the leprosy mission India and we work with the Leprosy Mission India, who are on the ground, who understand the community, who are locals and they team up with other organisations, other grassroots organisations working within the community, who understand the context and we can then really take that community based approach where we're working within the local networks.

One thing that we try and do in a lot of our work is to ensure that people affected by leprosy are central to the projects that we have, to the work that we're doing. And actually, they are the change makers themselves. Sometimes they're called leprosy champions, and they get involved in leprosy case detection, they get involved in awareness within their communities, advocacy, we have also self-help groups where people affected by leprosy will come together, support one another, train each other and how to care for their ulcers and how to really look after themselves.

And that is so key to what we do, they are central and actually, we almost follow their lead, it's led by people affected by leprosy and what they want and what they need. So that partnership is really key. And then we try as well to use as many innovative solutions.

We use things like technology or mobile clinics or things like this to overcome some of the geographical challenges.

Sudha: Like you said, it's hugely complex. It's not easy. It is like creating a whole support system in order to deliver on the program to support the communities that are affected or impacted by leprosy.

So, you know, I grew up in India and there's a huge amount of stigma attached to the disease. People affected by leprosy live on the margins of society because they get ostracized, and this is likely to push them further into poverty. What can be done to empower individuals with the disease and their families?

You've referred to some of the programs that you're doing with young people. Can you elaborate on that, please?

Daisy: Yes, of course. So, stigma is a huge thing across all of our countries but it's prevalent in India as well and that discrimination that people face, it's a huge challenge and continues to be. Back in...

Shownotes:

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the podcast are Sakshi Bansal’s personal views and do not represent or reflect the views of Arup Ltd.

Excited to share the latest episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast featuring Sakshi Bansal FRSA ChMC! 🎙️ Sakshi, a recipient of The Diana Award, the world’s first UNESCO Kindness leader and Founder of Project LEAP, dives deep into the 'S' in ESG.

In our conversation, we explore:

👉🏾 Psychology's link to sustainability

👉🏾 Social equity, triple bottom line, and social license to operate

👉🏾 Challenges in reporting the 'S' factor and current industry trends

👉🏾 Global sustainability dialogue dynamics and diversity concerns

👉🏾 Millennials' & Gen Z's perceptions of Purpose-driven organizations

👉🏾 The importance of continuous learning in navigating evolving standards

Tune in for insightful discussions on sustainability and ESG with @SakshiBansal

Link to the podcast in the comments below. 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

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Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Sakshi. Wonderful to have you as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Sakshi: Hi, thank you so much. It's so nice to be here.

Sudha: To start with, give us a quick introduction and tell us a bit about yourself, maybe your childhood, education.

Sakshi: Gosh a bit about myself. So, I am a psychologist by education, both a bachelor's and master's degree, but I'm also a management and strategy consultant now. And if I look back on my career, because it's so well integrated into who am I it's what I call a roller-coaster career or a squiggly career. It started in a tech startup. I was studying in Delhi I wanted to be a professional salsa dancer, And I came across these guys and they were doing something really cool at university, building an AI platform for billing and telling software and digital menus of the hospitality industry.

And I said, ah, I'll join you. And started working in a startup as one of those co-founders specifically focused on bringing in clients. So we were a bunch of 16, 17, 18 year olds with a team of 20 people bringing in clients and selling our hardware and software products all over Delhi on a tech platform that I knew nothing about. So that was my first real education, I think, into the world of entrepreneurship is learning how to not run a business, how to be a leader, how to talk to investors. And I think very early on, I got an insight into that world. And I think that sparked the sort of entrepreneurial interest in myself, and then I later went on to start a charity. So later means two years later, when we sold the startup to Amazon, went on to start a charity which is called Project Leap, and we were providing free education to underprivileged families in New Delhi. And that really came out of a very personal experience I had visiting some of these areas in New Delhi.

And I saw that while people want to help, they just don't know how to help And so we started Project Leap for the last 10, 12 years of my life, I've been running Project Leap. We've expanded to different parts of the world, to Nepal, Sri Lanka, pan Africa. Then I came to the UK, did leadership development here, capacity building, team building for three years and then started doing sustainability and ESG and investments.

It's just been a roller coaster of various different things, but I've had a real privilege of working in various different organisations such as the UN as a youth activist, talking about, youth employment even in New York, all the way to Australia doing change management. And now, in India in aviation so it's really just a mixed background.

But I grew up with a very simple idea. I want to be a dancer, and I want to travel the world.

Sudha: And now today, of course, you are dialling in from the UK, you are in the UK, like me not based in India at this point in time.

Sakshi: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's really important to be mindful of the personal, experiences you've had and how they shape you as a person. And not a lot of people have time for that kind of reflection, but I've always. And maybe that's where the psychology background comes into play, right? You make time for reflection, and you think about how things have shaped you and it helps you take the next step as well.

Sudha: So, you wouldn't assume that after degree and master’s in psychology, you'd end up doing sustainability and ESG. what's connect? How did you find that route?

Sakshi: I think it's a very good question, because honestly, I was in my first company after my master's degree doing a very psychology focused role. So doing leadership development, team building and all that. And when COVID hit and I was in parallel running my charity as well, we started taking the charity work international and remote.

I was so well versed with the grassroots challenges in India that this time I had to re-educate myself on what's happening in Africa and what's happening in New Zealand. And I had a reintroduction to SDGs as well, which is sustainable development goals. And so, this understanding about sustainability and what that means and how do we redefine it for education, which was my charity's goal, became really important.

And I think at the same time, I was growing discontent with what I was doing in my job. Not because it wasn't good, but just because it wasn't good enough. There was so much else I could do, and I think that's when the entrepreneurial spirit sort of came back to hit me. And I said, I'm working for a big company, it was Willis Towers Watson. It's a massive US based conglomerate. So, they don't just do what I'm doing, they do 20 other things. So just started ringing people up from the organisation and started asking the question. What is your role? What do you do?

What do you care about? And these are really senior people. And around that time, ESG was a word that was quite thrown around quite a lot. So some of the senior directors in my company were trying to understand what ESG means for them and for the business. And what do we take to market? And what do we say to clients?

And I offered help, I was so young, and I said, when you go and speak to clients, can I come, I can help facilitate some of these conversations. I'm good at that. And we went to Spain, we went to France, we went to, various different clients with my company.

And we just asked the question, what does ESG mean? What does it mean for your business? What can we do for you? And then we came back and synthesized all of that data to try and make a go to market offering for Willis Towers Watson. And that was my role; to go and listen and suddenly I was working with a whole different team in the company with very senior leaders. And it was my first experience of making a global strategy for a very targeted thing that I knew nothing about. But actually, I probably had done it before with the tech startup as well. So that was really interesting. And I realized that coming from a psychology background is such an advantage because I really understand some of the things around social, so ESG is Environment, Social and Governance, right?

And the social pillar and the governance pillar were really intrinsic to me.

I knew how to measure them. I knew what the impact was. I had tools and a toolkit with me that other people didn't or shied away from. And just after leaving Willis Towers Watson I published a paper on what does ESG mean for psychologists, how do we interact with ESG, how do we bring sustainability and ESG into our clients and our day to day, and why it is so important for us to be part of that momentum of ESG and the global dialogue.

I published the paper; I was presenting that as a keynote speaker at a conference. And my current employers, Arup, were in the audience and asked me to come in and consider Arup as a potential future employer. And so, I did. And I did that because Arup was much further ahead in their ESG sustainability journey. They were almost market leaders in this space. And I thought this is a real opportunity for me to walk the talk and understand how I can add value.

And so, when I first joined, I started doing private equity investor due diligence, what is the people lens of assets and how do we create a due diligence around it? What do we assess? What are the risks? How does that impact your triple bottom line, your CapEx and your OpEx? And now I look after that, ESG due diligence, what is social due diligence particularly and what does that mean for emerging markets? That's my role now.

Sudha: That's a very interesting journey and very interesting transition also. So moving on Sakshi, I was reading up your profile that you have various roles and you're doing various things in your job and outside your job, so you are the United Nations Global compact Coordinator for Arup. And you're also the president for SDGs for WICCI. What does this mean and what does this entail and why are you involved?

Sakshi: These are really interesting roles. So, at Arup, I am, as you said, the UN Global Compact Coordinator.

Arup is signed up to UNGC. We are one of the business partners and signatories to the UNGC. So UNGC has a set of regulations and guidelines and commitments which is around making sure that human rights violations are not in our supply chain and making sure that we're adhering to global standards of sustainability, which we do as a company.

My role is to make sure that we are signed up to it. We are reaping the benefits of being a UNGC signatory, which means we have these competitions for our junior members of the team that they can sign up to and take part in sustainability, innovation challenges et cetera.

It's really like a learning platform for our members of the company, but also for us to continue to adhere to some of those guidelines and be signatories and also inspiration to other organisations in our network. And then similarly with WICCI, I think that role is a lot about understanding what SDG means specifically for India and for New Delhi.

What does it mean for the city? How do we bring people together from different walks of life that are interested or doing something about the SDGs? Whether that's activism or research or civil society, and how do we bring that together to shape a dialogue about Delhi and SDGs? So I've had the privilege of presenting some of that dialogue at UN General Assembly last year in New York in September.

All of these roles are really about keeping an ear on the ground and really listening to what people are doing, what challenges they're facing and helping them become part of a global dialogue, because that's what we really need.

Sudha: Yeah, that's true. We all need to be connected. We all need to know what the other is doing to learn probably from successes and failures.

How important is social equity and social risk assessment /in the grand scheme of things for organisations. I call it the business equity and inclusion risk resilience.

Sakshi: I really like the way you have said it's a social equity inclusion, risk resilience, because these are very important metrics for an organisation.. Talking about social equity for any organisation for any asset, whether you're diversifying the asset or expanding the asset or decommissioning the asset, or even, it's a greenfield asset.

I think for all of them, it's very important to continue to have or to create a social license to operate. Because really, whenever you're talking about asset and built environment, it exists in a place where community, any kind of community is impacted by it. Whether that's people living there that are going to be displaced, or whether it's people living there that have to deal with the noise and the pollution that's emitted from the industry or the asset.

Whether that's the biodiversity, whether that's the flora and the fauna, that's all community and somebody or the other cares about it. And I think that if you have an asset that you're investing in, and there's a likely possibility or a risk that you will lose the social license to operate because people are not reaping the benefits or worse, are getting some kind of negative influence from that asset.

It's a high risk. We have seen that with organisations such as Amazon with their data centers, when they're proposing different parts of the world and the communities have protested because it's just not beneficial for the community, doesn't uplift them. It takes away sometimes the jobs or doesn't create local economic opportunities.

I think that's really important for an organisation or for an asset to have that license to operate. I think that there are specific things that you assess under social equity, right? You've got your human rights violations. These are the factors that have a direct impact on your triple bottom line, and this is not the fluffy stuff, but this is genuinely the stuff that helps you understand. Absolutely.

So, I think ESG is really connected. Environment, social, and governance they're interlinked, and a lot of people tend to focus on the environment side of it. But actually, the environmental policy, for example, energy efficiency of an asset, It won't be optimized unless people in the building or in that asset are ready to bring the demand down.

And that is not just in your policy, but also in day to day how are you running the company? What's the governance like? What's the culture like? Are people really interconnected? And that again, in turn impacts your environmental performance that impacts your OPEX and financial performance.

I think these are really interconnected challenges. Things like demographic changes, right? We have got energy, renewable assets that are trying to diversify their portfolio, buy new assets, create new assets, but where they sort of lack judgment or don't see this risk properly, foresee this risk, is what are the demographic changes in that local area, right? Are we going to have a population that's educated enough to take up local jobs educated in the right sectors that is going to take up the local jobs so that we can fulfill the employment demand and the headcount demand we are going to create in this area.

So if you're, creating a new asset in Cumbria which is western part of England, you probably need employment there. You want to create employment there and you need young people there to take up those jobs, but young people aren't ready to go to Cumbria and take up those jobs. And then plus the universities in Cumbria aren't educating the young people or don't have university courses about renewable energy. So how are we going to actually fulfil that demand? That's a very big risk that people are, or assets or investors are not able to foresee because they are not assessing the social equity.

Sudha: Yeah.

And I totally agree with you that, all E, S and G parts are interlinked when you talk about equity and inclusion piece, which is the S piece, if you don't think of one or the other, I think that is a problem. And generally, people tend to have a very narrow view.

We've spoken about, as I said, equity and inclusion, business risk and resilience. What are some of the trends of reporting on S and ESG, and what are some of the biggest challenges that companies face in reporting?

One is, of course, their narrow outlook or lack of awareness and education that these are all interlinked issues. And so what has been your experience of having worked in multiple geographies?

Sakshi: Absolutely. I think they're still struggling to understand what it exactly means.

You've got these all-external reporting standards, TCFD and ILO and GRI, and they have come up with a few factors of risk that you can assess under the S, but they're not comprehensive enough. There's so much more that goes underneath the social and governance. And, I always like to say Social, unfortunately, suffers from the middle child syndrome and governance is just really hard to understand.

