Wandering along a Sustainability Master’s and some lessons learned

My introduction to sustainability and the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership was accidental, by all means. Being born into a middle-class family, I was raised under the philosophy of a minimalistic lifestyle where we children were encouraged to avoid wastage. We did this without realizing it was a sustainability-centric lifestyle.

After school, I trained to be an aircraft maintenance engineer and had the privilege of working as an aircraft mechanic during the early days of my career. With time I moved along the aviation service streams of aircraft maintenance, airport operations, and flight safety. About 3 years into the industry I had an opportunity to take up an aviation consulting project. This experience was a true eyeopener as I soon realized that I finally found (rather, I thought) a career path that is more fulfilling, management consulting.

However, the challenge to make a career switch was big as I did not have any formal business school education. This is where I would like to mention an important facet of life, something I truly believe in, destiny. With time I joined a boutique consulting firm as a Market Analyst, leaving behind a secure mid-level management role in the aviation sector. Here I did exciting tasks that are typical in such firms, jobs like filing paperwork, arranging stationery, making coffee for senior partners, recording meeting minutes, anything but consulting as I then thought. But with time, I learned the business language and (often overused) jargon such as strategy, business transformation, organizational development, etc. Eventually, I grew out of those tasks (exciting as it was!) and was placed on a project that involved one of the region’s prominent brands in sustainability.

For the first time, I was made aware of the adverse sustainability challenges that were growing in the Middle East. I also realized in order for me to deliver the task at hand I required a deeper understanding of the subject. This led to my search for an academic institution that offered industry-oriented training in Sustainability, and thus Cambridge happened. There is a reason why in so many words I briefly narrated my life journey (so far), as from it I hope to extrapolate the key lessons learned during the course of the graduate program:

1. Sustainability is to be embedded as a lifestyle: Be it a small business or a large corporate, one has to embed the core values that lead to sustainability. This is similar to the values I was raised with, the basic mindset to avoid wastage, and to value resources. In a corporate sense, this would translate into measures such as making the business processes lean, energy-saving measures in a manufacturing plant, etc. by first having it engrained in the corporate vision, mission, and core values.
2. Embrace the Journey: The journey to being a sustainability professional or implementing a sustainability strategy is seldom linear. Almost identical to my journey to becoming a sustainability professional, the same is a corporate’s plan to implement a sustainability strategy. It is not going to be a straight road, it will be filled with twists and turns but we can definitely reach an expected outcome, given the right amount of time and grit.
3. Learning, never stop learning: I remember my first day as an analyst, with absolutely no formal training or background in business. But something happens in such situations, our basic instinct to survive kicks in and we end up doubling our efforts to stay at par with an educated and deserving candidate. In my recent assignments as a consultant for strategy and sustainability, I realized that learning and improvising is something every leader and team member must accept in this field, as there is only a certain advantage, strategizing offers, and most of it is learned operationally.
4. Communications, learn to speak their language: there is a specific language in which every service stream communicates, be it the CEO, COO, or CFO. As a sustainability professional, I have learned that we must learn to translate the sustainability initiatives into a format that makes sense to them, and it helps if we can also support them achieve their business KPIs as well. Something similar to my transition from learning the business lingo as an engineer.
5. Ignorance can at times be bliss: The initial days at the boutique firm, was me doing nothing but menial tasks. My seniors would assign me tasks that were not mission-critical as I did not have the widely accepted ‘business education’ required to be a consulting professional. But soon I realized that this was indeed a blessing in disguise as I began to think outside the conventional fixes and non-textbook approaches to client challenges. Common sense can take us a long way if we simply learn to draw from it the right way. Sustainability professionals must learn to think outside the norms and apply practical solutions to challenges, as opposed to formulating theories that can only be implemented in a utopian world.
6. Take risks, we will never know until we try: I remember the thoughts that ran through my mind when I put in the papers to resign from a secure job as a mid-management professional in a regional airliner, for an unexplored and unfamiliar career in consulting. The sustainability journey for an organization can involve taking risks within the business’ operational and management models. As a leader for sustainability within the organization, I have learned that it is our role to take responsibility for our actions and learn to think on our feet as we work in a dynamic corporate environment.
7. It always ends well, given the right amount of time and faith: Never lose hope, we as sustainability professionals could easily fall into the trap of being transmitters of bad news to senior-level management and peers. Therefore, we must learn to encourage ourselves by aiming for quick-wins without losing the long-term focus. Sustainability seldom is short-term, it requires a long-term commitment from the senior-level leadership in order to achieve the expected outcomes. We must learn to visualize these outcomes and take ourselves and the organization on this journey. This is something that I have learned in my career so far, which is a little over 10 years, and my career transition starting from the role of an aircraft mechanic to a flight manager to a business analyst then a strategy consultant, and now an entrepreneur.
8. Learn to tell a story: this again is a re-emphasis on my earlier point on communication, where we must learn to engage our audience, be it the C-suite or operational staff on the key advantages of the strategy or the operational plan for sustainability, in a way which they can logically understand and most importantly, emotionally connect.