Saif Hameed [00:00:00]:
There are two big reasons for why sustainability professionals who are well credentialed and high performing leave the organization. One reason is they just get offered something that is an amazing opportunity. And the second is that they find that the organization they're in doesn't take sustainability seriously enough. And that prompts them to leave, either because they're mission driven and it's important to them that the company be serious about the mission, or because they are challenge driven and it's important to them that they be working on an important challenge for the business.
Isobel Wild [00:00:37]:
I'm Isobel Wild. Welcome to the State of Sustainability Podcast, a show for professionals transforming corporate sustainability strategies, brought to you by Altruistiq. Hello. Welcome to state of sustainability. Setting up a sustainable sustainability team is one thing. Managing, retaining, and supercharging your team is another. This is the second episode in a two part series on optimizing your sustainability team for success. Last week, we focused on setting up a high performing sustainability team, and today we're going to dive into how to manage a high performing sustainability team.
Isobel Wild [00:01:20]:
Saif, welcome.
Saif Hameed [00:01:21]:
Hey, Izzy. Great to be here.
Isobel Wild [00:01:23]:
I would love to kick things off and get your view on what's happening in the sustainability talent market today.
Saif Hameed [00:01:30]:
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it, Izzy. As I was reflecting on this ahead of our show today, I realized that I spoke a bit about this last year, and what I'm going to say now is different to what I've been saying last year. Last year I was observing that the sustainability talent market was really hot. And actually, I think pretty much anyone with any kind of experience was being inundated with offers and roles and so on. And I was noticing that if you were senior talent and you'd been leading sustainability teams before, you had your pick of an amazing set of an amazing roster of openings. I remember I was kind of speaking with a new chief sustainability officer who had four Fortune 500 sustainability leadership roles to choose from before she chose the one she was in. If you were more junior in the talent space, you actually still had an amazing roster and you were being poached, like one year into your career journey. Effectively, you were being offered a role transition at a promotion to a different organization with more seniority and more responsibility and sustainability.
Saif Hameed [00:02:37]:
And that's what I was noticing. I suspect there's still a fair bit of that going around, but what I'm observing now is actually sustainability teams are maturing and they are happier to let go of people who have the right experience on paper, but maybe haven't performed in the right way in the role context. And that is a little different. Last year, it didn't matter what your achievements were in practice, if you had the right experience on paper, you were getting inundated with outreach and you were getting pulled around from company to company. Now I'm sensing that actually there's a gravitation towards performance and evidence of performance. And so the people who have done well in the role are being retained, often promoted, but like retained. The people who didn't gel well, for whatever reason, are being let go. And often I'm seeing that they don't necessarily then go into something else immediately.
Saif Hameed [00:03:32]:
They sort of linger around. They do the consulting circuit, maybe for a bit.
Isobel Wild [00:03:36]:
So on this point of retention, how can you effectively retain sustainability professionals who, as you've mentioned, are actually often highly sought after?
Saif Hameed [00:03:46]:
I think that there are two big reasons for why sustainability professionals who are well credentialed and high performing leave the organization. There are two reasons that I see. One reason is they just get offered something that is an amazing opportunity. And let's talk in a bit about what an amazing opportunity is. But it's like an offer they can't refuse. And the second is that they find that the organization they're in doesn't take sustainability seriously enough. And that prompts them to leave, either because they're mission driven and it's important to them that the company be serious about the mission, or because they are challenge driven. And it's important to them that they be working on an important challenge for the business.
Saif Hameed [00:04:28]:
And if sustainability isn't treated with importance, then what are they doing in this role, in this place? Those are the two big reasons I'm seeing for talent leaving.
Isobel Wild [00:04:37]:
And so on the flip side, that's why talent is leaving. How do you encourage them to stay?