So people can't pin it on procedural governance, is it operational governance? Is it systemic governance? All that. And I think that it's exactly that, if people haven't given social, the time that it deserves to be understood and they haven't gone...

Shownotes:

Being an advocate for equity and inclusion requires a certain level of self-awareness, humility and an appetite to be a lifelong learner. Especially considering that the vocabulary around DEIB/DEIBA or whatever you choose to call it is constantly evolving, there is more we don’t know than we know.

My chance encounter with Caroline Collier, CEO Inclusion Barnet happened over a LinkedIn recruitment post and my subsequent message to her regarding the language. She was gracious in her response educating me about why they were using ‘disabled person’ (instead of person first language). I was slightly mortified but glad that I had the opportunity to engage with Caroline to better understand why they subscribe to the social model of disability.  

I am grateful to Caroline for making time for this important conversation (a learning opportunity for me). In the episode we spoke about Inclusion Barnet and why it describes itself as a Deaf and Disabled People’s organisation, deaf being separate from disabled in deference to the cultural model of deafness. We also spoke at length about the ‘social model of disability; harnessing lived experiences for social change; acceptable language; role of the private sector in opening up opportunities; what allies can do to support; and the just launched ‘Campaign for Disability Justice’ calling for a) Opportunity b) Security c) Respect.

Did you know that care in the UK is based on a ‘medical model’ that frames the body or mind of disabled person as something that needs to be fixed?

“We see disability through the ‘social model’, where being Disabled is a political term that describes our experience of marginalisation, not individual impairments. The social model allows us to come together to fight back against a world that we can’t navigate safely without care and support. This model helps us understand that a flourishing social care system should give us access to choices and the freedom to live independently.

We want a system that enables us to live independently, rather than generating a list of ‘care tasks’ our local authority can charge us for. The struggle for a better, more equal system should unify us all to talk about intersectionality and disability justice alongside the crucial demands for fair conditions for both paid and unpaid carers, wholesale changes to the gendered imbalance of care responsibilities, and the need to tackle the looming climate crisis, which will affect our capacity to care for one another.” Caroline Collier, CEO Inclusion Barnet

 Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Caroline. It's wonderful to have you today as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast. Thank you for being here

Caroline: Thank you. Really pleased to be asked, so thank you so much.

Sudha: Let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Caroline: I'm Caroline Collier. I'm CEO of a deaf and disabled persons' organization called Inclusion Barnet. My background is varied. I started after college working in libraries. Then I ended up in my thirties writing about the construction industry, unusually enough. That changed in 2009 when I became really ill with what turned out to be bipolar. I had a bit of a rethink just because I wanted to find something with a little bit more purpose, and I was incredibly lucky to end up working in the organization that is now Inclusion Barnet. I've been here for nearly 14 years, and I consider myself incredibly privileged to be able to have a job where I can sometimes make a bit of a difference and also just be learning every day.

Sudha: Yes, it's good to hear because we tend to put people in boxes but there's always a journey.

Caroline: I've been pretty adaptable over the years, I would say, yes.

Sudha: From what I understand, Inclusion Barnet it is a deaf and disabled people's organisation. Tell us a bit more. I'm curious and interested to understand why deaf is separate.

Caroline: Okay. You're not the first person to ask, and it does confuse a lot of people. But the deaf being separate from disabled is in deference to the cultural model of deafness, which rejects the idea that hearing loss is an impairment and instead emphasizes the shared sort of culture and history of British Sign Language users. So, because the deaf community is more comfortable with that approach, in London at least, we tend to use "deaf and disabled people's organisations" to recognise that distinction. Sometimes, in other parts of the UK, just "disabled people's organisation" is also used, but that's regional variance.

Sudha: That's very interesting to know and also good to be aware about this.

So Caroline, our first interaction took place because I reached out to correct you by suggesting person-first language on a LinkedIn post and very kindly and generously, you educated me on the social model of disability, which I know of. I have been looking at diversity and inclusion and try to keep myself updated. But I'm hesitant to use that model. Is one or the other more acceptable and why?

Caroline: That's really interesting, and I might explore with you later, if you're okay with that, why you're hesitant, because I think that's really interesting.

The first thing to say is, obviously, we can all self-describe however we want to. But I think one of the reasons that the kind of person-first convention has taken hold is because the social model of disability is not nearly as widely known as it should be. Very simply, the social model of disability says, okay, some of us have conditions, impairments, illness, whatever, but what actually disables us is not our individual condition, but it's the disabling attitudes and barriers created by society. So if I were a wheelchair user, my problem in a multi-storey building is the fact that there isn't a lift; it's not a problem with me, it's a problem with the building.

If I was rejected for a job because someone was worried about whether a bipolar person could do the role and whether they could handle the stress and all the other bad attitudes people have, that's not a problem with my competency. That's a problem with their attitudes. So, there's a lot that society can do. And it's really important because society needs to accept responsibility for changing and being inclusive. I'm not saying the social model is perfect; no theoretical model is perfect, but it's a really important construct to make us think about, okay, what can government do? What can institutions do?

Because there's always a temptation with disability to just go, oh, it's sad, but it can't be helped. A lot of things can be helped, and it's really lazy thinking, especially today when we have so much technological knowledge, so much ability to change things. Why wouldn't we just make things as accessible as possible? So, it's important to keep pushing the social model, reminding people, and just challenging people to think about difference. And how that comes back to language is, I always say disabled people or disabled person because we are disabled by society. If you say person with disabilities, you're attaching the disability to the person. That's social thinking. So that's why we make that distinction. And can I ask you why you're hesitant? That's really interesting.

Sudha: While you've been speaking, I've been thinking about that, why I've been hesitant. And it could also be to do with the fact that people are not as conversant, including me, with the social model of disability. While we hear advocates occasionally speaking about it, the other model is more prevalent in most places, even in training, unfortunately. And that could be the reason for the hesitancy because you're unsure, am I doing the right thing?

Caroline: Yeah, no, it's difficult, isn't it? And I think we all sometimes worry about saying the wrong thing.

I think it's a challenge for the disability movement to actually get more airtime to explain why this is important because the theory behind it is important; it's the impetus for change. And while we campaign for that change, we think it's important to use the language that reflects that. That's not to say that there aren't all kinds of challenges trying to always find the right words for the right things, because I think that's something that we all grapple with in this world now. But the core theory of trying to get systemic barriers changed is the overriding thing.

Sudha: That's true. I've gone to your website and seen this, that you speak a lot about harnessing lived experiences for social change. How do you do that, and why does it matter?

Caroline: I think it’s really important to bring lived experience to bear on a variety of issues.

And we use our lived experience in a variety of ways. A good example might be, we have a service called Touchpoint, which is all staffed by disabled people and provides peer support and welfare benefits advice in Barnet. So, we think, because we work in a social model way, we’re not just working with each individual as an individual to help them overcome barriers and achieve goals and access entitlements. We’re looking at this as a team and going, what patterns are we seeing here? What’s emerging? What resonates in terms of things that we could tackle locally to make a difference? So, I might have a meeting with the team and find myself writing to the DWP about something that doesn’t work, calling the local council to say we’ve got an issue with this, or finding out there’s an issue with accessibility in GP surgeries.

And you might say, could something go in the GP newsletter to just remind them about reasonable adjustments? It’s just trying to think, what differences can we make here? It’s using that social model approach: how can we dismantle some barriers here? Even if it’s incremental things sometimes, what can we do to make life a little bit more accessible?

From another perspective, also, there is a saying that you can’t be what you can’t see, and being open about being a person with lived experience and mental health issues, working in a leadership role, I think that’s also me using my lived experience to say, despite people’s expectations of me, it turned out I could do this and maybe you can do it too.

And that’s really empowering for people who might be really internalising stigma about what people are going to think they’re capable of. It’s really sad when that changes people’s own views of what they’re capable of and trying to provide that positive role model I think is really important.

We believe that we can use the lived experience to take a leadership role in creating a thriving and socially just society. Hugely ambitious aspiration, but we’re trying to show as an organisation that we’re not just providing services by and for disabled people. We can provide services that benefit the whole community because we’re thinking in terms of inclusion and dismantling barriers.

Now, I might give you an example of that if that’s helpful.

Sudha: Yeah absolutely.

Caroline: Yeah, so we run an equalities network that's not just concerned with disability issues. And, for instance, we held a meeting last year where we were looking at barriers to health access from multiple angles. We found that, with three groups particularly, so people with learning disabilities, people who experienced homelessness and rough sleeping, and people who experienced English as a second language, so three very different groups, they were all experiencing barriers and being excluded.

And there were overlapping issues that we could look at holistically. So we went to our local hospital, the Royal Free, and we started a project group with them to say, "Okay, how can we change some systems here, so people don’t get unintentionally excluded before they’ve finished their treatment?" So that was a really useful piece of work, still continuing actually. We’re doing a pilot in pre-operative care to make sure people don’t get excluded from operations that they might need, and we’re hoping to take that wider.

I think that’s quite a good example of how thinking in that kind of barriers way and how do we dismantle barriers is helpful for everybody

Sudha: Yeah, like you said, it's a really good example of it working for the entire community and it's not just for some people, it will benefit everyone in general.

Caroline: Exactly.

Sudha: Caroline, another thing that I learned during my conversations with you, you mentioned that disability is unique in the sense that it would be inconceivable for any rights-based groups to be led by people without lived experience. And, of course, we’ve seen this in the past couple of years, that there would be a huge outcry if something like that were to happen. But the reality is that most disabled people’s organizations are run by non-disabled people. Why is this acceptable?

Caroline: I think we have to start by differentiating the disability charities. The big traditional disability charities are indeed largely run by non-disabled people. Disabled people’s organisations or deaf and disabled people’s organisations are run by deaf and disabled people. That’s a bit of a differentiator. And the reason it’s happened like that, because the disability charities have been around for far longer, is for a start. Forty or fifty years ago, a lot of disabled people were institutionalised; we culturally had even lower expectations of what disabled people were able to do. And I think that there is still something, even if it’s unspoken or unconscious, where there’s still doubt around disabled people’s competency. Now, that might sound surprising, but we did several focus groups last year as part of a project to try and understand how different messaging lands with the general public.

It was really interesting because, firstly, some messages landed okay. There was a certain amount of openness around equality and rights for disabled people, but the message that landed least was when we said something like, “Disabled people are best placed to lead their own organisations.” There was actually a lot of push back. That might surprise you, but there really was. People were really uncomfortable about that. There’s a belief that it shouldn’t go to a disabled person; it should be the best person for the job. And we’re like, “Hey, so we’re saying that a non-disabled person might know better than a disabled person?” Okay, so that’s what you think. And people were even more explicit like that. But it’s just not a good idea. One lady specifically said it: “You couldn’t have somebody with mental health issues leading an organisation.” And as a bipolar CEO, that’s quite hard to hear and quite amusing also, because in her worldview, I probably couldn’t exist. But there is still a lot of expectation that disabled people will be passive, and that’s still something that we’re on a journey as a society to change.

Sudha: I think it's a lot of it like you said Caroline, is linked to the idea and that's like really embedded in most of us is that it's a competency issue. You can be one or the other.

Caroline: Absolutely. And the flip side of that is Oh if you appear to be quite competent you were never that ill or you're, you're not. People really can't hold the two thoughts together.

Sudha: Yeah, again, very enlightening and interesting. Disabled people, like any disadvantaged group, are not a monolith. What would your advice be on how best to communicate with them? I would always start with being open, respectful, and non-patronising, because unconsciously we tend to patronise people, and this is how we start. But what are the things actually I’d like to hear? What would your advice be?

Caroline: Okay, no, interesting question. I think the first thing to say is that a lot of the time you won’t even know if you’re talking to a disabled person because things are not always visible, and many disabled people won’t have any specific communication needs anyway. Beyond that, it’s really not one size fits all. I mean, start with thinking about things like, in the workplace, remembering that you won’t always know if you’ve got a disabled colleague.

Ask before meetings if people have any access issues. Do that in recruitment as well; give people time to prepare. I had to really work hard on that because I tend to do everything a bit lastminute.com, and I’ve had to really try and retrain myself that for some people an agenda a couple of days in advance makes a huge difference to their ability to contribute.

Think about just practical things like, if someone is trying to lip-read, don’t cover your mouth while you’re talking. If you’re talking to somebody with a learning disability, try and be simple and clear. But please try not to talk to people like they’re children; be age appropriate. Obviously, it’s different if you are talking to a child, but don’t talk down to adults.

Don’t ask intrusive questions and don’t make assumptions about other people’s quality of life or their abilities. Because I think some people get so tired of hearing, “Oh, you must be very brave,” or “What happened to you?” And I mean, it’s just like, you think that the first person that said that—just don’t be that person. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Sudha: Yeah, that is true. And I guess the other thing to do is one of our speakers said this at a conference is that sometimes, it's, good not to try and fill silences be comfortable when you are with people generally.

Caroline: Yeah, I think that's good.

