On this episode of Five Questions Over Coffee, our guest speaker, an ESG consultant focused on social impact, emphasizes the importance of managing social risks and creating long-term value. They discuss how companies need to align social impact with business objectives, examine the key areas of people, purpose, community, and supply chain, and navigate practical challenges in implementing ESG priorities. They also explore the lack of effective communication and the importance of seeking guidance from experienced ESG consultants. Our guest shares their expertise on ESG consulting, specialization, materiality assessments, and data analytics while providing a comprehensive, globally recognized framework for responsible business conduct. The speaker offers advice and insights into understanding sustainability, ensuring social impact aligns with business objectives, and the biggest challenge of effectively integrating ESG considerations into employee engagement. Join our host and guest to hear more about managing social risks and achieving long-term value through ESG consulting.
Who is Therese?
Therese Baptiste is an ESG consultant who specializes in managing social risks and opportunities for her clients' products, processes, and services. She believes that a company's brand value heavily relies on its customer relationships and workforce, making it vital to manage social risks effectively. However, with no globally accepted benchmarks for social topics, it is hard to ensure consistency and comparability across ESG as a whole. Hence, companies face increasing pressure from stakeholders to display social responsibility by addressing issues related to human rights, labor practices, diversity and inclusion, community development, and customer privacy. As a consultant, Therese works with her clients to identify, prioritize, and manage social risk and opportunities aligned with their business objectives. She guides them by understanding their perspectives and developing strategies and programs to provide long-term value for multiple stakeholders, not just shareholders.
Key Takeaways
Topics covered in the episode:
- Overview of ESG consulting and social impact
- Lack of globally accepted standards and consensus across ESG
- Pressure on companies to demonstrate social responsibility
- Role of ESG consultants in identifying, prioritizing, and managing social risks and opportunities aligned with business objectives
- Challenges in ensuring social impact aligns with business objectives and provides long-term value for all stakeholders
- Specializing in a specific area of ESG consulting and the need for materiality assessments, targets and metrics, and data analytics
- Different skillsets required for analyzing the E and G aspects vs. social impact
- Importance of seeking guidance or checking progress
- The impact of UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
- Key areas for a company to examine, considering people, purpose, community, and supply chain
- Challenges in implementing ESG priorities, including lack of clarity, difficulty in measuring and reporting ESG performance, and limited resources
- Need for employee engagement and effective communication
- Importance of managing social risk and creating long-term value
- Failure to align social impact with business objectives and narrow, short-sighted views
- Insufficient data collection and analysis tools
Bullets under each topic have been provided in the main text.
Valuable Free Resource or Action
Connect with Therese - https://www.linkedin.com/in/therese-baptiste-cornelis/
A video version of this podcast is available on YouTube :
https://youtube.com/live/6gP28ro_axA
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at https://TCA.fyi/newsletter
Find out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguest
Subscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcast
Help us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!
Here's how you can bring your business to THE next level:
If you are a business owner currently turning over £/$10K - £/$50K per month and want to grow to £/$100K - £/$500k per month download my free resource on everything you need to grow your business on a single page :
It's a detailed breakdown of how you can grow your business to 7-figures in a smart and sustainable way
————————————————————————————————————————————-
Transcript
Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)
Keywords
ESG consulting, social impact, brand value, customer relationships, workforce, global standards, social responsibility, social risks, reputational damage, legal issues, financial losses, stakeholders, business objectives, sustainability, UN courses, environment, governance, materiality assessments, data analytics, internal biases, graduate advice, GRI standards, labor practices, human rights, diversity and inclusion, community engagement, customer privacy, GDPR, pandemic, employee engagement, resistant to change, effective communication, social responsibility efforts, ESG consultants, social risk management, stakeholder engagement, data collection, analysis tools.
Therese Baptiste [00:00:21]:
Hello.
Stuart Webb [00:00:23]:
It's not rocket science questions over coffee. I cannot tell you how much I'm looking forward to today's conversation. Tariff is an ESG consultant. She has got a really interesting history. Really love her history of what she's been doing. But we're not going to sort of get her to give all of her history today, her career history. But she has had some really interesting roles in Path. But she's got a really great understanding of the sustainability aspects of ESG consulting. And I really am looking forward to her describing in more detail some of that sustainability. Therese, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us and taking your time today. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Therese Baptiste [00:01:13]:
Okay, thank you for having me.
