CMgr: Sustainability, remote working, crisis management

Section editor / Mark Rowland

“It’s complicated”

It’s not easy being a leader in the age of sustainability. The societal and stakeholder pressures are enormous. You must educate yourself in highly complex issues, and take decisions which may be fraught with compromise. We looked for guidance from Emma Wilcox CMgr FCMI, chief executive of the Society for the Environment

Decision-making around the environment can be a very complicated thing. Take coal: it would be logical to assume that we shouldn’t be opening any more coal mines, but we still need to use carbon in order to manufacture solar panels and wind farms.

This one example illustrates why the Society for the Environment (SocEnv) exists. It’s an umbrella organisation made up of 24 related member bodies, and it’s the custodian of the Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv), Registered Environmental Practitioner (REnvP) and Registered Environmental Technician (REnvTech) registers. “People generally want to do the right thing,” says Emma Wilcox CMgr FCMI, SocEnv’s chief executive. But don’t let the good intent mask the management and leadership challenges that come alongside these decisions.

Stronger together

Most of the time, a high level of collaboration will be required when making decisions about sustainability. The scientific evidence may seem to point in different directions. Then there are historic and cultural issues which can hold back decisions.

For Wilcox, who’s a materials scientist by training, managers should try to rely on the evidence as far as possible. “I’m a scientist by background, so evidence is really important to me,” she says. “If I can’t say something to convince somebody, I’m going to try and show them the evidence. Some people are persuadable and some people are not. At the end of the day, you’ve got to have faith in your own convictions.”

Making a difference

On a wider level, Wilcox is keen for managers and leaders to really engage with environmental issues. She encourages people to think about their operations and the environmental impacts. For example, how many people in the organisation travel regularly? What chemicals are used in the production of its products? Once the positive and negative impacts have been identified, leaders then need to look at how they can move the dial.

Some of this might involve simple measures such as using Zoom instead of taking a plane.

Organisations should also review the amount of waste they produce and make changes to reduce it. According to Wilcox, no matter what industry you’re in, there are three overarching aspects to consider: environmental, financial and social factors.

“Think about the social impact that you’re having as an organisation – not just locally, but around the world as well. If you decide you’re going to switch your fleet of cars from diesel to electric, do you really know where all the materials that have gone into those batteries are coming from? Do you really understand the impact of those supply chains around the world? Think about it in that people context as well as the environmental and financial context.”

Learn as you go

For individual managers who want to be more sustainable in their decision-making, Wilcox recommends a healthy curiosity. Read, learn and be humble through the process. Accept that you don’t have all the answers – nobody does. You’ll need bravery and the ability to step forward and act. Don’t let striving for perfection get in the way of the good steps you can already take.

“We could wait around forever for some miracle technology that may or may not ever come. But we’ve just got to get on with it and make these changes, whether we like it or not.”

She believes that SocEnv has an important role to play in this process. “The thing that I like about the society is that it allows people to demonstrate their competence. When people have clearly demonstrated that they’re competent, it gives you trust in that person, because they clearly know what they’re talking about in this really complicated world.”

Wilcox’s journey to the top of SocEnv started in lab work, but working in laboratories wasn’t as satisfying as she hoped. “You’re very much on your own, and I like working with people.”

She took a sideways step into education and training, becoming knowledge transfer leader for the National Physical Laboratory in 2000. She worked for several skills academies in the manufacturing and energy and utilities sectors before taking the role at SocEnv in 2015. “I’m somebody who likes to help other people come together and solve problems,” she says. “If I look at the jobs that I’ve done over the past 20 years, they all involve different people from different areas working together.”

Science and sustainability are characterised by complexity. Ultimately, someone has to make a decision, says Wilcox. You need to do your homework, gather the evidence, be brave enough to make a decision, and then stand by it. That’s true leadership.

Four rules for remote managers

Lorraine Halford CMgr MCMI has been fully remote as a leader for almost five years. She made – and learned from – her mistakes long before the world changed

Lorraine Halford CMgr MCMI

Lorraine Halford CMgr MCMI first managed a remote team long before COVID, furlough and Zoom became part of everyone else’s vocabulary. Having accepted a job as a regional manager for programmes at Teach First in 2017, she was tasked with managing people who were developing trainee teachers. She only saw them once every two weeks for a team meeting.

“In a previous job at The Guardian, I used to describe being a team leader as the art of eavesdropping. How I knew what was going on in my team was just having that awareness of what was going on around me all the time,” she says. “I lost that in my remote role.”

Despite having to change her approach, Halford found that managing remote teams has freed her – and her development leads – to do their jobs better.

We asked her to draw out some threads about how to manage teams effectively from a distance.

01 Beware careless delegation

In a remote environment, it’s easy to delegate a job and not recognise that the person is struggling with it. You’re not there all the time for people to come over and ask you for troubleshooting advice.

Halford’s advice is that “you need to make sure that they know what’s expected of them and they have the resources to do it.” If the person truly understands the task they’ve been given, then they’re likely to run with it.