Sudha: What can the private sector do to attract and retain deaf and disabled candidates? We know that representation or their participation in jobs is hampered because of how we are currently structured. How crucial is the private sector to opening up more opportunities, so that people can, fulfil their potential or work to their potential.

Caroline: Absolutely, I think the private sector does have a huge role to play and there is support out there. There are specialist job sites where you can advertise for disabled candidates, and there are organisations like our own that can give you advice...

Show notes:

We all need our cheerleaders, the people, who stand by us through thick and thin, who inspire and bring us joy.  The friends who are like family or better. I am lucky to have a few friends like that. One amongst them is @SabianaAnandaraj, whom I have known since my first job in PR over 30 years ago when I was a young mom to two toddlers in Mumbai, and she was the young, independent, go getter who introduced me to the workings of the agency and our mutual clients. We worked together for a short while before life got in the way and we drifted apart - she moved jobs, got married, had kids and I moved to the UK.

It was serendipity that we bumped into each other in early 2007 in Mumbai. The circumstances were wildly different her father was in very ill in hospital and mine was in and out of hospital (the same hospital) as he battled a rare form of Parkinson’s. Sadly, both our fathers passed away in 2007 much before their time. And @SabianaAnandaraj facilitated my unexpected move back to India for a stint to look after my mother. This move would have been impossible without @SabianaAnandaraj offering me a role in the agency she worked for at that time. And the ‘rest as they say is history.’ Today, we have a deeply, fulfilling friendship and our lives are deeply enmeshed (along with the rest of the gang) enmeshed together (in the best possible way).

Getting her on the podcast has been on the cards for a while, to share her amazing work trajectory and her foray into entrepreneurship. But, also to spotlight the reality, that women in their 50s are not done as yet, they don’t suddenly lose their ambition. The dominant narrative is about them being overlooked and written off but some of us are pushing back against the lazy ageist trope. Sabiana and I are both in our mid-50s (soon to be late), have no plans to retire and firmly believe the next decade may be our best as yet Also, I don’t think we are the kind of people who will take kindly to being overlooked! In this free flowing conversation we spoke about our mothers, being old, work, women in leadership, ageism, freedom in the 50s, entrepreneurship, learnings, cheerleaders, staying motivated and much more…..

We still need to talk about female friendships, menopause, empty nest, ambition, aspiration, work-life, second innings, third innings, fulfilment, and definitions of success…… 

Meanwhile, head to the podcast to hear more……

Episode transcript

Sudha: Hi Sabiana. I'm so, so happy to have you as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast. We've been discussing this for the longest time, and finally, it has happened. It's good to see you here.

Sabiana: Thanks so much, Sudha. It has been a pleasure. I was really excited when you asked me to be a guest on your podcast. We know each other for decades, have had, n number of informal conversations. I think this is one of our first formal conversations on a platform like this. So, I'm really looking forward to it.

Sudha: Let's get started with the questions. I always ask all my guests. And even though I know you so well, and we've known each other for decades, please introduce yourself for our listeners and tell us a bit about yourself.

Sabiana: In the grand scheme of things, I am the third musketeer in the family lineup.

All the way from Bombay, I am today a 57 year old grown up. My one and only, what do I say? partner in crime is Trivikram. I've spawned two mini me's through him. One is Aria, who's my son, and Kaira, who's my daughter. My entrepreneurial journey started in the year 2020, I must say where I started my rollercoaster journey which I tell you that twist and turns could probably be something that you could compare with a Indian, Bollywood, blockbuster. But after two years now, finally I've settled down and I'm really enjoying the entrepreneurial journey.

Sudha: So, you're enjoying the ride, so to speak.

Sabiana: Yes, that's right.

Sudha: We've discussed this informally a lot of times, and we speak about it. You know, when our parents were in their 40s and 50s, we thought they were really old, but like you just admitted on the podcast that you're 57, and I'm 57, I don't feel very old. Do you feel old?

Sabiana: I don't actually you know, but we must understand that the times are very different Sudha. They came from a time where there was so many limitations, right? I mean, look at the job scene then, look at the job scene now, look at the exposure we have as compared to the exposure they had.

They always looked for government jobs where there was work life balance. Here we are looking at, you know, raring to go even at 57. So, I think it is the times that really defined how you felt. Given the day and age that we are in today. I don't think we feel old because there is so much opportunity that I don't feel I've come to the end of that opportunity, which probably they would have, you know, at 58, they are retired, they worked at government organizations, lived in joint families. I think in their heads, life, had to come to a grinding halt from a professional point at 58.

At 57, I mean, you know, two years ago I just started, being an entrepreneur, a new twist in my career. So, no, I don't feel old at all to answer your question.

Sudha: Yeah, I mean, my mum was 42 when I had my oldest daughter, that is Asmita. And of course, my children show no signs of getting married or settling. And as you said, times are different. And the weight that they felt, I think it was those times where they got married early, had children early, did everything sort of at an accelerated pace and then waited. And I think even the lifespan used to be smaller. We now live longer and healthier than I think they did.

Coming to something that I believe is very true. Do you think people view women differently after a certain age? Personally, , of course, and professionally.

Sabiana: Sudha, I've had different experiences. I think generally speaking, yes, they do. Again, it depends on the times that we are talking about. Professionals our age at that time would be looked at very differently, treated very differently, perceived very differently, judged very differently. Over the years, I think that gap has been bridged to a large extent only for the reason that women have started playing different roles.

In the past, women were playing more housewives and not really sitting in boardrooms. Today you see women are in boardrooms as well. They've broken all glass ceilings. So they are viewed differently, but that gap has been bridged over time. There's nothing that a man can do that a woman can't do.

And I think over time, they've realised that we play a role at home. We look after their parents, our parents, our children, the home, and a successful career as well. So I look at it really differently because my experience has been very, very different. I've worked for organisations, Sudha, where the senior leadership team were all men and I probably was the only woman. But nobody really made me feel that I was the only woman. They gave me equal rights to speak up and so on and so forth.

But I think generally speaking, it has been a struggle. When I speak to the other womenfolk, it has been a struggle for them to get their foot in the door, for them to really get things moving because men, I can't generalise, but there are men who are also very insecure about a woman taking over their seat, which they probably had for years, right? So then all those nuances one does have to face being a woman, but I think slowly things are changing.

Sudha: Yeah. So this is the impact in the workplace. And I think this conversation that we are having, some of it is we are reviewing the journey that we have come on and that journey has not always been privileged, right? We've all struggled through different sorts of, what do you say, exclusions to come where we are today, and we are in a position of privilege.

And I see from the kind of person that you are, Sabiana, I think a lot of women lack that confidence and that clarity and the courage to be able to work to their potential. And I think you have been singularly very focused on that part and you've been, no, I wouldn't say nobody is blessed with that courage, I think you've given yourself that courage, right?

And you've spoken about the impact in the workplace. Are there any specific incidences, you don't have to name your employers, but are there some specific incidences that you can of think of where clearly, you know, the current people in power do not want you to step up or take your rightful position? Have you experienced that?

Sabiana: Yeah. Because the organisations that I've worked with in the past were more male, less female. So I feel it was more male, but it's not that you don't find it with women as well. But coming to your question about whether I felt like that, yes. Particularly in one organisation, which was a very male-dominated industry.

I came in, in a leadership role and, like I normally approach my career or my new job, I tend to understand the organisation, understand the colleagues that I need to work with. I need to get a buy-in, very important for me to get a buy-in from the people I work with, junior, senior, whoever.

So, when I was approaching them one-on-one because it was a male industry in particular—it was the telecom industry, probably you'll guess the organisation—they looked at me with zillions of question marks, so what are you going to come and do? What are you going to really tell us? But shift to another industry which had an equal number of men and women, and it was the same question marks on their faces, you know, I mean, how can you come and tell us what to do in an industry that you are not even remotely connected with? When you shift jobs, you shift industries, and you learn on the job. But I think what helped me overcome all that is one, of course, the belief in yourself to understand what you're there for, you have the conviction in the value that you bring to the organisation. And when you engage with these people, it is extremely important to get that surfaced in conversations.

For example, you understand your business, but I understand your business and how to run it, you understand my point. I think how you engage with people and the personality that you sometimes need to take on has to outshine your position at that point in time; it plays a very important role.

The second thing I did was, when I met them one-on-one, of course, I got this pushback. So then I changed strategy and said, okay, fine, get them all into one room. I realised people are far more fierce and wear their bully caps when you are engaging with them one-on-one. They mellow down when you put them all in one room. So that was my strategy, and I said, okay, and I acknowledged all the input that I got. So again, my learnings were, focus on the positives, ignore the negatives, don't give it too much importance. When they were all in one room, acknowledged all the help and all the support, and ignore the hard time they gave me.

The point I'm trying to make Sudha, is it's never a straight-jacketed approach. You've got to learn on the job, you need to work around, and it's never a customised approach, right? Some industries work very, very differently. But I think it is how quick you are in identifying those loopholes and how quickly you work around them. It's not easy, but it's not impossible.

Sudha: There are two things that come to my mind because I know you. One is that we are also from that generation where we believe that we almost work in our workplaces as if we are owners and not as workers. The second thing is what you said very clearly is that when you move into an industry at a certain level, you are taking your learnings, and you can re-engineer your skills to any industry because you have leadership skills. And the third thing is that you have to be able to adapt very quickly, think on your feet, adapt, and understand the environment rather than just being like straight-jacketed, like you said.

I spent a large part of my forties in India, coming back to India to work. And I thought when I was in my forties, I thought, okay, I'm really old now, but I began to enjoy it a lot, the forties, and it is definitely a function of having all of you around me that helped me to really enjoy that. But I believe that the forties are really a brilliant decade for women to be in. You suddenly discover,  you can speak actually, you can say no, you can do this, you can do that. And the fifties, of course, were dramatically different for me; they've been dramatically different.

So how have the fifties treated you and has it been very different from your forties? Are you thinking about things differently? And how are you as an individual, you know, so your personal, professional...

Sabiana: Of course, it is radically different, Sudha. When I was 40, I was 10 years less in experience, 10 years younger. Now I'm 10 years more intelligent. I have 10 years more exposure, more experience.

So, of course, it is very, very different. But the way I look at it is that 40 is when I would say my journey as a senior professional began. Before that, I was just a junior, learning, grasping, trying to support a team and all of that. But at 40, I suddenly felt this responsibility of teaching, of helping my team grow, sharing all my experiences and all my learnings with them. And that satisfaction that you get is immense.

So for me, my journey at 40 was fantastic because here now, you know, is this excitement of, okay, now I have so many more people I'm responsible for. I need to look at numbers, I need to look at growth, I need to make sure I'm contributing to the growth of the organisation and also take the brickbats, right?

At 50, you feel you've achieved because it's been 10 years, it's been a whole decade and that you've achieved a lot, and then you've been there, done that, and now suddenly you want to start a new chapter altogether. And I think that's where I am currently. At 50, actually, Sudha, I moved from a profession which was the only thing I knew, which is communications. And at 50, I joined a law firm. The only time I worked with lawyers was, you know, working with the GC at a crisis or when there was some key message that one needed to give out.

And here at 50, I joined a firm where they were expecting me to run the operations of the firm. For me, it was exciting; it was scary. I had to use all the experience that I had, the learnings, and at the same time, I had to also tell myself to unlearn and relearn. And I do that all the time, even till today. I'm 57, but I do that all the time because things are never static; things keep changing, they keep evolving. I mean, my ideas would have been so great once upon a time, could be totally obsolete today. So, my thing is unlearn, relearn, unlearn, relearn.

So, my journey keeps going on, and the reason I enjoy my journey is because I keep innovating and innovating myself in a new environment because the environment is never the same. I'm 40, then 50, now I'll be 60—the environment changes. If I do not evolve, if I do not bring in new ways of working and adapting, it's not going to work for me. So I hope I've answered your question, Sudha.

Sudha: Yes, you definitely have. I think it was a big challenge that you undertook when you decided to become the COO at Trilegal, which is the third-largest law firm in India. And that's been an amazing journey you have the experience, the knowledge, the intent, and the energyI’d say you’re one of the most energetic people that I know in this world, one of the most hardworking and energetic people that I know.

I totally agree that you have to not just bring all of that learning and experience. You have to learn constantly and evolve.

So, let's talk about your entrepreneurial journey. I think a lot of us jumped on that wagon during COVID and post-COVID. Tell us a bit more about your entrepreneurial journey. What prompted you to embark on this journey? Because you were doing very well. I don’t know whether it was something that you’d been thinking about for long and then took the jump, or it was one fine day you decided, “Oh, enough, now I need to do this for myself.”