Saif Hameed [00:04:44]:
Well, this is tricky, right? Because the inverse becomes, well, how do you make sure sustainability is important in the organization? And I think that for that you need to, in some cases, if you are the employer of sustainability talent, to some extent, this is always out of your control. Unfortunately, because you may just be in an organization where it is a lip service topic, sustainability is just not that important. However, let's say that you're in consumer packaged goods or in an industry where there are important tailwinds driving sustainability forward, then I think it is relatively easier for you to establish. Sustainability is important because you can lean in to consumer insights on sustainability, you can lean into market positioning, you can lean into operational improvement, you can lean into R and D, you can lean into the procurement dialogue. But the wait becomes on you as the employer and manager of sustainability talent to make sure that you are creating a function that is a high caliber function, and you are also, to some extent, creating the challenge space that that function is going after. And the organization is probably looking at you to do both define the challenge and build the team now to go after that challenge. And if you do one of those pieces right, the first one, I think the second one is then much easier to get right.
Isobel Wild [00:06:04]:
Yeah, I think we've spoken about this in previous episodes, but around how you have to celebrate the small wins as well to acknowledge that, okay, this challenge is really big. I think we can all agree sustainability is a huge, monumental challenge, but actually, those incremental wins can be really important to create some satisfaction and fulfilment in a team who is probably looking to work towards those sustainability goals and have that mission close to their heart. So I'd love to maybe also get your two cent on what other motivation factors and what other kind of levers you have as a sustainability leader or a sustainability manager to keep the vibes in the team going.
Saif Hameed [00:06:47]:
Yeah, I actually think, Izzy, that the best sustainability talent has moved on from the quick wins. They are no longer satisfied with a steady stream of small successes. The best sustainability talent that I come across are looking for game changing initiatives because they are out there to be had. Let me give you a few examples. Right. There's a company that we work with, big multi billion dollar beverage player, and they are now trying to chart a path towards a blended carbon dollar price for the stuff that they buy. They want to start thinking about what is the cost of decarbonization embedded into the product, or the cost of the carbon embedded into the product that we're buying. And how do we bring this in as the second or third index on our procurement process.
Saif Hameed [00:07:35]:
That is a big game changing initiative, and it will attract amazing people to lead it. Similarly, you have all this incredible stuff going on, on R and D around engineering. If you're a Mondelez, it's the net zero Oreo cookie, for example, or just reengineering the product from scratch and building something more sustainable. These are the sorts of things that are attracting incredible talent today. And if you're going to offer them a role where over the next two years, you're going to see energy efficiency savings and some solar panels on the warehouse roof and some mobility, this is just not cutting it for the best talent anymore. You won't get the top decile to stay. You may get the next 25% of top talent but you're not going to get the top decile because they can see a world where actually you are challenging big, substantial, company wide topics. And if I was a top tier sustainability professional in a business, I am thinking about how do I become a CEO or a COO or a more impactful c suite.
Saif Hameed [00:08:41]:
And I want a big challenge that will take me across the full cross section of the business so that I can demonstrate my credentials to be a leader in the organization.
Isobel Wild [00:08:51]:
Yeah, I think this reflects what you've said previously is like, where do you want to win the game? So those big North Star goals that you want to be known for and where you want to just play the game. I am slightly skeptical. I totally agree that it's like honeybees to a hive that will attract the best talent. But I think some of the less glamorous jobs are some of the most important jobs. How do you attract great talent to something which perhaps isn't as sexy and as exciting as a blended carbon price or a net zero Oreo cookie, so.
Saif Hameed [00:09:24]:
Easy to come back to it? I think there are some elements that are in your control and some that aren't. And so if you are a business that is serious about sustainability, you have a shot at getting the best possible talent. And the good news is that it doesn't matter if you are small or big or which sector you're in, but if you are serious about sustainability, and it is an important challenge for your business and you are going to tackle it, and you have that manifesto almost embedded in the organization, you have a shot at attracting great talent. Maybe that means that, lets say youre in the transport industry and actually it is a transition to electrified mobility, which is a slightly more straightforward initiative. In some ways it may not seem as intellectually challenging, but actually the implementation of this is going to be quite tricky, like getting this to work at scale across a multiregional organization. There are some amazing things happening in the logistics space where really the intervention palette is quite narrow. There are maybe two, three, four interventions to choose from, and they're all quite iterative. But the way in which you phase them, like do we actually start out with certain types of routes, certain regions, certain types of vehicle? Do we blend this with how many route runs we do? Parcel sizes? Think about all the different things you could be doing.