Stuart Webb [00:01:16]:
And I hope you've got your coffee ready. I've got my favorite bear mug in front of me at the moment.
Therese Baptiste [00:01:22]:
Fresh brewed coffee served here, but it's cooked zero inside of it.
Stuart Webb [00:01:27]:
I love it. Listen, Deris, you help people with their ESG journey, particularly as we sort of talked about that sustainability. So who are the sort of businesses you're currently trying to help? And I know you've got some really interesting stories to tell you.
Therese Baptiste [00:01:42]:
Well, the thing is, for me, I really look at clients because, like I said, I do ESG consulting, but it's more of the S, the social impact. So I'm looking my clients are those who want to manage the social risk and opportunities of their product or their processes or services. And the value of most, if not all brands, I say, sits heavily in the S focused area, and that is customer relationships and your workforce. So it's easy to see how this can be getting the wrong side and can destroy a corporation's value. And what has happened is that there is yet no globally accepted. I know everyone knows about the Task Force for Climate Financial Disclosures, but there's none for social topics. And to add to this lack of comparability and consistency, the lack of the global consensus across ESG as a whole is causing a lot of problems. So what I find, companies are facing increasing pressure from stakeholders to demonstrate their social responsibility and to address issues related to what we say human rights to labor, to practices diversity and inclusion. Everyone is like, oh, we practice diversity. It's on everyone's front page of their website. To community development, truly recognizing your role in the community and customer privacy, because failure to manage these social risks effectively can lead to a reputational damage, legal and regulatory issues, and even financial losses. Okay, so again, my role would be to help my client identify, prioritize, and manage their social risk and opportunities. And there's a way I do it. And as a consultant, I will provide the guidance and the support necessary for them to achieve these goals by understanding their perspectives. So I go in, I speak to them, develop strategies and programs that align them with the company's overall business strategies. And therefore, the biggest challenge is to ensure that their social impact actually aligns with their business objectives and that they're able to manage their social risk and opportunities effectively to give long term value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Stakeholders?
Stuart Webb [00:03:52]:
Yes, stakeholders is important in that respect, isn't it? Because so often we focus on the shareholder aspect of things and forget that stakeholders involve the community, the employees, a group of people that are often neglected in many of these things.
Therese Baptiste [00:04:08]:
Yeah.
Stuart Webb [00:04:10]:
Tell me some of the mistakes that I know you have come across that people try to do in this journey that fail to really encounter and work through some of that impact that you've been talking about.
Therese Baptiste [00:04:28]:
Yeah. The thing is some people believe oh, I don't need an ESG consultant, I can do it myself. The mistakes are like one, focusing only on compliance so they only do what they have to do. Two, ignoring stakeholder perspectives. They don't care what the community says. Lack of integration with business strategy, insufficient data collection and analysis and failure to communicate effectively. If you wish, I can go more in detail or I can just stop there.
Stuart Webb [00:04:57]:
No, please give us a bit more detail because I think you've given us some really great ones there. I'm particularly concerned myself about the lack of integration with business strategy because I find so many of these there is a great deal to be said for integrating with your business strategy. And people will often just turn around and go, we've got to tick a box or let's just do something. And it's not integrated, it doesn't help to build the business. And then it does lead into a failure to communicate effectively. What can you give us in terms of pieces of advice around those subjects?