Sabiana: It was not thoughtful at all. So, it happened—like I told you, the mystical year of 2021—I got an opportunity to work for a firm in Noida. I live in Gurgaon, so I had to travel from Gurgaon to Delhi to Noida. As long as it was locked down, it was fine. I am a person who likes working in an office. I'm a very people-oriented person. I like interacting; I like the chaos of the office, and I can't work from home. So I used to go to the office. There were hardly anybody in the office during that time because, you know, we had the flexibility of working from home. But given that I had just joined this organisation, I wanted to learn and understand the culture of the organisation, which is extremely important for my success, so I did. But unfortunately, what happened was when the lockdown was lifted, I realised I was spending way too much time in travel. And you know me better than anybody, Sudha; I'm a very impatient person. Very, very impatient. If I don't see the time that I have put to good use, I start getting the heebie-jeebies. And I just felt, you know, that time in the car from here to there, two hours, sometimes two and a half hours one way, therefore five hours a day, it was a waste of time.

And that gave me the reason to say, no, I can't do this anymore. But I didn't take too much time because I knew by then I'd been there, done that. I was 56 and something, and I said, let me start something on my own. And what I did was, of course, spoke to a lot of people. People who had only good wishes for me from a professional point of view. I started speaking to them and said, you know, this is where I am currently, and I don't know what to do. Spoke to a lot of people, got a lot of ideas, and then I sat on my own and I said, this is what I want to do. And I went on to creating Curate.

So, Curate is a...

Shownotes:

In the past couple of years, there have been a lot of discussions, debates, articles around how PR practitioners can combat misinformation. It is often cited as one of the bigger challenges along with AI (advanced technology) facing the PR industry.

The Elephant in the Room is the role of PR professionals in the dissemination and amplification of misinformation and fake news. How complicit are we as an industry when propagating the agenda of businesses, individuals, and governments?

Beyond the industry a lot of people ascribe ‘spin’ a pejorative term to the work being done by professionals. So, what’s the truth? To discuss this and more I spoke with Prof Lee Edwards, from the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. Considering that the title of her 2020 research paper was, ‘Organised lying and professional legitimacy: public relations’ accountability in the disinformation debate’, she has an in-depth understanding of the subject.

In this episode of The Elephant in the Room, we spoke about role of PR in society; the misinformation debate; disposable diversity; ethics of climate communications, AI, ethics in general, and more……..

Thank you Stephen Waddington for the introductions, this fine conversation would not have been possible without your initiative.

Interested in learning more, head to the podcast (Link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

 Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Hey, Lee Good morning. Wonderful to have you as a guest today on the podcast.

Lee: It's a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Sudha. I hope you're well.

Sudha: So, let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do. I'm really grateful to Stephen for the introductions that he made over email, but I'm keen to know more because I haven't really met with you.

Lee: Yeah, so my name is Lee. I'm a professor of strategic communications and public engagement at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and I've been there about seven years. Prior to that, I was at the University of Leeds, Manchester, and Leeds Beckett originally. My research area is focused on strategic communications, particularly public relations. That's the area I look at most. More recently, it has expanded into the area of public engagement and also media literacy, which ended up being quite nicely related to the type of work that I do.

I originally started in practice. I did about eight years working for the technology industries as a PR consultant. Like most PR practitioners I know, I kind of fell into it with no particular ambition to do PR, but just ended up there. I originally started in New Zealand, then I came back to London. I was mystified by the apparent power that Tony Blair's communications director, Alastair Campbell, had and how much he was hated because he was the proverbial spin doctor. I was working in the profession and didn't really feel like I was powerful at all.

So that led me to do a PhD focused on understanding how power works through public relations and in public relations as a profession. The rest is history, really. I've been working in academia now for just over 20 years and really love it.

Sudha: Wow, that's interesting. And I think that we should have another podcast episode, probably on your PhD, because like you, I'd agree that, yeah, we don't always feel very powerful as communications professionals. In fact, rather disempowered and often isolated, including with clients and within organisations.

Let's move on to the next question. We live in such divisive and polarised times. What do you think is the role of PR in society? We are so set in our views; we all think the choices or the sides that we take are the correct sides to be supported and advocated for.

We've seen, day before yesterday, the attempt on the presidential candidate in the US. All this is a result of the churn happening in society, the conflicts and the unease there. And, of course, communications professionals have a huge role, I believe, to play. We don't often get that opportunity. But between strategic advisors to the C-suite and spin doctors, which most people like to think of PR practitioners as, is there a happy medium between the two? A space that we can occupy with authenticity?

Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really interesting question. There are perhaps two answers to it in the sense that I think currently there's the role that public relations as a profession and practitioners occupy, and there's the potential role that they could play. Currently, I think we oscillate between those two roles of strategic advice and spin doctor.

The strategic advice role is the one that has the most promise, in the sense that it's a role that is more reflective and considered as a contribution to the organisation. It doesn’t just take the organisation for granted and follow what the organisation says. It’s much more of a kind of critical friend type role. And I think that's got to be positive because organisations can become very self-oriented and absorbed with their own purposes. That’s just the nature of the beast. But public relations practitioners have this bridging role that is very valuable. The strategic advisory capacity is important for helping organisations understand the nature of the society they exist in.

The spin doctor role, I think, is what happens when practitioners don’t or aren’t able to take on that more strategic approach. To some degree, that's a question of organisational culture, the degree to which organisational leaders are able or willing to listen, and perhaps also the degree to which comms practitioners are able to make themselves relevant. There’s a challenge there, because if you end up being the spin doctor, you end up simply parroting what the organisation thinks is important, and that’s not necessarily what society needs. So I think that’s what currently happens.

There’s a lot of debate within the profession about the pros and cons of both roles and the desire to be seen as more strategic. I think there is also a much bigger role for communications professionals, particularly public relations professionals, because they are different from advertisers, branders, and marketers. They are more focused on dialogue, discussion, and engaging with audiences. There’s a lot of talk, for example, about relationship building and engaging in conversations. That gives the profession a platform to influence society and the way social dynamics unfold.

For instance, with the shooting of the presidential candidate at the weekend, the ways in which the communications profession responds should also reflect on how they might make interventions as a profession, not on behalf of their clients but as a profession. They should discuss how and why such events might happen, what rhetoric underpins them, and how one might change it and make concrete moves in that direction. They have a lot of influence; these are people who work with some of the biggest companies in the world and with some of the largest media conglomerates. I would like to see a more socially oriented professional identity than we have at the moment. I think that could have a really significant impact on the way people talk about division and debate.

Sudha: I think that's a very interesting perspective, Lee. And I also think, how we contribute to the discourse, whether we contribute just on when you know, strictly has a problem or there's some reality TV show or we are participating in issues that really make a difference to people and to society. I think, we need to definitely consider that.

Moving on from this, we're talking about the U. S. and of course the U. S. has been so prominent in the past couple of decades, not just because of its power, but, what has been happening in politics. So the 2016 U. S. elections, were a time when we saw a lot of fake news or biased news and it brought misinformation to the spotlight.

And there was a spotlight on the role of lobbyists, PR practitioners, foreign actors to build a particular narrative. It’s been eight years since that spotlight. Has there been any change in behaviour or is it more of the same? Because I noticed that, as practitioners, as an industry, we love to talk about things, but I don't think, we really address some of the issues root and branch and try to make a systemic change. What are your thoughts on this?

Lee:I think the reality is that the volume of misinformation that became very visible in 2016 is now normalised. I think that’s probably the case. It was interesting how little it was discussed in the UK election, for example. I’m not sure about the election in India—there have been so many elections—but I was struck by the fact that occasionally it was covered as an issue but not really picked up, and there was no significant monitoring of it as far as I could tell. Although I was away for some of the election time, so it may have happened in my absence.

I think the reality is that we now assume misinformation will circulate, so the focus has shifted from trying to stop the origin to helping people understand what is true and what isn’t, particularly online. I wrote a piece a few years ago that argued that misinformation has also been part of the communications profession for many years. People in organisations or organisations themselves have always framed certain issues in ways that favour their own positions—climate change, tobacco, the chemical industries, for example. This is not new. And so, I don’t think the profession is innocent in this mix.

There was a really good study done by Jason companions and Jonathan on disinformation in the Philippines, where the people producing the disinformation in the context of an election campaign were people from the advertising industry who were working a second job at night producing this material. The skills and techniques our professions use in a legitimate way can also be used illegitimately and are used illegitimately. There’s a responsibility to acknowledge that and work towards changing it.

In terms of whether misinformation will ever stop, I don’t think so. Bad actors, as you say, will always be around. To some degree, the question of how to tackle it involves individual education, media literacy, for example, making sure people can spot disinformation. But I think this goes back to the previous points about the social norm. We now expect misinformation to some extent. We don’t have to accept that as our social norm. So, I think we need to ask ourselves what we are willing to accept in society and what we would like to see minimised. Communications professionals can certainly be part of that debate.

Sudha: I agree with parts of what you say. We’re now in a world where the more important aspect is not just that misinformation exists but how to spot what is true and how to filter out truth from lies or bias from unbiased information. For example, during the Indian election, India is a hugely polarised country, and the media has been polarised for the longest time. People generally know who speaks for whom and then make their decisions based on that.

Similarly, in the US or UK, people believe that media has certain leanings. If you are a left-leaning person, you might read The Guardian, while if you're a right-leaning person, you'll read something else. And that’s similar in India. But in terms of professionals and how we contribute to the news circulating, there perhaps needs to be more open conversations about what is acceptable, what level is acceptable, and how far we are going to allow our practitioners to operate in those areas.

Lee: I mean, these are ultimately questions of the ethics of the profession. And it’s not that people don’t talk about them, but I think, you know, professional associations and practitioners do talk about them. And there are areas where some really fantastic work has been done around inequalities, for example, gendered inequalities, racialised inequalities, where campaigns have pushed the forefront claims for recognition that might not otherwise have been taken up because brands are very powerful, because, you know, large conglomerates are very powerful.

They have some clout, not just for their customers but also for political actors, I think. So there’s power within that kind of market-based context or the overlap between markets and politics for practitioners to do something. But there is also, I think, as you say, this kind of reflexivity or, you know, self-questioning to ask exactly that question of how we limit our negative impact in this kind of space.

And to do that, you have to accept that there is a negative impact. Yeah, and I think that’s difficult for professions to accept because professions of all kinds, you know, their reputation and their legitimacy are built on doing good in society. That’s a big part of the profession. And so, being really overt about the fact that that’s not always the case is a difficult thing, I think.

Sudha: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. The industry, of course, is a microcosm of society. How does that impact our ability to fulfil our roles in a responsible manner? Because, you know, the makeup of the industry does not reflect our society, essentially.

And we don’t need to speak about statistics in general. So, are diversity and inclusion conversations in the industry today an imperative or a distraction? And I am asking you this question from having been on the PRCA Equity and Inclusion Advisory Council for three years. I think there are startups and newer agencies that are very interested in engaging, and the bigger agencies who don’t give a— I don’t want to use the word, but don’t give a damn.

So, what would you say? Do these people look at it as an imperative or a distraction? Because change is not going to happen unless the big players in the industry decide to put their weight behind any change that is required.

Lee: Yeah, well, I think you put your finger on the pulse there when you say, nominally, we should be a microcosm of society, but there’s no way the profession can ever describe itself as such for a range of reasons, in particular racialised and class inequality. I think this is a huge issue, and, you know, multiple surveys have identified that.

So, PRCA in the UK, CIPR in the UK, and a bit to a slightly lesser extent in the U.S., I think. There is a business case for diversity. The business case for diversity tends to revolve around the narrative of the more diverse you are, the more innovative you can be, the more ideas there are around the table, the more productive you can be, you’ll get the extra leadership, people will be more inclusive, etc.

And I was looking at the recent survey that’s been issued across 12 different professions, I think, that the CIPR contributed to. And that survey, which has just been issued in the UK in 2024, talks about this business case and cites various statistics. So, there is a business case for diversity, but diversity is complicated.

And it’s not without risk. If you want to be really honest about the need to be more diverse, and practitioners from marginalised groups say this every time they are asked, and they are asked a lot about their experiences. It can’t be just a tick box, it can’t be just the word, because really to understand the impact of a lack of diversity, you have to engage with some difficult questions about the really frustrating and miserable experiences that people sometimes have in their professional lives.

And you have to acknowledge that that is because of the nature of the organisations that have been built. And so that opens up difficult conversations that require mutual respect between the people who are marginalised and the people who are in charge, and that also require organisations to put aside their own self-interest in the sense that they can’t only ever manage the value of diversity by assessing whether or not it’s going to be profitable, or whether or not it’s going to get them more votes, or whether or not it’s going to get them more supporters for their charity.

It can’t only be about that. There has to also be a moral question of whether we want people in our organisation who are marginalised from the day they walk in, to the day they walk out, or feel that way, you know, enough on a regular basis for it to be a characteristic of their professional life with us.

And whether we want an organisation that also creates barriers for people who are marginalised to even get in, in the first place. Is that a moral position that we want to take? Because it is a moral position that one takes if one doesn’t do anything about it. It’s an ethical and moral position that is actively taken by doing nothing.

So, I think, from my perspective, with all the claims that organisations make about being responsible actors in society, I think it is a must-have. Because you can’t make those claims when you are, you know, then conducting your day-to-day engagement with your employees very differently.