Saif Hameed [00:10:43]:
It is a big logistical, operational challenge and it can attract people who are excited about those sorts of challenges. I think the problem is really where, for whatever reason, you don't have the ambition, in which case you will really struggle to attract ambitious people. There is no way to repackage a lack of ambition in a way that attracts ambitious people, I think in the.
Isobel Wild [00:11:05]:
Long term, and to maybe talk about pay. So obviously ambitious targets and missions are a great incentive to join. Do you think that you have to also have very ambitious salaries as well to attract that talent? Or do you think actually the mission driven nature of a company can sometimes substitute for that a little bit?
Saif Hameed [00:11:27]:
There is so much variability in the data on this space, and it's not like I've seen rigorous data around compensation. So I only have, unfortunately, anecdotal evidence. But what I'm seeing is that as long as you're above a certain minimum, there's a correlation between mission and challenge excitement, an inverse correlation between mission and challenge excitement and payrol, in that if you have a really exciting mandate on the table, then a mission driven high performer will give you a bit of slack on the compensation package. I don't think it is to the tune of a 70% haircut, but I think that a 20% haircut is quite possible and that is unique in this space. I think you won't really find that in other sectors. I think what is skewing the market slightly is that there are some organizations where they can afford to pay much more to Hoover and talent. If I think about, let's say, private equity, often in PE funds, the ambition level is actually much lower than you might have in a consumer goods business, for example. But the organization pay grade is generally much higher, let's say, and the profile of the role is high enough that it can merit a high pay grade within that organization.
Saif Hameed [00:12:49]:
And so you might find that the pay package that a PE fund, for example, or a big bank puts on the table is two to three times higher than a comparable role in a consumer goods organization, even though the challenge is a bit less or the excitement is a bit less, and therefore you're now in that zone. Where does someone turn down a salary that's twice as high? And I've actually seen examples of people who are literally working in their dream job and they got an offer, for example, from like a Deloitte, to be a senior consultant, and the pay package was just so much higher that they had to turn away their dream job and go to this other job that was probably also reasonably exciting, but not the dream job. So I think there is just this skew in sustainability where I think organizations that are used to getting a big haircut because the role was so cool and so exciting ten years ago, and was the only role in the market. I think you now have to revise to be more market competitive.
Isobel Wild [00:13:44]:
Interesting. And whilst we're on compensation and resourcing, I'd love to just talk around performance metrics of a sustainability team and how, and what you think is a good compensation framework to enable those high achieving performers to really meet those stretch goals.
Saif Hameed [00:14:08]:
I think, Izzy, that's at a level of specificity that I probably won't have an insight on because I literally have never like assessed any of these people. So I know everything. I could give a view on how I would do it, but the thing is that it may just not match to how it's being done, you know, so it's a little out on the limb.
Isobel Wild [00:14:27]:
I think your view's valuable. Do you back your view, maybe say your view, and then we can either scratch it out or nothing.
Saif Hameed [00:14:34]:
All right, so I cannot really speak to how this happens across the market because there's going to be so much divergence in approach across organizations. However, if I were to be addressing this myself, I would closely link it to the delivery of the strategy. And so I would say we have a sustainability strategy. And the sustainability strategy is about value creation, which is, I think, what all strategies should be about. It is about capturing some upside and mitigating some downside. The upside might be better pricing power, more customer loyalty, etcetera. The downside might be about efficiency, cost, risk, etcetera. And across each of these elements of the strategy, we have goals, and across each of those goals we have owners.
Saif Hameed [00:15:23]:
And the performance management of the sustainability professional should be therefore linked to those goals in their capacity as an owner. And so, for example, let's say that I am an ESG reporting specialist and that is my role. And the part of the strategy that I am linked to is, can I help my organization attract a premium in the market when it comes to share price, for example, because we are seen as a sustainability champion and we featured all the sort of the mutual fund indexes or indices that try and filter for sustainability champions. And we actually kind of have a wide breadth of market participants that are ready and willing and excited to invest in our shares. Maybe that is my KPI and that's kind of what I'm optimizing for. How can we find a relationship between what I'm doing on the day to day and that KPI or that output metric? It may not be direct. You don't want to have this person's performance linked to literally the share price, and it's going up and down. But what are some maybe leading indicators that we can see for that? Is it about maybe the number of conversations that they had with investors and potential investors? And is there a way where we can judge the quality of those conversations and whether those are likely to lead to positive impact? Is there something about the way in which the ESG report is received that we can judge and how much it is referenced, for example, by new investors, where new investors say, I was excited to see the ESG profile of the sustainability profile of this company.