Therese Baptiste [00:05:34]:
Well, I'll start with the one you went with. So it's lack of integration with business strategy. What we see is that companies may view social responsibility as a separate and distinct aspect of their operations rather than an integral part of their business strategy and this can result in a failure to align social impact with business objectives and a missed opportunity to create that long term value. And I started off with focusing only on compliance. That was my first one, focusing only on compliance. Many companies, they make a mistake of focusing solely on compliance with regulations and laws related to social issues without considering the broader social impact of their operations. I mean, there are some laws that said no child labor involved and they said okay fine, no child labor. But then they go and they want to make their products in countries where child labor is the norm. So rather than saying okay fine, if we don't hire those children, someone else would and saying let's see how we can work with this law. No child labor. Really? What is the intent of that? The intent of it is really that we want children to be educated. And there are some companies who have managed to say, fine, I will hire your child. Your child can work for a maximum of 2 hours, but they must go through four or 5 hours of education per day and the company pays for it. So it's more like in the curriculum as such. Again, if you just go poopy on compliance, it can be a narrow, short sighted view, and it doesn't serve the purpose of helping the community. If we look at ignoring stakeholder perspectives, companies may fail to engage with key stakeholders such as their employees, their suppliers, their customers, and their communities to understand their perspectives and their concerns related to social issues. So they just go with what the law says they have to do. The law says, okay, fine, we must like, I saw like there were some people wanted to say, let's say 10% of your company must be diverse. If you just look at that, 10% must be diverse. Some people interpret it to be of a different race, but that is fantastic if that reflects your environment where you operate of having that percentage. Because I teased one person, I was talking to a company and they were like, yeah, that's a good thing to do. But then one person in that group was actually from a company based in Africa. So I said to him, so are you getting 10% of people there of North African descent? And he looked at me like, of course not. I said, but if you want to make this a global thing, it has to be that way. So again, we see. This can lead to a lack of understanding of the social risk and the, I say, opportunities that a company faces and the potential impact on its reputation and financial performance. Like, I tell people, yes, I understand we want to get gender inclusivity, but will I hire someone just because they're female? No, if they have the qualifications and stuff. So, I mean, don't just tick the box, really implement it. Then we talk about insufficient data collection and analysis and oh my God, we don't have the data, and we make all these assumptions. Companies may lack the necessary data collection and analysis tools which exist out there, but you have to look through to see which ones apply to you, which one are built. I always remember when I first started doing business process reengineering straight out of university back in 1994, and that was the big buzzword. And at that point they said that you need to have 99.9% no errors. And I went to a client and the client was, okay, we want to make sure that we have 99.9% no errors. And I was like, you do 100 transactions a day. In other words, you can't have any go wrong. That is what it means. You can't use that as your measuring tool. So this can lead to incomplete understanding of social risk and opportunities, making it difficult to develop strategies they must be logical and able to implement. If you come up with metrics and try to implement them without data that matches what your company does, you literally excuse the word screwing yourself out of the systems. Right?
Stuart Webb [00:09:52]:
I have to ask about data thing because I had a client once who told me that they were bringing some machine learning and they were going to use some data in order to improve their process. And I said, okay, so from where are you gathering this data? And they said, well, we're not gathering it yet, we're going to start gathering it. And I went, okay, when are you going to implement the machine learning having gathered the data? And they told me they were implementing machine learning at the same time. And I went, but that doesn't work because you won't have the data to train the model. And they went, oh, don't worry, we're going to make data up. And I looked and I thought, I worry about the fact that companies actually.
Therese Baptiste [00:10:27]:
Do think these are the thing is my problem. I come from a background of It. My first degree was mathematics and computer science. I only went on to do business studies because I couldn't speak business speak and the business people couldn't speak tech speak. So now I call myself a perfect bridge. So I can understand when the techs are trying to throw wool over your eyes and also to when the business people are asking for things that are impossible given the circumstances. And the last thing and that comes, it failure to communicate effectively. Companies fail to effectively communicate their social responsibility, efforts and impact to stakeholders. And if you don't tell people what you're doing, don't expect them to know, okay? They lead to a lack of trust and confidence in the company's commitment. It's not blowing your own horn, but recognize that I'm doing good, let them know what you're doing. Bad news travels faster. You got to keep ahead by telling them what you're doing good. So those are the kind of things I teach to companies. Keep it out there because again, when I was doing my Masters, I did technology. Yeah, why not, right? Because it was easy to continue onwards. But I took marketing and strategy as the three subjects I were looking at, simply because marketing, getting that brand, that communication out there is all strategy with technology. So I consider myself, oh yeah, I got the blend and that is what needs to go there. So you have to manage the social risk. If you want to manage it without the help of an experienced ESG consultant, you're going to end up with a piecemeal approach that fails to effectively address your company's social impact. It's crucial you seek guidance and support from experienced ESG consultant, not those who have done an ESG course. There's too many courses out there and I see people, I look in this and they say they've done a course and they're ESG consultant. They haven't even lived life yet, right? Stewart they barely have. Like you said, you can still see the baby eyes and everything, but no, they're the consultants. I've gone to meetings with other ESG consultants and then when I'm speaking, they look at me like I was like, We've lived it. Stuart like I said, as I go further, you will realize this is not something new. It's just keep new terminologies that come out, new buzzwords that come out. It's crucial companies seek the guidance of an experienced person to ensure they're managing their risk and opportunities effectively to create that long term value.