And then the business case also is important. I think my challenge with the business case has always been that you can achieve the same outcomes without having to engage with diversity. And when diversity requires you to do difficult things, if you’re doing it properly, then it’s much easier not to engage with diversity and to achieve those profits and those changes in other ways, and I think that’s the problem with the business case for diversity. It doesn’t make diversity compulsory. It just makes it kind of attractive as one of the set of options that you might have. So, I think that means it’s always weaker, really, as an imperative.

I think the moral imperative is stronger.

Sudha: Yeah. I mean, I'm really glad to hear that because I think it’s quite frustrating to hear about the business imperative and the business case because.  I mean, DEI has been around for a long time, especially if you look at the U.S they’ve been doing this for decades, and they’re still making a business case, and the business case has not really propelled too much action.

I mean, we’re like 30 years or 40 years into it, and things should have...

Shownotes:

Most people would agree that sustainability is a much-abused word. It has become a catch call phrase for individuals and businesses keen on asserting their ‘good for society/good for planet credentials’. As we hurtle towards 2030, the reality is that the private sector has a pivotal role to play in helping to meet the SDGs. Cynicism aside, behind the rhetoric and noise, there is serious effort by some businesses to integrate it into their business strategy.

A couple of weeks back, I spoke with Chris Argent, Head of Sustainability for AMEA at Syngenta (A leader in agricultural innovation) to understand the role of the private sector in global food security (SDG 2), on innovations that can catalyse change and help improve the lives and livelihoods of farmers (especially marginal farmers).  

According to the World Economic Forum, ‘the global food security challenge is straightforward: by 2050 the world must feed two billion people more and the demand for food will be 56% greater than 2010.’ The sector also accounts for a whopping 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of freshwater withdrawals, so there is also the need for adoption of innovative practices to be more sustainable.

What is the private sector doing to address SDG 2? How are businesses transforming and innovating for sustainable development? Chris covered some of the issues during our conversation👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 The link between purpose, profit and sustainability

👉🏾 How organisations can be authentic when speaking about purpose or sustainability

👉🏾 What it means to be a leader in agricultural innovation for Syngenta?

👉🏾 The impact of climate change on small and marginal farmers who make up majority of the world’s farmers and produce over 70-80% of the world’s food (UN FAO 2021)

👉🏾 The ‘Good Growth Plan’ (Indian context) a time bound target to reduce its carbon intensity by 50% by 2030 from a 2016 baseline

👉🏾 The Portfolio Sustainability Framework aimed at increasing transparency to external stakeholders

👉🏾 Changing food preferences and growing trend for sustainably grown food

We also spoke about sustainability narratives, reporting, communications and much more.

Global non-profit EAT, “Food is the single strongest lever to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth”

To hear more, head to the podcast (Link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Chris. It's wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room Podcast today. Thank you for being here.

Chris: Thanks very much Sudha for inviting me to join. Looking forward to the discussion.

Sudha: Brilliant. Let's start with a quick introduction. So, you've moved from politics to external affairs and then sustainability. How has the journey been?

Chris: That's a great question. Things have certainly evolved in terms of sustainability over that period. As you mentioned, I started my career in Australian politics working in various roles for about seven years before moving to the private sector. And certainly, in that early days of sustainability, it certainly wasn't high on corporate's agenda. But over that time it has very much come to the fore, which I think is great for the community, for business and also for the environment.

It really started with the development of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and it's certainly progressed from there.

Sudha: Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like a very interesting journey, and I'm sure there have been lots of learnings that you can now use in your current role.

So, I listened to a podcast where you spoke about purpose, profit and sustainability. This is something I'm very passionate about. my consultancy is called The Purpose Room. Both purpose and sustainability have become sort of buzzwords for organisations keen to show their commitment to a bigger, cause to a bigger purpose. So how can organisations show up, authentically when they speak about purpose or sustainability without somebody groaning on the sidelines?

Chris: Yeah, thanks for the question. I think authenticity is the key word that you just mentioned there Sudha. I think sustainability and sustainable operations throughout the business world and beyond are critically important to some of the key issues that we face as a community at the moment. And certainly, two that very important to Syngenta, which as I'm sure your listeners would know, is one of the biggest agribusiness companies in the world, where we sell seeds and crop protection products to farmers. And so, food security and climate change are two incredibly important big issues that the world faces, and that certainly not only impacts our industry, we believe that we can be part of a very complex solution to these issues and so authenticity is critical.

And I think we've all heard of many companies falling foul of accusations of greenwashing and certainly I think many companies perhaps were keen to demonstrate that they were doing something in the purpose space.

But I think critically, and this is fundamental to sustainability at Syngenta, it can't be separate from your business strategy. Sustainability needs to be part of the business strategy. If it's business and sustainability, I think it can be seen as an add on or an afterthought or even a cost rather than an investment.

And the private sector has a critical role to play in these big issues. And so that's where, I guess, where purpose meets profit, is to me the foundation of where the answer may lie. Private businesses are in service to their consumers and shareholders, but also increasingly consumers and shareholders expect the private sector to be in service of something bigger, and that's where the purpose comes in.

But if it's not profitable, if we can't find that sweet spot between purpose and profit, it becomes outside that that private sector space. And I think if we can find those areas where profit meets purpose in a meaningful way, that's how we can really drive the agenda forward and drive change. And I think it starts with being part of the business strategy, which is the approach that we take at Syngenta.

Sudha: Very well-articulated there and what is interesting that you're saying is it should not be an add on because so far it has been an add on for businesses. I think for decades it's been like yeah, you do some philanthropy and CSR and that's something that you're doing just a bit on the side. I think companies are definitely finding it difficult to, like you said, to make it an essential part of the business.

So, your boiler plate reads Syngenta Crop Protection is a leader in agricultural innovation. What does leader mean? Leadership has been redefined so many times in the past couple of years, I'd say. What are your aspirations as a leader for Syngenta? Is it size, scale, innovation or purpose?

Chris: Yeah, sitting on the fence, Sudha, I think it's part of all of those things and certainly going back to the point I made before about the importance of profitability in the broader scheme of the pursuit of purpose. So certainly, we seek to be a leader in the industry and I think that leaves us best placed to help farmers with the challenges of growing more food, with less impact on the environment.

I mean, that's a critical important challenge that I mentioned before. So, there's all that leadership in terms of how we listen to farmers. I mean, farmers being at the centre of everything we do, how do we understand the challenges that they're facing? And agriculture is tremendously diverse and if I think about the region that I'm responsible for Asia, Middle East and Africa, we have large scale industrial farming, and then we have a lot of smallholder farmers who trying to make a living and support themselves and their community with one hectare or less of, land to farm on.

There's lots of different challenges across that region. But I think finding a common way to understand what farmers are looking for in terms of solutions to their problem is one approach we take. So, there's that leadership. There's leadership in terms of innovation, which in terms of buzzword Sudha is another one that I would contend is thrown around a lot at the moment.

And innovation can mean a lot, it can mean technological innovation and certainly from our product development approach, that's a big part of what we mean by innovation. But it's also about innovative ways to deal with what is very complex in terms of food security and climate change, and the role that agriculture plays in that.

And so how can we be innovative in the solutions that we provide, not just from a product perspective, but also through partnerships with broader solutions for some of these issues. If you look at the emissions contribution of agriculture, products themselves play some part in helping to minimize that, but it's more about on farm practices, innovative ways to drive change at the farm level.

And that can be, complicated purely and simply because going back to the profit and purpose thing we talked about before, we need to find ways to make sustainable agriculture, not just sustainable, but also the best and most profitable form of agriculture, again, to drive that change at scale.

I think we are making some progress there, but we can't do that alone, so long way to answer your question, but in terms of a leader I think trying to take the initiative across all these various things that can drive the change that's required in this industry, but also keeping farmers at the centre of how we approach this. And last thing I would say too, is being a leading workplace in terms of how we encourage diversity inclusion, how we encourage people to speak up and have their say about issues that they are passionate about to drive that ongoing improvement.

And I know that a number of the country teams in my part of the world have been recognized as leading employers in that space, which I think is a part of the entire puzzle for Syngenta.

Sudha: Yeah, leadership is not just about one thing, it is about various pieces that all come together to make a company a leader. We've covered some of the stuff around, drivers for sustainability when we were talking about purpose and profit. So, we move to the next question on the ‘good growth plan’ that is linked to your sustainability efforts.

I understand it is particularly relevant to India. Could you share a bit more about it?

Chris: Yeah, the good growth plans been in place for more than 10 years now, and I think it was certainly back to that leadership point. It was taking a step forward for the industry in terms of really defining and quantifying the steps that we thought Syngenta could take as a company to pursue sustainability as part of the business.

And it certainly evolved and was updated about three years ago with some new targets to, acknowledge that things have progressed. And so that was really the aspiration for all of our country operations. And it covered things that are still important to us in terms of the importance of soil health, the importance of safe use training for all farmers that we can get in contact with about how to use products in the best and most sustainable way to protect themselves, of course, but also to get the most out of those products. And certainly, India is a really important market for Syngenta and certainly a country where agriculture is such a huge part of the economy and social fabric of that country.

Finding ways to use that foundation to drive sustainable agricultural outcomes was certainly a big ambition of the India team. And I think they've done and continue to do a great job. Just focusing on a couple of examples of that, as I mentioned before, soil health. I mean, if you think about sustainability and agriculture, it really all starts with how we take care of the soil to ensure that it can continue to be fertile and provide that foundation for crops for as long as we possibly can. And there's a big awareness part in relation to this, I think everyone intuitively understands that the health of the soil is critical, but what exactly about the soil?

How can we understand what the baseline is and what approaches can be taken to improve that. And some simple things, but very effective that we did in India is in relation to soil health testing and providing those tests to farmers, particularly in relation to rice growing.  And then providing recommendations in partnership with the university about how to apply the right amount of fertilizer at the right time to ensure that the soil health was being protected and that yields would also benefit.

And this had fairly swift, but also impressive results in terms of yield, and of course, yield is linked to livelihood. If a farmer can apply less in terms of inputs, get more in terms of yield, and also the quality improvements, then that leads to higher prices for farmers. And so, these are some of the examples of the Good Growth Plan in India.

One last thing I'd say about the Good Growth Plan is we've now recently launched for the first time Syngenta Group's Global Sustainability Priorities and that builds on the foundation of the Good Growth Plan and really focuses on the key issues of higher yields with lower impact, and that means environmental as well as protecting the safety of the farmers, regenerate soil and nature improving rural prosperity, which is very important when you consider agriculture because agriculture is often really a foundational part of prosperity in rural communities throughout the world.

And lastly, about our own sustainable operations, really ensuring that we have a focus on reducing our own footprint in terms of emissions, as well as how we can move that forward. So good growth plan was the foundation, the sustainability priorities that were released in April this year build upon that.

And I think really sets us up to hopefully in partnership, drive further change for farmers, for food security and for the environment.

Sudha: All very essential pieces if you are to consider that the farming community, rural farmers make a huge chunk of the Indian population and they contribute to the GDP, but their own prosperity is also linked to all of this. And it is essential for them if we as a country are to grow at a certain rate that the small farmers are able to be prosperous and all of it is so interlinked.

So interesting to hear all of this. Moving on all conversations around sustainability start with climate change and global warming.  Should the starting point not just be people and the challenges they face. Because we're speaking about ‘just transition’, but just transition starts with thinking about where the planet is going and where we are going to be 10 years later in 2030 or 2050.

Why don't we start with people and the challenges that they are facing. What are your thoughts on this?

Chris: Yeah, it's a really interesting point and I think we need to do both. But I would certainly agree that focusing on the challenges for people, because it's people at the end of the day that drive action and drive change.

But if I think about the urgency of the change in terms of food security and climate change, as I mentioned, having that broader topic set at that global agenda can really help to encourage that action. Because I think also if we focus too much on the bigger picture, maybe it gets a little paralyzing too, because, it is enormous, it is critical and it is urgent. And so it's important that, that is setting the scene for action. But then we focus on how people can drive change. And as I mentioned before, that's why it's certainly at Syngenta having the farmer at the centre of everything, because without the input of farmers, without the enrolment of farmers, it's almost impossible to drive change.

And so that's why that's such a big focus for the company because without that action at the farm level then those broader topics and concerns are going to be even harder to have an impact on, so that's also where it becomes, again, complicated. I know I'm highlighting some complications, but we are talking about very complex things here and trying to simplify it can be beneficial.

Why should, let's be very frank, why should an individual farmer who's done things a certain way for a certain period of time and had pretty good results change unless there is a personal motive for change beyond that bigger picture. Because again, particularly in Asia and Africa, we are talking about smallholders and so change is risky. And the impacts of that going wrong can be very detrimental in terms of their own food security and their own livelihoods. So, we need to find a way of finding value and I mean, value in the broadest sense of that word, not just financial value, but sure, that's important. But what can we do to demonstrate the value for change to happen?

And it comes down at the heart of your question, Sudha, it comes down to people and how we can together build a change that can have the impact we need.

Sudha: Yeah, so the farmers have to be motivated to actually come on board. And I don't think there's too much that is required other than engagement and a little bit of awareness.