Saif Hameed [00:16:53]:
And that's one of the reasons why I chose to invest. And I am illustrating with an elaborate example here. But the point I'm making is that you have a strategy, you have goals. From those goals, you have KPI's which track to the goal. You then have to have some correlation between those KPI's and causation at the level of the individual in the system sustainability team. And that causation link is kind of what you should optimize their performance on.
Isobel Wild [00:17:19]:
Okay, so in terms of retention levers, we've got making the actual opportunity amazing. We've got sustainability linked compensation and pay. Now, I want to talk about upskilling, and I think this tends to be an area that actually gets overlooked quite a lot. And I think even us, in our podcast, we've spoken about upskilling different teams, different departments, and how you can best do that. But I think a phrase that really has stuck with me from the podcast with Camilla Riddeford, head of sustainability at ANA, was that you've got to put your oxygen mask on first. And so, saf, I'd just love to get your sense on what are the key areas that sustainability teams should invest in upskilling.
Saif Hameed [00:18:03]:
So I would look at this as a build versus buy combination. When you're acquiring talent from the market, you should be looking for certain types of expertise that you need, and you want to acquire that expertise. In addition, you'll have certain types of expertise that you are ready to build once the person is on the job. And those should be types of expertise that you have an approach in mind for how you can build it. Let me actually illustrate with a personal example from our organization and then connect it back to the space. We are hiring for a sales director right now. And in a way, I'm also doing this as a promotion for the candidates that may be listening to our podcast and looking to apply for this role. But we're hiring for a sales director, and we know that there are certain types of expertise that we are acquiring with this role, we are acquiring the ability to build a high performing sales team.
Saif Hameed [00:18:54]:
We are acquiring the ability to bring a high operational efficiency sales playbook to the organization so they can set up processes and APIs and metrics and tracking. We are acquiring the expertise of selling a complex software product into a new market. These are things that we're acquiring. We acknowledge that we don't have enough of it in house. We acknowledge that we can't train it up enough in house, and so we want to acquire this expertise from the market. At the same time, what we are not looking for is expertise in sustainability and in the subject matter. And we're actually explicitly saying we don't need that from the candidates for this role. And the reason for that is that we are ready to upskill them onto that because we think we're good at upskilling people onto that expertise, and we have an approach for doing it, and we have a high level of confidence that we can do it.
Saif Hameed [00:19:44]:
And in the same way, if I'm now hiring for sustainability talent, I would take the same approach, which is I am bringing in expertise, let's say, in sustainability communications. But actually, I'm going to need to upscale them on project management. And maybe I have a good in house training program for project management, which I put people through all the time and they can go through that. Or I have a third party that I work with on project management training and they can go through that. It is a combination. I think what a lot of people look to do is they try and say, let me find great operational talent in my business and upskill them on sustainability and send them to the Cambridge program, for example. And that's also fine. I think what you want to do, though, is you have a competency framework and you want to figure out what are the competencies that you don't have in the organization and you need to acquire.
Saif Hameed [00:20:33]:
What are the competencies that you have an approach in a model that once they're in the organization, whether it's with third party partners or internally, you can then upskill them on the gaps. And that may be that some of the acquisition talent is on sustainability and the upskilling is on project management, data science, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Or it could be the inverse.
Isobel Wild [00:20:53]:
And on this upskilling piece, when is it best to upskill them with internal expertise versus external?