Stuart Webb [00:13:00]:
Because for me, one of the signs of a good consultant is not that they've done 15 implementations, but they've done twelve, and three have gone badly wrong. And they won't make those mistakes again because they don't want to live through that pain ever again. And I often say to people, when they sort of say, well, why should I hire you? And I said, I've made all the mistakes so you won't have to. And that's the secret of being a good consultant, is to turn around and be honest and say, I've made enough mistakes that I now know what not to do. And I'll make sure you don't actually make those mistakes because I don't want to have to live through that experience ever again. You were talking then about some great ways of helping people to understand sort of some of these things. And I know you've got a really valuable free piece of advice, which I'm just going to show at the bottom of the screen. So can you talk to us about this valuable piece of free advice that.
Therese Baptiste [00:13:54]:
You'Ve sort of yeah, because you were asking me in our little talk before about what valuable resource people can go to because not everyone, I agree, can afford to hire an ESG consultant. Do I have to admit to Raspberries.com I'm not that expensive compared to the others from the so called firms who really inflate their cost? Okay. One valuable free resource I can recommend to people looking to manage is the Global Reporting Initiative Standards. The link is there for you that Stuart has given you. It provides for you a framework for companies to report on their sustainability performance. It provides guidance on how to report on a range of social issues because you have to report on your labor practices, on your human rights. Yeah, your human rights. What are you doing to the people in your company, people around people around the world? Diversity and inclusion, community engagement, customer privacy, GDPR and data security. Okay. Because those are things you look at. Even as far as passwords. I mean, just today I got a message from someone showing me according to how many words and characters in my password, how long it will take a hacker to hack. Okay? So now I have realized I need to develop a 14 word password. 14 words. I used to have eight or 914 words password with numbers lowercase and so on, and then it will take them some years. Other than that, it was five minutes, so I thought I was good. But apparently now the hackers are getting better. So by following the Gir standards, companies can ensure they're collecting and reporting on relevant data and information related to their social impact. Okay? Because remember, we have a lot of stuff about the climate and I could go on Stewart about green washing, but that's not my area. Just like this green washing, there's a lot of social washing pretending to care for people. Okay? The GI standards are a valuable free resource because they're publicly available and can be used by any company regardless of size or industry. Okay? It's widely recognized if you use it, companies can improve their understanding on their social impact and skills, develop strategies and programs. It can help them create long term value. But like I said, it's always best still to get. You don't have to get an ESG consultant like myself to manage the entire project, but it's normally helps when you start in guidelines or to check in on what your people are doing. Is it on your right path because you don't want to wait till 2025 when everyone's supposed to be ready to realize, I did it on my own and I did it wrong. Like when you baked that cake that you never followed in directions for, but you saw it in a book and you figured everything was there, which never is, and your cake doesn't come out the way it's supposed to and you only find out when you serve it to the guest. You don't want to do that.
Stuart Webb [00:16:48]:
Yeah, they'll help you make sure you never make those mistakes again because nobody wants to live through those sort of mistakes, do they, Teresa? No. There must have been a concept that you came across which really fired you up towards sort of this passion you've got for the social impact that your enterprise can have. What is it? What do you recommend that we read or get into in order to be able to understand and get into the passion that you've got for the subject?