And definitely because of food security and their own personal security livelihoods, they are more likely to be on board.

Chris: Yeah, but also when you're talking about 450 million smallholders in Asia and Africa that's a lot of people. And it takes a huge amount of resources to be able to interact with all of them and a company, even a small company of our size is unable to have that direct contact with such a large number of farmers. It's also finding progressive farmers who want to try something new and can drive change and then they can become the role model to really drive that change further beyond

Kavneet Dasra Shownotes:

In my second innings I have been intentional about working with the third sector. Through The Elephant in the Room, I am able to engage vicariously with the sector without being a part of it. To some extent I have been able deepen my understanding and engagement with the sector through PRADAN where I truly believe there is an alignment between my passion and their purpose. However, truth be told the sector is cliquey and closed like most sectors/industries the world over. A bit jarring considering they exist to make society more equitable and inclusive, to provide support to the most excluded.

In the Indian sub-continent where I have spent a lot of my time it is no different. A cursory look at leadership, boards and composition of teams can be revelatory. That they mirror society, and all its inequalities is a bit alarming?  Is it possible for them to continue to work with the excluded and marginalised, and be effective in their current avatar?  What does it mean for the sustainability of the social sector short term and long term?

To learn about what the sector is doing to change, I reached out to Dasra one of India’s most respected and leading third sector organisation. Dasra evolved from being a philanthropy fund to a bridge between NGOs and funders. On their website they state that, ‘Equity is at the centre of everything we do’.  To kickstart my conversations with the sector I spoke with Kavneet Sahni, who anchors internal DEI efforts, spear heads the GEDI (Gender, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion) initiative at Dasra and leads on their Social Impact Program. GEDI is a lens that not only guides Dasra’s internal inclusion strategy but also informs their funding and grant making strategy. For the uninitiated GEDI is commonly used amongst multilateral organisations including ILO, IRC, UN to frame conversations on diversity and inclusion.

In this freewheeling episode Kavneet and I spoke about her background, move to the third sector, faith, privilege, GEDI, the drivers for change in the social sector, representation, war for talent, barriers to change, best practice, inclusive campaigns and initiatives, successes and failures………

My one key takeaway, the road to inclusion is paved with failure and learning……..

To hear more, head to the podcast….

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good morning, Kavneet. It's wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. Thank you for being here and making time.

Kavneet: Thank you, Sudha. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm so delighted that you actually are interested in learning a bit more about my journey and the work that we do at Dasra around diversity and inclusion. So, thank you for having me.

Sudha: Let’s start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Kavneet: So, I work as an Associate Director at Dasra and my role primarily is to design and implement capacity building programs for non-profits and other stakeholders in the sector. You may know this, but Dasra was formed on the basis that there is a lot of funding, a lot of focus that goes into supporting programs, on ground and very little focus on building stronger institutions like we often do in the corporate world. So, my role, my journey at Dasara has been, very old. I've spent close to 11 years at Dasara now and most of my time goes in building, designing programs, which will help nonprofit leaders, look through their own leadership journeys, become better leaders, but also strengthen their teams, their organisation.

In the last few years, with a lot of chatter happening on diversity and inclusion. I also have had the opportunity to dive a little bit deeper and understand. Beginning from who I am, what is my identity, how does that bring the privilege that I carry. And even at Dasara, I've had the opportunity to anchor some of the diversity and inclusion efforts.

So that's a little bit about me professionally. I'm a mother, I like to call that out, of a seven-year-old. He keeps me on my toes and kind of teaches me, new lessons every day, if I can put it out there.

Sudha: Amazing. So, like you said, you didn't start off in the social sector.

If you were not at Dasra, what would you be doing? Have you thought of it? Do you think about it sometime?

Kavneet: Yeah. I was at the crossroads and there was this dilemma back in 2013/14 when I joined Dasra. But on one side I had to pick this job at Dasra and the other side I had an offer from Johnson & Johnson. So, it was either the corporate world or the development sector. And I'll be honest, I did give it a thorough thought at that point of time because of course, if you enter the corporate world, you get a better salary, as a starting point, you have a lot of other incentives. There is a clear career path that you're moving ahead on.  At the same time, I think my passion lies in the development space, and I really wanted to contribute my skills, my experience to the society and that's where I picked Dasra. But wherever I would have been, if not Dasra, Johnson & Johnson, any corporate job, I think I would still be doing the very same thing, engaging with stakeholders, working on diversity and inclusion, because my background was in human resources.

Sudha: That's so interesting. So, you are passion led and you knew very clearly where you want to go and how you want to use your skills. How important, Kavneet, is your identity to you? And what are the experiences that have shaped you and influenced the work that you do today? Because, we are also confused about our identities, like, who am I at the end of the day? Most of us tend to be identified by our designation and the place where we work.

Kavneet: That's such an interesting question, Sudha. And I see it in a way that there is a perception or there is a way in which the world identifies you. And then, there are certain things that you identify very closely with your own personality, with your work, with your personal family life.

And to the world, of course, I would say I have the privilege to be an able bodied woman, married women born in a upper class, upper middle class family, had the privilege of finishing a double masters and supported by my parents. So, I think I do acknowledge the privileges that I've had while growing up.

But at the same time, I also I always try to not negate the challenges that I have had, whether it is around, socioeconomic challenges of being in a family where I was the first girl to not get married at the age of 22. Where I was the girl who was like, I want to do a master's, but I don't want to do a BEd, which is apparently the best way for me to settle down in life and, in my career. Where I was the one who said, okay, if you don't want to, sponsor my MBA, I will take an education loan and I will go ahead and I'm ready to take the risk and the responsibility of the repercussions that come along.

So, I also had my own set of challenges, whether it was around seeing the financial difficulties, parents and me not getting on the same page around when to settle and what's best for me in my life. But I think what's always stayed with me are some values, that I identify myself with.

I am very into preachings of Guru Nanak Devji, and I follow Sikhism as a religion. But I think more than any of the gurus, any of the teachings, I'm very influenced by the teachings of Guru Nanak and he has spoken a lot about being kind to others, not discriminating, just believing in the oneness of God, but also the oneness of human beings. So, I think those are some of the values I really identify with and hold very closely to my heart.

Sudha: That's so good to hear gives a holistic view into who you are, your spirituality and faith that often, sort of grounds us and is our North Star and guides us in making decisions in life.

Tell us about your journey at Dasra internal, to DEI as strategic imperative, because I don't think for the social sector, it has been a big priority. What are the drivers? Why is it that the social sector really needs to sort of get started and get going very quickly on this journey?

Kavneet: Yeah. So, Dasra was formed in 1999, we've been in existence for 25 years. And I think some principles that have stayed at the very core of whatever programs we build, whatever path, new strategies that might have come along. We always want, and we always try to keep the communities, the vulnerable communities that we serve at the centre of everything we do.

So that has been like the core right from the beginning as to how can we think and how any program, any activity, anything that we do, any action taken at Dasara, how is it influencing these communities positively? I think that has been one of the very, I would say strategic drivers, for us to do what we do today in the field of D&I. And if you have to go back, D&I was not a buzzword either in the corporate or in the social sector. Back in 2008, Dasara was one of the leaders in the sector who said that we will pick on audiences or target groups or communities that nobody else is serving or focusing or highlighting.

So adolescent girls, for example, we started, with a few research reports that we did on adolescent girls, the condition of young women. Till date, we have like 25 plus research reports that we've published, focusing on girls, women in the sectors of education, nutrition, water and sanitation.

And it was in 2013 that we actually built the first collaborative that was focused on adolescence, specifically girls. So, in my mind, when I look at our journey around D& I, it's not new, it's something which is very inbuilt in our own strategy, in our own vision that we have for the organisation.

But I think it was back in 2019/20 where we were reflecting on where we are in terms of the organisation demographics. Is there enough representation of the different strata that India, kind of has? And that's when we realised that we are an organisation with 70 percent of women and an equal percentage around 67 percent of women also in the leadership positions in the organisation.

We decided that, let's move beyond just gender. Let's also look at, other aspects of diversity, whether it's caste, whether it's disability, gender and sexual orientation. We've, then kind of moved ourselves, not just looking at women, as one of the demographics, but also looking at other aspects that are so inbuilt in the society that we have.

And since then, we've done two demographic surveys, and we continue to do that once in two years so that it gives us a sense and a pulse check of, which are the underrepresented groups in the organisation. And so that our hiring and a recruitment strategy is focused on that.

But also, we try to dive deeper into understanding how are they voicing their feeling, are they able to bring their authentic selves to work or not? And these, pulse checks or employee surveys it kind of informs the vision for us on what next do we do on GEDI.

So, I think one thing which I just would like to highlight is that for us, it is a little bit around how can D&I be a lever for us to do what we do well. And there has been a lot of conversations with the leadership here where we've sat down for two days straight and just spoken about, do you think that as an organisation we need more diverse talent? How would it help us meeting our vision? How does that contribute to the goals that we have set for ourselves? Are we ready as an organisation to take this up? Are we ready to perhaps slow down our pace of work, perhaps open more ways of doing things, not just sticking to the ways that we might have been following for years at Dasra.

Sudha: So clearly externally you have looked at marginalized communities and internally when you have started doing that sense check on what the makeup of Dasra is like, you're looking again at excluded groups or communities and seeing how you can increase representation and of course belonging. But why is this a necessity today, is it just because Dasra believes that this is the way we should operate or are there bigger drivers or imperatives?

Kavneet: So, after the first demographic survey that we did, we were left with a few questions. And these were very, honest questions that we put out to the leadership and to the D&I committee, which said that what does D&I mean to us at Dasra? Why do we need to go on this path? We really have to move on this path or is it fine because Dasra as an organisation is doing fine and, will it be of a value add. Do you see it as a strategic lever?

And two things Sudha that came up very clearly for us, which has been pushing us to move ahead on this journey.

One, we ourselves, not just by the research that exists today and the data points that we have, but by our own experiences we realised, by having diverse perspectives, by having people who have different ways of solving things, we are able to innovate and are actually able to build programs that we would have not had built otherwise.

So, that was a learned lesson for us, and it was something that we weren't just saying because we read a research report say this, but we had five examples at Dasra where we saw this happen. And the second piece, I mean, India's social fabric is moving with a lot of layers of caste, class, gender, religion, and for us equity is the core belief, right?

It's like again, the centre of our work. And for us to bring any change, we have to solve for the structural inequities that exist in the society. And for that reason, if we have to make a change in the lives of the marginalised group, we need to start internally. We need to have them become part of the work that we're trying to do for them. So, it's a bit of like, it would be ironical if, we're saying, Oh, we want to break those inequities, but we don't start at home.

Sudha: So, I started the last question also speaking about the sector and the poor track record that it has on, DEI or equity inclusion representation.

One would assume that this would not be the case. Please, could you share your insights on what the barriers are for the social sector to be more inclusive? I mean, if you look at the statistics and if you look at just a couple of the big social sector organisations and you look at their leadership or their boards, they're clearly not representative, right?

And just having lots of women in an organisation doesn't mean anything. It doesn't show that you're inclusive or equitable unless everyone has a path to forge ahead in the organisation. What would you say are the barriers for this sector to moving in that direction. I think from my perspective, it is, they feel that they do a lot of stuff already because they are working externally with marginalized communities.

Kavneet: Yeah. I think a few things, right. One, I think first and foremost, we need to understand that the development sector is also part of what India's social fabric has right? So, it will definitely be a reflection of what is happening in India, the complexities, the challenges, the same social fabric who have these unconscious biases. Who have these you know ingrained understanding of the context or the society. So, we are all eventually part of the same social fabric and the challenges remain the same. But I think first and foremost, we also need to acknowledge and understand that the development sector is way behind in terms of the resources we have, the availability of resources we have as compared to any other sector.

The intent here of every organisation, every not-for-profit organisation is to not focus on profit, but it's to focus on bringing that change. Unfortunately, India continues to be way behind as compared to its, other countries like US and, UK, where philanthropy is way ahead on the journey and people are still giving a lot more as compared to India.

I think the resource crunch is a big factor, I feel, because if you have limited resources, it's logical that you will end up prioritizing, the programs on ground, you will look more external versus looking internal. And that comes to you only once you have reached a stage in the organisation journey where it's not a hand to mouth situation or you have, set the organisation on a path that you feel comfortable for the next five years on where the organisation is going.

I think the second thing is that, and funds is one, but also talent, right? There is not enough talent that's coming to the sector, and I have personally seen this change in the last five to seven years. Now, we get to see people who are picking social sector as a choice. And there are also a lot of myths and assumptions that, oh, you didn't get a job elsewhere, so you're joining, or you're a woman, that's why you just are picking this as a hobby.

So, there are still these stereotypes and assumptions that exist in our society which also act as a barrier for talent to come in. I think those two to me are, two of the very important things that we need to keep in mind. But apart from that, I think there is a lot of scope, and I will not, pull back on saying this, that we need to, in the sector, work more on the leadership commitment, that it has to be very clear role models. That women have to be seen and there has to be tracking and accountability, there has to be certain mechanisms, governance mechanisms in place that will hold the organisation accountable on, internal D&I aspects as well.