Saif Hameed [00:21:03]:
When the quality of external expertise is likely to be better. That is the simple answer. And so, again, to go back to my sales analogy, it is not that we don't have people who know how to sell in our organization. We do, but we suspect that there is better expertise out there that we can bring in house and acquire it. And once we have acquired it, our next hire into that team will benefit from that expertise that we've acquired. And so in your sustainability function, let's say that you actually have already acquired amazing subject matter context. You're an apparel business and you have brought in someone who really knows sustainability in apparel. They know the ins and outs, but actually, you don't have great project management experience in the team you need to acquire then maybe not actually a sustainability project manager because youve got the sustainability bit covered.
Saif Hameed [00:21:55]:
The subject matter part, you can coach. You want to hire a great project manager because thats what youre missing and you can train them up internally on the sustainability context. So youre looking for competencies and youre looking to build out your patchwork of competencies across the team.
Isobel Wild [00:22:11]:
And if you are looking to get external upskilling, where do you look? Where are the good courses? Who are the good consultants? Who are the good, I don't know. Trainers that you can lean on?
Saif Hameed [00:22:26]:
I'm going to be honest and say that I don't think there are many consistent homes of expertise in the market. And what I mean by that is there are exceptional individuals in many organizations. I don't see any one place as a reliable vendor or third party where you will consistently get good expertise. So, for example, like, I was at McKinsey in the sustainability practice for several years, and I know that in that practice, there were exceptional people who were just really, really deep in the subject matter. And there were also, frankly, people that were very, very light on the subject matter but talked a good talk and could get away with it. And I think every organization has some blend of those. So I don't know if I feel confident in actually recommending any place to go. What I would say is you should find individuals that you like in organizations, whether they're consultancies, whether they're thought partners.
Saif Hameed [00:23:25]:
We have many customers that see us as a thought partner. And I know that when they see us, they think about the organizational capabilities, but also individuals, frankly. And they often want as much the individual's thought leadership as the institutions. I would think about individuals that you go to for specific topics. And organizations like our customers that do this well, they know who to go to for insights on data. They know who to go to for insights on compensation and sustainability roles. They have specific individuals that they think of.
Isobel Wild [00:23:56]:
Yeah. And I think this is where the value of events comes in. I saw a report that said sustainability professionals tend to spend their time on reporting internal engagement and going to events. And I know, Saif, you've spoken previously on your LinkedIn about what the best events are to go to and actually how to discern the good ones from, from the bad. But I think that is a great place to find those peers to actually lean on, to get proper industry advice from real experiences. But I want to kind of Zoom back out and look at culture around a team. And I think culture is a huge, huge thing in terms of keeping everybody engaged, happy, making sure that the people they're working with, they're getting on well with, and just make sure the vibes are all good all round. What would you say are the important kind of cornerstones to culture within a team?
Saif Hameed [00:24:50]:
What I've observed, Izzy, is that the mission focus is the unifying element for any sustainability team. And I'm going to draw parallel, let's say, with a data science team or a data engineering team and a sustainability team. And these are both teams that we have in our organization. So they're familiar to me. But I also reflect on having worked with these teams in other organizations. And I think that if you look at like a data science team or a data engineering team, for example, they're excited by the quality of the problem. And if the quality of the problem that they're focused on is interesting, exciting, forward leaning, complex that attracts and retains great talent. And also it becomes very easy to build a culture around that.
Saif Hameed [00:25:37]:
Because you build a culture, then that is rooted in expertise, quality of the code, accuracy of the output, iteration quality, etcetera. There will be a whole range of things for that reason. You often find, for example, that gaming companies have an easy time recruiting really incredible data science and data engineering talent. Because whatever you might think about gaming companies, the intellectual quality of the data problem is actually a very exciting challenge in that space. And so they have a great job attracting amazing people, and amazing people tend to kind of bring their own culture around them for the most part. You obviously always have talented people who bring a toxic culture as well. On the sustainability side, I think that because you are likely to be attracting mission driven people, you need to also have that unifying element around why this is important to the organization, why the mission is consistent and have that follow through. And if you don't, you'll rapidly, the culture of the organization will also disintegrate.