Therese Baptiste [00:17:21]:
Well, then we are going back to one of my positions. I held, not tooting my own horn. I was my country's UN ambassador based in Geneva, and I was on the UNHCR committee. And that was when I was first exposed to the UN guiding principles on business and human rights. And I was like, literally, I was a business lecturer at university and I had not been exposed to how in depth this was. People have sat down and developed this. There are set of international standards that provide guidance to companies on how to respect human rights in their operations and supply chains. Okay. The Guiding Principles establish responsibility of companies to respect human rights, the need for companies to conduct due diligence to identify and address human rights. This sounds familiar, right? This is all what ESG and all these things are saying. This existed before the importance of providing access to effective remedies for human rights violations. I mean, I was so much into it when I was recently lecturing at a local university based in Belgium. We had students in final year, and one of the topics I had my students research was human rights. And at the beginning, they were like, human rights business. And then they saw the major impact and they saw the linkages. They had never seen that document. And it was so great to see these students dwell into it and develop research looking at technology and human rights. And for a senior ESG consultant focused on the S in ESG, I would say the UN Guiding Principles provides a comprehensive, globally recognized framework. It incorporates if you look at the ESG consultants, we help clients develop and impact human rights policies. Right. We see right now there's a lot of confusion with is EU policies for human rights for ESG really focused on the correct thing, or is it what looks good for the finances and people don't realize? The UN Guiding Principles has been implemented and is the key thing for responsible business conduct. It has been used by OECD in guidelines for their multinational enterprises. It has been used by IOL for their triparty. Declaration of Principles Concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy It has also been used ISO 26,000 for guidance and social responsibility. It has been a transformative concept in ESG. And that's why I go back to her to say in ESG, it's coming from there. Okay, so, yeah, I was a UN ambassador back in 2011, 2012. So it sounds over 1112 years ago, I've been in this sustainability thing. I even served as the vice president on the UN Forum of Sustainability Standards. I was like the only diplomat at that time because I was a diplomat. I had been a minister of health. Yeah. Another thing, a politician. I've been an academic, had been in business. So they wanted that kind of background to see because to give that Holistic approach. And it provides what we consider to be a framework for managing social risk and opportunities related helping establish global standards. Because as I said in the beginning, there's nothing out there ready. There's no agreed on global principles. We don't have someone like Bloomberg, who is the head of the Task Force for Climate Financial Disclosures pushing on the social impact. We need someone to take that mantle and push on it, someone high profile who people respect the social impact. Okay? And we see that what we call the UNGPs. The UN guiding principles has helped develop the S component.
Stuart Webb [00:21:01]:
Ask you the first question before I do, I'm just going to suggest I know there are a couple of people watching at the moment. I'm just going to ask, if people do have questions, please post them in the chat. And I can ask them. Theresa now, because she's got some really valuable experience and as you've heard, she has a sort of background of taking a lot of input from politics to social impact and working with the UN. And some of that might give you what might give you problems. I know that I wouldn't want to do half of those things, but it might provide a lot of opportunities for people to say so if there are questions. But whilst we're just doing that, I'm just going to pose the final question that I've got for you, Teresa.
Therese Baptiste [00:21:50]:
It's an easy one. It's going to be an easy one.
Stuart Webb [00:21:55]:
I always use this question in order to sort of not have to do too much work. So it's quite honest. I have been asking you some questions, you've been having to answer them, but there must be a question which I haven't answered, which you would like me to answer. So what would you like me to have said? What question would you like me to have asked you, which I haven't yet? And obviously you have to answer it.