And thinking a little bit more of platforms, right now we do not have enough platforms where the underrepresented groups can connect with each other, can actually gain perspectives from each other and build the confidence in their own abilities. I think women, for example, I remember when I go back, when I started my career, every, every, every review I used to be told, you need be assertive, you need believe in yourself. And I agreed because, as women we're taught to not contribute to a decision that is being made at home. We're not, we're just told this is the...

Shownotes

Nelson Mandela famously said, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does”. There are examples the world over whether it is Cricket, Football, Athletics, Tennis ……. It brings together fans and inspires current and future generations. However, like the rest of our society and business racism and exclusion is rife in sports. The good news is that there has been a concerted effort by sportspersons, sports bodies, regulators address systemic issues in the past couple of years. 

Recently, I had a wonderful opportunity to engage with Jatin Patel, to learn more about what is being done by Rugby England to bring about change. We spoke at length about the four areas of focus including i) embedding inclusion in the life cycle of employees in the org; ii) gameplay; iii) game leadership and iv) fan, followers and partners. A huge and challenging remit by any standards. 

We spoke about the importance of data for building a business case in organisations; his thoughts on whether DEIB/A is really slowing down/stalling; Social mobility as one of the biggest challenges facing English Rugby; Racism at the institutional level and steps being taken to tackle the behaviour of fans and influencers; Role models; accountability and much more…….

Key takeaway, much needs to be done and nothing is going to change overnight but the collaborative approach by England Rugby, the two premierships (men's and women's premiership), as well as the rugby players association, to develop an elite game, inclusion diversity plan seems like a step in the right direction (to address root and branch). 

Like to learn more, head to the links in the comments 👇🏾👇🏾

“Ultimately being in this job is about influencing. And I think a lot of leaders have realised that EDI leaders are influencers, they use knowledge and expertise and data to drive suggested ways of change, but they understand they can't do it themselves.

And I think it's that layer below where people do need more help because perhaps they've been more stretched that we need to close that gap of understanding that EDI practitioners are not there to do the job, they're there to help you and enable you to do the job, to be more inclusive, and therefore see diversity foster and succeed as a result of it.” Jatin Patel 

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good afternoon, Jatin. Thank you for being a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast today. 

Jatin: My pleasure. And good morning to you Sudha good to see you. 

Sudha: Good evening, actually. 

Jatin: Oh, good evening. Of course, it's evening. I knew that. Good evening Sudha. Good to see you. 

Sudha: Okay, so let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Jatin: Sure. So I'm Jatin Patel and I'm the Inclusion and Diversity Director at the RFU, which is the England Rugby Football Union. Been in post now just over two years and in terms of what I do, I think the simplest way of describing the way I do my role is across kind of four critical pillars. 

We look at how we can build a more inclusive and diverse approach to employees on board. So the organisation, I describe that typically as your very quintessential I&D role. So everything in relation to the employee life cycle from attraction, approaches to recruitment to progression and retention of staff. And ensuring the journey for everyone is equitable, but also that we are constantly looking to diversify our staff body.

The second pillar is gameplay. So for rugby and for me, that means everything from grassroots community rugby, all the way through to the top of our senior squads, both men and women and the pathways that sit in between them. So trying to get more people playing the game understanding the experiences they're having from an inclusivity perspective and making sure that we can make them as welcoming and positive as possible. But it's not just players, it's also match officials we need more referees and there is a lot of talk about the impact on referees in rugby in particular at the moment. And also coaches. We need coaches from all different backgrounds to not only role model inclusive behaviours, but also inspire the next generation of talent from different backgrounds, becoming coaches. So that's gameplay. 

The third pillar is game leadership. So we are a governing body. We have constituency bodies based around the country, pretty much reflecting different geographies. We also have a council, which is our chief decision making body, and ultimately is trying to build more inclusivity into the way they make decisions, the way they approach their respective leadership roles. But also diversify the talent pipelines behind them, so more people from different groups and backgrounds are able to become leaders themselves within the game. 

And then the fourth one is fans, followers and partners. So I try to describe that as who are our fans, how do we get more of them, what is the content we're using to sell the game. So a reflective and honest picture of what the game is, but also one that entices people to want to be involved in rugby. But then also working with a lot of corporate partners. So Umbro are one of the biggest ones, they're on the front of our shirts. And we have a host of others like Honda and British Airways, etc. And working with them to align and collaborate and achieve mutually beneficial I&D objectives. They're obviously large organisations. They have a number of areas of focus for them, which similar to ours to try to scale up our objectives and ambitions, but working together to make it meaningful and cohesive. So it's quite a long explanation of what I do. But that keeps me busy most of the time. 

Sudha: My God, I bet it would keep you busy. That's a huge remit. It sounds hugely challenging too. So as a second-generation British Asian, we spoke earlier at the conference when we met last year and you were speaking about, your parents, et cetera. How important is your identity to you? And what does it mean? 

Jatin: Yeah, it's a really good question.

I sometimes struggle to answer it, if I'm honest, because my heritage is incredibly important me. My parents came over from India when they were very young but not very much. And so they were kind of learning the ways of being British whilst also being strongly Indian. And I was very fortunate, I was born in South London, which is a very diverse part of the country, I then spent most of my upbringing in Brighton.

And up until recently, I've always kind of struggled to kind of connect the two because Brighton's not the most ethnically diverse part of the country, but it's an incredibly liberal, wonderful place. 

I was listening to a podcast the other day with Munya Chawawa, and he talks a bit about his own upbringing in Zimbabwe and then moving to Norfolk and rural Norfolk. And he kind of nailed it in a way because I kind of spent my formative years like when I was in university suddenly meeting more Asians that weren't my family and understanding a bit more of what your typical second generation experience and upbringing in Britain was like.

And so I had to kind of find that identity. But what it means to me is that I can't pretend I'm the most religious, but faith plays a big part of my culture and my family culture. It constantly drives me. I support England in every sport except cricket, because if I didn't support India cricket, I think my family would disown me.

But I think that's okay. You can straddle multiple cultural identities and still be proud of each and strongly patriotic to each. And so it means an awful lot and it's definitely defined me. But sometimes I kind of struggle to properly identify myself, if that makes sense. 

Sudha: I can imagine, I struggle with it so much, so I can't imagine what that struggle is like for, the second generation. Because at some point we start looking at our roots it's not always important, but at some point it helps to us a lot of answers. And I think to make peace with who we are and what we do. 

Jatin: Yeah, it's a real dichotomy if I may say that. Cause it's like, you grew up here, you're British Indian. Because of the colour of my skin, it's obvious that you're from an Asian background, and then every time I've gone back to India, not necessarily when I was younger, but when I was kind of in adulthood, you're seen as British, you're not Indian, you're British. And you kind of like, hang on, where am I meant to belong here? . And it's not a massive problems I have in life but at the same time, it does cause a little bit of a separation. 

Sudha: Absolutely. Absolutely. Moving on I hear this all the time that let's make a business case. For DEIB, or DEIA, or whatever you'd like to call it. That's the first thing everybody wants to talk about. Have you not moved? Should we have not move beyond that? 

Jatin: Look, I think data is important. I think building cases for change is always important.

Any person working in sort of change management needs to build cases for it. I think from a EDI perspective, I think the continued call for business cases for this agenda I think are like you say, I think are dated. I think ultimately, if you're searching for a business case to become a more inclusive organisation I think you're missing the point about what the entire agenda is about.

And for me, it's about people, it's about human beings and ensuring you can capture and engage as much talent as possible. And that requires you to look beyond your traditional lenses. And so if you need financial business cases to do that, then I think you're kind of missing the point of the fact that actually the drivers of your commercial and financial success are the people who work for you and the work that they do and then doing it to high standard.

And therefore if you're already casting a wide net in terms of talent and engaging as many diverse populations as possible and you're reaping the rewards of that, there's no need for a business case. So yeah, I think the continued ask for a business case is I think we're definitely past that.

That said, I don't think any organisation is doing this perfectly and I think sometimes the constant need to reflect on the business case sometimes creates a bit of a barrier and a blocker to actually seeing impacts and success over time. So I think we need to move, move, not move entirely away from the business case, it's important to reflect on the data and the impact that your programs are having, but move more towards what's next, how do we make sure we continue this in a sustainable way and it doesn't become just a short term project. 

And unfortunately, there are organisations that do look at it as a sort of, if we do this mentoring scheme, we introduce these apprenticeships, if we do this, then we'll see some change in a short amount of time. Actually, how do you make it meaningful and strategic over time and align it to everything that your organisation is trying to achieve, rather than as a separate sort of approach or agenda or action plan or strategy that sits alongside your broader objectives.

Sudha: Yeah, because this way when you need to make a business case every year to justify your existence every year, sometimes it's the easiest thing to ask and do away with and so we segue into the next question. Do you believe that we have lost some momentum from 2020 and that progress has stalled? Because last year, we were speaking about the Kantar report and that showed that globally it was stalling. 

Jatin: Yeah. And I think, so over the last couple of years, a lot of organisations, as we saw post, the horrific killing of George Floyd, the growth of the Me Too movement, we were in a very unique place globally as a result of the pandemic.

And a lot of organisations recruited ED&I practitioners new, so, and they used those instances as a large part of the narrative behind why they were doing it. And some of it was ultimately bandwagon to some extent. So if my competitors doing it or if that organisation is doing that, we need to do the same.

And in a way, it's almost built on a false premise and it kind of speaks to the cycle of the D&I issues, which have gone around for years and years and years. And it's like, you know, not to diminish what happened in 2020, nor to diminish the efforts that a lot of people in this space make. But it's almost like organisations look at it, what is the important social issue of the month or the year, and we'll focus on that in the here and now, I don't think we are necessarily across the piece losing momentum. But I think we are in another one of those challenges where we're having to justify why this work is important.

And If I go back to the point I've made previously, it's important because it's about people, it's about human beings, it's about organisational culture, it's about people driving the success of organisations, regardless of what sector you work in. And that has to be strategic and sustained over time. And so, yes, I can see organisations cutting resource or even cutting departments in this space, but they're doing so, I would say, unfairly, because the change that we as practitioners in this world are trying to drive takes time.

It doesn't happen immediately. Yeah, there are quick wins, but if all your focus is on the short term stuff, then you're just ignoring the longer systemic institutional issues that are not three years old, they are hundreds of years old in most institutions and organisations. Particularly in a country like Britain and also in the United States.

And then if you look at it from a global perspective, I think one of the challenges has always been, and you're starting to see differences here, because the growth of D& I as an agenda, and also the quality of practitioners in other parts of the world, It's very much focused on what is culturally nuanced in those respective countries, so be it in Asia, be it in Africa, be it in the Middle East, which is right.

And again, that speaks to the broader issue here, which is there is no one size fits all. There is no one approach that works for a country, let alone the organisations that are operating in those respective nations. So, yes, I can feel the pain of practitioners and I can feel that sense of momentum being lost and resources being cut. But given a secular nature of diversity and inclusion issues, there'll be no doubt, unfortunately, that something bad will happen again, and organisations will go, well, yeah, we do need to put effort and focus on this. And almost you have to, you know, to the outside world, it'll feel like you're starting again, but actually all it's doing is allowing practitioners who are doing this and been doing it for a long time to gain that buy in from their respective leaders to carry on with the work they probably set out to do much, much, much further in advance than when the issue happened itself. 

Sudha: Yeah, you know, from what I've heard you speak and I've read some of the stuff you seem like a glass half full rather than glass half empty.

So you do like to see the positives also. So from that point of view, do you see that some progress has been made and that leaders can still get this back on top of the agenda. 

Jatin: Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are organisations, you know, large high profile organisations in multitude of sectors who are doing some incredible work.

And I think one of the really interesting things is that if you ask most, let's take corporate leaders, for example, whether ED&I is important. And actually, take sport for great example. If you speak to the leaders within our organisations, they absolutely will talk about the importance of ED&I, the importance of inclusivity, they understand the nuance of and the difference between inclusivity and diversity and the need as well. I think where some of the challenge probably remains is that, once we have more leaders openly talking about the importance of this stuff, perhaps it hasn't seeped through to those middle layers of management who actually do the day-to-day recruiting, who oversee the day to day cultures of organisations who are ultimately the gatekeepers to seeing equitable progression within organisations, et cetera. 

I talked about earlier, so not to be hypocritical, but the importance of having a strategic approach is absolutely there, but then sitting behind that needs to be clear delivery plans and buy in at all levels of an organisation, it shouldn't just be the underrepresented groups through employee networks, whatever it might be, pushing from the bottom. 

It can't just be the leaders at the very top because I genuinely believe that the vast majority are bought in. It's that large chunk of people in senior management positions inside organisations who, yes, they've got really busy jobs, they've got huge remits, they've got KPIs they need to hit. I get all of those things, but if they aren't enacting the behavioural changes that most ED& I practitioners are championing, if they're not doing it in a meaningful way, which is reflective and focused on their respective organisations, if they don't know the tactics they need to apply themselves and the role and responsibilities they have, that's where this stuff falls down and I'm not saying I'm doing it perfectly.