Saif Hameed [00:26:43]:
And so I would kind of have the mission and mission consistency be a rallying cry around the organ, for example, with Nestle. I remember when Nestle came out with the Kit Kat breakfast cereal. And actually, I think that was probably one of the harder hitting pieces for the culture of their sustainability team, because you have a team that is thinking about actually positive impact on the planet, and you basically release a bowl of sugar as the first meal in the day for kids. And I think that sort of thing is probably doing more damage to the culture of the team than anything you could do in the form of daily check ins and team events and things like that. That, I think, is a harder hitting thing for a sustainability team culture.
Isobel Wild [00:27:26]:
Yeah, but maybe to draw on some of those softer things as well. I know the KitKat reference reminds me of something that Emma Keller said, that after Henry Dimbleby's book Ravenous came out, she instantly went out and brought a whole load for everybody in her team. And I think other things like that, which align with the mission, but perhaps small add ons, I think, also go a long way. Another thing that Camilla Riddeford said was that every month, every quarter, they actually look back and they share a lesson about what they've learned to ensure that their team has a growth mindset and says, okay, we've learned something. Perhaps that didn't go as well, but we can kind of move forward and we can move on from that. So those are two little softer examples that I quite liked. Are there any others you'd like to add to that roster?
Saif Hameed [00:28:13]:
My own observation is that culture is how teams behave in passive mode. It is not so much about the active things that you do. I think that there are things that you. In some cases, I've often found that I've consulted to a lot of organizations, and in some cases, the ones with the worst culture were doing the most things, and they kind of also needed to. There were, like, organizational health surveys running around, there were events happening, there were policy frameworks coming out. And I actually think that none of that manages to necessarily create a great organizational culture. Sorry, Izzy. I think that probably comes across as a bit of a slight on poor Emma.
Isobel Wild [00:28:59]:
Maybe a little bit. I know what you mean. I think maybe you can just frame it as. Actually, I think culture is foundational and it's a framework, and these added bonuses are great little things on the side. But ultimately, you need to focus on the core, which is what you said previously around being mission driven, having your fundamentals right, making sure those decisions day to day align with that mission.
Saif Hameed [00:29:22]:
Yeah, I think so. Let me have another go at that. Yeah, so I think it goes back to this point about consistency, which is the things that you're doing need to speak to the nature of the challenge that you're addressing. And so I think that example from Emma is a really nice one, where you're a food business. This is food thought leadership at its best. How do you really cascade this across the organization and then really even bring in the author as well to speak to the team and so on? Another example that I really like is we spent some time with the team at Nando's a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks ago. One of the companies we work with, and what I really loved is that they have, like, a Nando's opposite the head office.
Saif Hameed [00:30:05]:
And on the ground floor they have the restaurant, and then on the floor above, they have, like, the office canteen, effectively. And we did this big lunch together in the restaurant with us and the Nando's team. And you can see that every meal choice, the Nando's team has an opinion and a perspective on the sustainability quality of the meal choice. And there are anecdotes coming from how this is slightly different in Australia or New Zealand or in different markets or in South Africa, and what they're experimenting with now is new, like, new menu combinations. And, you know, that small thing, like, just the act of going to lunch, becomes a reinforcing mechanism for sustainability, where it brings work to life. It's almost like an applied sustainability right in front of you. And I think those sorts of things, if you can weave them in subtly into the day to day, can really be a reinforcing element around culture. And, you know, like, one of the Kieran, one of the Nando's team members actually had a t shirt that he was wearing.
Saif Hameed [00:31:06]:
Seen the Nando's chilis on the menu, where, you know, the chili kind of goes from slightly hot to hot to hot to hot, and it becomes a more fleshed out chili. So he had this t shirt where it's like a little chili becoming a more fleshed out, bigger, bigger, bigger chili, etcetera. And it said net zero loading underneath. I think that's amazing, which is just really, really fun and all of that sort of stuff. I think these little subtle reinforcements, but in a way that is so consistent with the brand and the focus, and it just brings it all to life. You're then building block after block on foundations that are already there.
Isobel Wild [00:31:43]:
Yeah. Doesn't Starbucks, the sustainability team there, all have matching jackets with badges on to show that they're in the sustainability team.