Therese Baptiste [00:22:19]:
Thank you. I would say you should have asked, what are the key areas for a company to examine who's looking to consistently meet the requirements and expectations of their stakeholders? Now, I'm going to answer that. I have two questions, actually, but that's my first one. I would think they would have to look at people. Yeah, why not? We must. People can't do math, people purpose, community and supply chain. Those are the four key areas, I would say people, because the pandemic something like don't Ranch on the pandemic again, Ms Matisse, the pandemic has changed the way we work. And with more working from home, it has shone the light on people's. Wellbeing, it really has. Therefore, companies will need to communicate clearly what staff support is going to be available. And there's also a job to close the gap between those at the top of the workforce and the millennials. The millennials are willing to grasp, want to work in at home. We still have some of the older people that believe, if I don't see you, you're not working. And again, I was never that way. I mean, even when I worked at a bank, I always told people I worked at the bank and I had younger I shouldn't say younger, older people underneath me. Right. But they consider themselves younger. But my logic was I didn't check what time they came in or what time they left. I gave them an assignment. They could come in one day every week, but if that assignment was finished, good, because I don't believe in watching every hour, because some people work very good quickly and then need a time off, right? And the FRC Reporting Lab has released what they call useful guidelines on workforce reporting including the importance of workforce engagement. Okay? And engagement doesn't mean because they're working from home, having nonstop meetings online. That's not it. If we look again at purpose, I think it's businesses need to create value, okay? Don't assume you're creating value and address these issues. Investors, because ESG came about primarily to make people invest in your companies. Okay? Everybody knows it's money. Everything is not going to be done unless there's money to be seen in it. And investors want to see companies believe in something and more than ever link the purpose and trust is dominant. It's a key requirement and I think it's also in your UK corporate governance code, key to building trust. It is essential for companies to think about demonstrating how their purpose drives what they do and the impact they have. The third thing I said was community businesses should be able to demonstrate how they tend to support or add value. So you need to look at that and supply chain, consider your ecosystem. And again, I remind, I mean, most people here wouldn't know, but there are some people who think that ecosystem talks only about trees and the forest. Ecosystem is the area of the businesses operating. And we say of your business, who you are to be an employee versus a contractor. Who do you want as your employee? Which ones can you say? Okay, I don't need this person as an employee, I need them as freelance. I give them opportunities to have other projects because that is sometimes why in your supply chain you have to look at do I need someone nonstop or do I need someone for projects? Because there are people willing to a lot of people are realizing the value of being a freelancer, okay? It's given them that control over their lives. They all have an impact on your brand and reputation because again, if you take someone just as a contractor as opposed to an employee, you don't again have full control and again what they do can impact on you and we talk about all those issues. And your business only operates well if all parts are healthy. Okay? So that comes back to my Minister of Health part. Everything needs to be healthy working together. Nothing can be a silo on its own. Okay? And a question that would have opened up more. My 6th thing is what do I see as the biggest challenge for companies to effectively integrate ESG considerations and how can they overcome this?
Stuart Webb [00:26:33]:
Well, I've asked you that but I didn't want you to feel under any pressure, honestly.
Therese Baptiste [00:26:38]:
I know because again, when I thought about it, I said if I answer this, that might reduce the need for them to hire terrestrial.com, right? Should I put that question? Because then it will have all the ESG consultants about how we support companies in this process. But I'm going to be honest and I'll just give you the four things. The several practical challenges that companies face is lack of clarity and consensus on their ESG priorities. There's a lack of clarity and consensus. There is difficulty in measuring and reporting on ESG performance and again that is where I do advise you to bring in someone who can make that so much simpler for you. I always tell people stick to what you're good at okay? Too many people are just taking ESG reporting and saying hey that's your job and throwing people into the wind and then wondering why it's taking so long, why it's not getting done. Okay? Limited resources and capacity if you have limited resources and capacity in your company recognize that. Put those limited resources and capacity where it makes money for your company and hire another resource to deal with it. And I go back to for instance when I lived in Trinidad and my husband and I had our company called Cornells and Associates. I used to really find it. It was strategic but it was funny. At the same time we were being hired by a leading accounting company to run their website. We were being hired by them to develop a strategic plan for them. Meanwhile they were hiring their consultants out to people to develop website. And I said to the managing partner I said you know something you not hire me because I'm that better than your employees but you can get more money from sending them out than I would charge you. And he says you know and I said yeah because I work for you I know what rate you charge thing but I don't charge that to you. So they can get me for 50% of what they would charge. So they make a lot more money off of it. But then they know that is it limited resources. They need something done. They want an outside perspective someone with a clean with no bias in it. And that is a problem if you take too many internal people to do that reporting they may have an internal bias, they may have it and they don't see anything wrong with the way it is operating now. So it can easily fix the report to say all is okay but then when the audit comes you're going to be in problems when the audit comes because what is reported is not true. And again be careful of the internal silos and your resistance to change. As people we don't like change.