I don't think anyone has the secret sauce, but that's certainly the way I try to look at it. And it's the way, ultimately being in this job is about influencing. And I think a...

Shownotes

On The Elephant in the Room podcast it has been my endeavour to spotlight leaders from the global majority. I recently had the privilege to speak with Taisha Nurse, Global Senior Director, Diversity Equity and Inclusion at McDermott. As a senior HR practitioner she has been responsible for building Centre’s of Excellence across multiple geographies before moving to her current role in 2020. A role she loves the most and believes that her various experiences have prepared her to navigate the web of challenges and opportunities she faces in the course of her work.

The focus of the conversation was on an industry well known for its lack of diversity, and to her her views a female leader on all things DEIB/A. We covered many interesting topics including 

👉🏾 The challenges to finding success in her DEIB/A role in an industry that isn’t traditionally recognised for gender diversity

👉🏾 Cultural intelligence and steps to building an inclusive culture (one culture) in a global organisation

👉🏾 The role of managers and leaders in building safe work spaces

👉🏾 Her definition of leadership

👉🏾 Measurement and evaluation of DEIB/A efforts in an organisation

I name checked @Pamay Bassey when Taisha spoke about being a learner for life❤️❤️

“It's probably my most favourite job in my 20 plus years is it definitely keeps me on my toes, but it allows me to stay in the sphere of being a learner for life. Every day, I'll have a conversation, I'll read something. I'll have an experience. And I think, wow, I didn't see it from that perspective. And so it's really putting me in a very open mindset. Even though I sometimes resist it, I want to be kind of in my comfort zone, but it puts me in this open mindset to see the world through someone else's eyes, when I'm thinking of a strategy, a campaign, the training that's required, being able to sit and think, okay, this is the audience, how are they going to receive it?”

To listen to the episode, head to comments for Links 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Thank you, Taisha, for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. Wonderful to have you here. 

Taisha: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to today's dialogue with you. 

Sudha: Brilliant. So to start with give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do. 

Taisha: So my name is Taisha Nurse.

I am currently the global senior director of diversity and inclusion at McDermott. McDermott is a global engineering procurement construction and installation organisation. So we're in energy, let's say. But my background is I have over 25 years of HR experience. I am an American born, so I started my work experience in the US. However, only worked in the US for two years, I then transferred to London, still in investment banking. I've worked in the Caribbean in telecommunications and now at McDermott in energy for the last 10 years. I've worked across most of the centres of excellences in HR. So mobility, HRAS, compensation and benefits, recruitment, and also worked as an HR generalist.

So the scope of my HR experience is quite broad, but I would probably say I'm now in my favourite, most favourite position being diversity and inclusion. And it truly takes a bit of all of my experience and combines it quite nicely to help me navigate through what I kind of see some days as a web of challenges and opportunities et cetera. So that's me in a nutshell. 

Sudha: And I think you're a multi, country experience must come in really handy with a global organisation that you work in. 

Taisha: Definitely. I say time and time again, diversity inclusion is not a one size fits all. And at McDermott, we have over 25 countries, we're averaging 30, 000 employees. And so it's being able to be very open to others experiences, listening very intentionally to come up with strategies that will work for that particular market. 

Sudha: So how easy or difficult has it been to succeed as a DEI leader in an industry that isn't traditionally recognised for diversity or gender diversity. The industry isn't really known for being a very inclusive industry.

Taisha: So I will say my organisation, we would say we're very diverse. Again, working across over 25 different countries and diversity is measured across many, many dimensions, as we know. I would say from a gender perspective their scope to improve. But when you look at the nature of the business being engineering, being construction, you don't find many women even leaving their undergraduate studies or even in their secondary education going into STEM studies. So as an organisation, we really need to look at establishing partnerships all the way down to perhaps secondary schooling to get more women into this type of industry.

We're never going to achieve 50/50. It just doesn't exist in the market. But like I said there's opportunities to improve. I think as a DE & I leader. I have been successful because we know that the world is changing and the market is changing and the industry is changing. And there is a focus on diversity and inclusion.

We have a function of DE&I and I work very closely with top leadership to say, what does our strategy need to be to continue to celebrate our diversity and bring more diversity into the organisation, but also to be inclusive. And all organisations want to be inclusive. That's effectively where everyone feels valued, respected and recognised.

And so even though I sit as a DE& I lead, it's my challenge perhaps, what's perhaps difficult is trying to make that everyone's responsibility, not just mine. I can't be accountable to being an inclusive and diverse leader for such a big organisation. And so It's being able to create a message that resonates with every single employee that they realise that I can contribute to creating more diversity and also inclusion within the organisation.

So those are, the big pieces, but I think as a DE&I leader in the industry, it's not as challenging perhaps in the past because the focus is growing and the understanding is also more clear to all leaders and throughout the world. So it's one step at a time. I always say it's a journey. It's going to take time, but we're getting there. 

Sudha: Yeah, I think the important thing is that you get started and you recognise that this is critical for the business. So if you're on that journey, it's brilliant. We spoke about this in the first question that you worked across multiple geographies and that sort of is definitely a superpower. It gives you an understanding of cultures, etc. 

As a global organisation, you said you're present in 25 countries, 30, 000 employees on an average. How do you go about creating an inclusive culture or one culture that everybody strives for? 

Taisha: It's challenging because I think, also the dynamics of our workforce is very different.

So not only do we have our office-based staff, who I probably spent a lot of time trying to educate, raise self-awareness, run campaigns, and really engage that population. We also have probably over 15, 000 employees working in fabrication yards. And so these are our blue-collar workers. I can't get them all in a room and do training.

We also have employees on vessels, we work offshore. And so they're doing rotations where they live and work on a vessel. And so how do you tap into that culture? And then we have project sites in some of the most remote locations. And so an inclusive culture and creating one is a challenge because it's again, not a one-size-fits-all in terms of how do we do that in some of these different locations.

However, what we're trying to drive is a McDermott culture. And so we tap into what are our values? What is the culture that we want everyone to experience irrespective of where you're sitting on this planet. And so it's looking at what are our values, it's educating our leadership on inclusive leadership behaviours.

So they're adopting it into their language into their day to day behaviours, into their decision making. So that takes time because effectively what we're doing is saying when you walk through McDermott's doors, this is how we want you to show up as an employee, as a leader. This is the experience we want you to have.

And so, by definition of inclusion, we want you to feel that you can bring your whole self to work, that you feel that we value and respect you, that we celebrate your uniqueness, which is your diversity. And ultimately we want you to be successful in the work that you do. 

And so is it a big challenge? I think yeah, just organisational culture on the whole is going to be a challenge. But the inclusion part of course has its own challenges. But it's every day, one of our values is 'One Team’. And so it's breaking down what does that ‘One Team’ then mean when we think about inclusion, and how do we make sure that we're getting the best from our people.

So creating it is setting it at the top, they must live it, breathe it, exemplify it. And then pushing it down and teaching others, what does that look like in your day to day interactions? 

Sudha: Yeah, sounds like a huge, huge task I can't imagine it being easy and it must require a lot of engagement and coordination with leadership and of course different teams and functional heads and countries.

Taisha: I mean, a part of the role, especially this year, that we've looked at doing a lot of cross-functional collaborations. So we're working with our ethics and compliance. We're working with our quality, health, and safety. We're working with communications. We're working with sustainability and social governance.

We work with our leadership and so it's looking at how do we drive this message? We work across all of the HR areas to make sure that the message is embedded in everything that we do. 

Sudha: Yeah. It's a huge task nonetheless. 

And how important is cultural intelligence for your employees and leaders in today's world?

Taisha: Well, cultural intelligence pretty much sits as our business strategy. So just to take a step back at McDermott, we operate as a ‘MOPEX’, which is a multi office project execution organisation. So that means we can have a project where the project director may sit in the US, the engineering is going to be done out of India. The fabrication may take place in the Middle East, or let's say Indonesia, and you have individuals supporting from anywhere in the world. And so sometimes we work off this basis that we've brought the best resources together across the world. We threw them onto one team, and so they're gonna have the same working styles, speak the same way, communicate effectively and as that is so far from the truth. 

So as a part of our strategy, probably for the last two or so years, is looking at how do we build cultural intelligence, cultural agility in our managers, so that they can flex their style of communication, so that they can flex their working styles to accommodate different cultures.

And. It's working well. Of course, it's not intuitive, if you have someone that is very different from your style, even if they're from the same culture, that has its own challenges. Now imagine you're working with different time zones, even language could be different. It's going to be challenging. But we need to have cultural intelligence in order to have successful project execution.

That's how we function. That's a part of our success. 

Sudha: Yeah. and the model that you said that you have as an organisation, that means that this is just an imperative. So the definition of leadership, since I was a young person has changed dramatically, even in the last 10 years or in the last three years or post-COVID, Black Lives Matter, the definition of leadership has changed dramatically with all that has happened in the world.

And it's, moved on, I think, from where it was about command and control. What does leadership mean to you? 

Taisha: I think leadership it has transformed. And I believe it's starting at a much earlier stage. So we have a younger generation coming out of university and they feel they are leaders. So it's not being linked to perhaps work experience. It's not linked to age. It can be thought leadership. It can be individual contributors that are leaders. 

And I think if I go back to how you and perhaps myself, how we experienced leadership, it was authoritative. It was driven by age. It was hierarchical. It was based on being very technical in your experience. And what we're seeing is this huge shift to being collaborative, very much people oriented. 

The softer skills are taking precedence. So we have a lot of conversations around being an empathetic leader. How do you coach as a leader, being inclusive, being flexible and adaptable. And I think for some of the leaders that I know, this is huge that if I say, be empathetic, they're looking at me with cross eyes, be compassionate, they're like, what are you talking about? 

But that's the expectation from a new generation coming out that my leader, is not going to be hierarchical, that I can voice my thoughts and that we can collaborate, even though I may not have as much experience. I have knowledge and I have ideas and the thought is that should be embraced. And so I think you're seeing yeah, this definite shift in leadership to the softer side. And I think that goes sometimes a little further than the technical leadership that we know because if you're very agile and you can learn things and you can lead people not necessarily processes, that takes you a lot further than just being very technical in your in your leadership style.

So, yes, it's changing, but I think, there's some gaps in us being able to move a previous generation into this leadership style that I think is going to take time. 

Sudha: Yeah, I think there is some resistance and reluctance. 

Taisha: Yes still, even though we can say leadership has shifted, it's more softer still, compassionate, empathetic leadership, being able to actively listen and relate to employees. We know that is the way forward, but yeah, there's definitely resistance from previous perhaps generations. And saying, well, we're just here to get the work done, just do it. 

Sudha: You can't win them all, yeah. So, leadership and people in supervisory roles have a very critical role to play in creating inclusive and safe workspaces. Why is psychological safety critical to workplace inclusion? So we spoke about how we experienced leadership or how we experienced workplaces. And what was yesterday doesn't have to be today. So I guess the changes for were good, but what are your thoughts on this? 

Taisha: Yeah, so when I think about individuals in these roles, they have a duty of care to create an inclusive and a safe workspace and the nature of McDermott's work where we're working in fabrication yards, safety is paramount. But I think in previous years, we spoke about physical safety.

And what we realise is that psychological safety is actually linked to physical safety. So when we talk about creating these safe workspaces, it's beyond physical. It's psychological where employees feel they can speak up. They can share their thoughts and opinions if it differs from status quo, that if they see something going wrong, not being done properly that they can raise the flag immediately and in our case be able to stop work.

But that comes with a level of, there'll be no retribution, I will not be penalised, that this is an environment where my thoughts, my ideas, my voice is actually welcomed. And if you don't have an inclusive and safe workspace, things can go very awry. And so what we're pushing is that we need to really start focusing on how do we build psychological safety, and that's down to your people in leadership, they have to start with demonstrating behaviours and that mindset that we want you to speak up, that we value your opinion.

It's not this hierarchical, do as I say, we need to expand that. And the younger generation will not tolerate. 

Sudha: No, they won't. They just won't. 

Taisha: No. They're not gonna come to a work environment that's not inclusive and that's not a safe workspace. So, it's really important and it's quite interesting to see the research and the conversations really starting to shift around psychological safety and how do you create that and how it impacts the overall work environment.

Sudha: Yeah, I think it's a part of the older health and safety thing, which is just brought to include, this very, very, very critical for successful workplaces. Do you believe Taisha that, it's important to regularly measure and evaluate the work that's been done in the DEIB space and organisations? Because a lot of organisations speak about this. So there's a lot of talk that's happening but not everybody can stand that scrutiny and that's why probably measurement or accountability is essential. What are your thoughts on this?

Taisha: I mean, we definitely have to evaluate. Measuring tangible measurements are probably a little more challenging in the DEIB space. But definitely being able to tap in with engagement surveys spot polls to understand how are your initiatives landing. I think in kind of the DE&I space, it's absolutely imperative, because sometimes the dialogue, or if...