Saif Hameed [00:31:53]:
You know, I love this is one as well. So we did our kickoff with Starbucks a year ago, almost now actually, in Seattle, and I had started to see a lot of Starbucks people joining calls with these denim jackets. And I was, like, intrigued because the denim jackets were all very similar. They were all the same denim jacket, but they all had different patches. And when I got there, I started asking a couple of them, you know, David and Katie at the Starbucks, Steve, about these jackets. And it turned out that the chief sustainability officer, Michael, had, he had come from Levi's, and he had brought this concept of these team denim jackets. And so everyone at the Starbucks sustainability team had an identical denim jacket, but the patches were custom patches for different events, off sites, site visits, you'd have patches in different shapes and designs, and you had the, like, standard Starbucks batch, but then everyone put their own flavor on it. And I think that sort of thing also really reinforces the feeling of a team culture and a team vibe.
Isobel Wild [00:32:53]:
It's like sustainability war heroes. How many net zero targets have you been through?
Saif Hameed [00:33:01]:
Exactly right. And I think the nice thing with the denim jacket is also, like, you know, when you think of a durable item of clothing that you might keep for a decade, like, you could do worse than think of a denim jacket. Right. You can imagine this denim jacket just standing the test of time. And so I think it is a really nice. It is a really nice sort of thing to try and bring mission down to the level of an individual.
Isobel Wild [00:33:26]:
And also, you're proud of those badges. You wear them around and you're like, yeah, I did this. I got through it. I think we should divvy away a bit of the marketing budget to make some Altruistiq jackets as well. Maybe with the state of sustainability badge and the podcast logo all over them. Saif, the last question I want to ask is, do you have any advice for any sustainability managers running a team at the moment who might be tackled with those day to day people? Problems of trying to retain talent, make sure the team is happy and engaged and enthused. What's your top piece of advice for them?
Saif Hameed [00:34:01]:
You know, I'm going to take another analogy from building a great sales team. And something, actually, that I learned from. I think it was George in our sales team, George Webb, when we were asking him, like, what do you want from a sales director that we should hire? George said, I want someone who is going to make me a better professional so that if I join another place, eventually after my time at Altruistiq is done, I join them as a better seller than I was when I joined Altruistiq. And I think that actually if you take that and apply it to a sustainability manager, you should try and have the mindset that you are bringing in someone, and they should actually, when they leave your organization, they should be better at something. And I think thats a great mindset to have for attracting talent, for retaining talent, and for building a high performance team. How do you bring someone in with that intention that if theyre going to spend 34567 years with you, they are going to emerge better, like they've graduated from your management as an improved person?
Isobel Wild [00:35:04]:
And does that work both ways?
Saif Hameed [00:35:05]:
You mean at the level of the person joining the team?
Isobel Wild [00:35:08]:
Yeah, I think it has a hiring manager.
Saif Hameed [00:35:11]:
I think it does. I think that amazing people want to learn from other amazing people. And as a hiring manager myself, I think one of the hardest tests to put myself through is do I feel I am hiring someone that if the roles were reversed, I would be happy to work for? It's something I heard mentioned somewhere, but when you actually think about putting into practice, it is a really high bar, as in, I'm not trying to be self promotional, but I think everyone has in some ways, a lofty opinion of themselves, I imagine. And it is a high bar to think, am I actually hiring someone who is just better than me and will improve me? And if the roles were reversed, I would work for them. And actually, then that begs the question, well, how can I improve this amazing person that I'm hiring? But then one of the best ways that I can improve that person is by giving them an amazing opportunity where their talents can just really shine. Because as an individual, I can only do so much, but the context I can put someone into gives them the whole world to play with.
Isobel Wild [00:36:16]:
I agree. And I guess that also translates into how you both operate on the day to day. So three, six feedback sessions or team building exercises, all of that jazz will feed into that quite well. Saif, thank you so much for joining. It's been a great and fun episode, and I hope everyone's enjoyed this two part series. As always, we are looking for feedback and content suggestions, so please ping us or drop us a message, but thank you, Saif.
Saif Hameed [00:36:45]:
Thanks, Izzy, and thanks to our listeners.
Isobel Wild [00:36:47]:
Bye.