02 Show your team you trust them (constantly)

Trust gives employees the freedom to do their jobs, to feel confident in their ability to do the work and, potentially, to do it even better. “You cannot express often enough how much you trust people,” says Halford. In her initial role at Teach First, she constantly reinforced the fact that she trusted her team to do their jobs. “Knowing that they’re trusted and that it’s OK to make mistakes is really important. You need to trust people to do their job and give them the clarity to do it really well. They will repay your trust 99 per cent of the time.”

03 Use every opportunity to connect

Halford made a mistake during her first year in the job. The team was supposed to meet every fortnight, but people were constantly sending their apologies because they were so busy. In an attempt to respect their autonomy and because she was still working on building trust, she decided to leave these meetings flexible.

However, as people skipped meeting after meeting, they began to feel isolated. They lost clarity about what they were doing. At that point, Halford started to require people to attend the meetings. “It was a big ask to lose half a day every other week to travel to the office, but coming together as a unit and as a functioning team happens through being connected to each other.”

04 Don’t overthink it

Whether you manage someone who’s 500 miles away or five feet away, remember that you’re still managing a person.

“You don’t have to throw out your approach,” says Halford. “Sure, you need to adapt, but I think you can absolutely hold true to whatever your management style is, rather than having to start from scratch. With a little bit of adaptation, the fundamentals are still the same.”

Leading through an existential crisis

Ahsan Gulabkhan CMgr had to step up, along with many of his colleagues, to ensure the survival of Virgin Atlantic

On 17 March 2020, Virgin Atlantic effectively lost its reason to exist. The UK government, like many others, had advised against international travel. Virgin Atlantic’s primary source of income – passenger flights – was suddenly gone. While it shifted its efforts to focus on transporting cargo, including PPE equipment, around the world, the company had lost most of its usual routes.

For Ahsan Gulabkhan CMgr, associate general counsel for Virgin Atlantic, it was time to step up and focus on the company’s survival. As a qualified lawyer, he had started as a legal counsel for Virgin Atlantic after almost seven years working in practice. By the time the pandemic hit, he had worked his way up to legal director for engineering, finance, fleet, network and alliances. With its primary sources of revenue effectively shut off, Ahsan was part of a team working to steer the business through.

“We had to focus on our own existence,” he says. “An airline generally makes money through passengers, and cargo isn’t usually the dominant aspect of our operation. It was more than 600 days that we didn’t fly to the US, and that’s our main market. We didn’t get any public funding, so we needed a private solution, which for us was a private solvent recapitalisation.”

Mission impossible?

At the start of the pandemic, many thought this was an impossible task. It would require huge sacrifices and a lot of work for the company’s legal team, all while Ahsan was adapting to the pressures of being a new parent and undertaking an MBA.

“I had to try and make sure that mental and physical wellbeing didn’t get forgotten. This included the basics such as sleeping at the end of the day. I had to take the rest periods where I could. At the same time, I had to balance that with my family commitments, helping with the newborn and meeting my course deadlines. Managing my time became really important.”

These were two of the most difficult years in Virgin Atlantic’s existence. Ahsan was part of a team fighting for the airline’s survival. Everyone was working in isolation but trying to collaborate at the same time. “We all became experts in Teams and Zoom and whatever else was out there that we could use,” he recalls.

People were working long hours, and every action came with the question of whether a meeting was necessary or if people knew what they needed to do. It would have been easy to end up in back-to-back Teams calls all day, Ahsan explains.

“It was a challenge that we all had to overcome. It wasn’t as if the deadlines we were working towards were far in the distance. It was all very time-pressured and time-consuming. It was a new challenge for everyone.”

Empathy in a crisis

Working towards that private solvent recapitalisation was an iterative process, involving a large number of people across several teams, making decisions throughout the day. Sometimes decisions had to be taken at board level, sometimes in the leadership team. Other times, the sub-divisional teams had to make the decision themselves.

It was an environment that required a healthy dose of empathy, says Ahsan. Everyone was going through their own personal and professional challenges, cocooned within their own homes. As a manager, it was important to be understanding of each individual’s personal circumstances and to give them the space to deal with them.

“We would put in calls just to talk about anything other than work. We weren’t seeing each other in the office. You still want to feel part of a team, so you need to replicate those water-cooler conversations.”

As a result of the pandemic, Virgin Atlantic had no choice but to let around half of its workers go. A large number were also furloughed. This was tough on both those who were leaving and those who were staying. “We still have an airline today because of the sacrifices everyone made,” Ahsan says.

Having come out of the other side of it, Ahsan hopes that it was a once-in-a-lifetime crisis. It puts you under a microscope as a leader, he explains, when you have to operate in such an extreme environment. It has brought the team closer together, building on the people-focused culture the organisation already had. The team is certainly more mutually supportive now, he says, and there is also a stronger awareness of the need to look out for each other.