Stuart Webb [00:29:29]:
Owners directors who spend a lot of their time doing things actually they ought to get other people to do partly because it's more effective and they pull a bigger growth lever by getting on and doing something which produces better results. But also because their internal bias means that they make decisions based upon what their gut tells them and their gut is often. Very wrong. It doesn't involve the right data. They haven't collected the data. So they go on what they think is the right thing. And I see a lot of decisions being taken by people who don't have the data but have decided to. As I sort of said before, they guessed what they think it will be, and they end up making a lot of mistakes, largely because they haven't brought somebody in from the outside who's able to take a fresh view. And just look at it and go. But it's obvious because I can see things here that you can't see because you're inside looking out. And I've come in from the outside so often. We do need to have that perspective of somebody who can just take a fresh view. Theresa, I just want to ask one question. We've had one question from Mark Thomas. I think it's a really interesting one that I would love you to just give. And perhaps you need to link with Mark Thomas outside of this, but can you just give him two minutes? And I don't want to take up too much more of your valuable time, because I know you have actually got a lot of things you want to try and do today, but what advice do you have for a graduate who wants to get into this field? And I think encouraging young people into this field is absolutely critical to the future.
Therese Baptiste [00:30:56]:
Yeah. And the thing is, one of these main things is if you're going into the field of ESG consulting, then you really have an interest in sustainability. Okay? It's not just finance, it's sustainability. The UN has a lot of sustainability courses to give you that background, the connections of it, not just the financial part, depending on your angle, which one is more for you? Are you one for environment? Are you one for social impact? Or you want for governance? Because the problem is when people try to say, I'm an ESG consultant of all, okay, because that is where it's problematic. So I would say Mark Thomas, because if you go out and you have to help them conduct materiality assessments, okay, you have to help them set clear targets and metrics. You have to help them do data analytics. So if you will, I see you see background in financial computing will understand I wouldn't see you doing more the social impact, but you can analyze it and do the comparison, but I definitely see you more in looking at the E and the G would be for somebody in finance. So, again, understanding sustainability and what it means, it doesn't just mean, okay, I don't use disposable, I don't do this. It's really understanding how these things interact, realizing that there is no perfect utopia that we want to create. If we create this perfect utopia, we are creating it for a few people because you can't get rid of everybody goes electric cars and stuff like that. So you're going in there with an understanding that you can't fix their problems, but you can help them understand their problems. And that is what a graduate needs to do. Okay, brilliant.
Stuart Webb [00:32:48]:
Theresa, you broke up a little bit on that question, but I think we absolutely got the spirit of it. And if people want to sort of get a message to you afterwards, I'd encourage you to please post them into this post on LinkedIn YouTube. We will get them to Theresa. She's just fond of knowledge and so much enthusiasm. Theresa, I want to thank you so much for this time you've spent with us. It's been brilliant. I really, really have enjoyed it. I hope everybody watching has enjoyed it. I'm just going to leave you with the one final link on this, which is if you want to get onto the newsletter list so that you get notification of this thing coming up. Coming up in the next few weeks. I would encourage you to just go onto this link, which is link thecompletroach Co UK newsletter that's link thecompleetproach Co UK newsletter that will get you onto our newsletter list. We send out a newsletter which basically says who's coming onto the podcast so you can join our questions, get them answered by people like theres Mark Thomas. I hope that's been useful to you. When you get advice from somebody as knowledgeable and ingrained in this and is so much of an expert, you can't get better advice. Theresa, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us. Really appreciate it. My pleasure, everybody. I just really appreciate the amount of time that we've had Therese on today. I hope you have, too. Thank you.
Therese Baptiste [00:34:17]:
Thank you.
Stuart Webb [00:34:19]:
And we'll just make sure everything works on the podcast before it all goes horribly wrong on me.
Share this post