Sustainability, growth and getting buy-in to important initiatives

Before taking the leap into co-founding an investment and advisory business, I worked at Stockland, one of the largest diversified real estate groups in Australia. During this time I had the great privilege of working alongside some incredible leaders; one of the standouts for me was Amanda Steele. These days, Amanda is the Executive Managing Director of CBRE Asia Pacific, the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm. During our time working together at Stockland, Amanda was the National Sustainability Manager.

Before sustainability was cool

Today ‘sustainability’ is getting a lot of well-deserved attention, but it was just as important a decade ago when it wasn’t quite so cool. One thing I know is Amanda has always been a stout believer in its importance. In fact, she did a lot of things before they were mainstream and these innovations are part of the great success she’s found today.

Ten years ago, making projects environmentally-friendly was an afterthought, something you did if it suited you and didn’t hurt the bottom line. To make any headway at all required Amanda to be original, a different voice to pitch these topics in which no one seemed interested. The way she went about that is fascinating and can be applied to many business situations. I recently sat down with her for a chat to learn more.

Getting buy-in to important initiatives

The first thing I wanted to know was how she took steps forward in what could be a pretty hostile environment. While there were people at the time who wanted to see sustainability succeed, there were also plenty who thought it was a complete waste of time and simply a distraction from any actual money-making. Pushing sustainability was hard graft, and Amanda made progress in very small chunks; one person, one project at a time.

The first step may seem obvious when you know it, but it wasn’t something most people had tried before in Amanda’s unique way. For her, the key to making progress was to learn what really drives people and shape the conversation around it. If you’re talking to the money man, describe how making the project sustainable will save them money. Talking to the head of risk and compliance? Point out how these initiatives are going to reduce risk.

Amanda recognised upfront that it was important to be flexible with how she presented anything. There was no one true message. By tailoring the message to the person’s wants and desires, it makes it easier for them to give you that yes. It’s the classic “What’s In It For Me?” approach…. expertly executed!

Celebrate and amplify the small wins

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither did including environmentally-friendly business practices become mainstream overnight. Instead, Amanda had a keen eye for the small win. She knew that success needed to be found early to keep the interest of those who had been reluctantly drawn into the conversation - she’d promote the hell out of any small win available. Her biggest tip here? Don’t make it about yourself.

Instead, give the win to those who gave you the yes.

The success is everyone but hers. When the CFO felt that he owned a solar installation, even though he fought against it every step of the way, that was enough for her and she was going to amplify it massively, making sure those she needed on board got all the credit.

The power of a great team makes a huge difference

Amanda didn’t achieve it all on her own. In fact, her next best tip is to create a great team around you. In order to even start the conversation, you need people who can translate sustainability into finance, into business, or any topic that you need.

Amanda is clear - a big part of her success is the fantastic team she inherited and built. As she points out, great leadership is getting smarter people than you to join the effort. Sustainability can be incredibly complex and you need your message to be strong enough to attract the right people. Oftentimes the language is just as complex and can be hard for laypeople to understand. That was another area in which Amanda triumphed. She revealed the real secret to her success: leveraging the team so that the message was absolutely clear and easily understood by anyone.

Don’t forget the power of storytelling

We all love a story and getting people on board for whatever business challenge you’re facing is no different. Stories are what get us all interested. Amanda’s background in finance was great training for how to get clarity of message. You can’t just yell metrics or science at people. That’s a quick way to turn them off. Instead, give them a reason why they want to get on board with whatever you’re pushing. No one ever wants to do the right thing simply because they’re told it’s the right thing to do. Instead, they need a narrative.

Give your audience something they can go home and tell people about or share with their colleagues. Just like the wins, it’s important that they can own the story. Amanda’s tip here? Find a way to translate complicated problems into simple solutions while still keeping your team motivated.

Making the complex simple to understand and embrace

My background is in engineering. We love complicated problems, and sustainability is no different, but complicated problems lead to long-term focus and even more complicated business structures and planning. Most audiences, understandably, just can’t be bothered with all that effort.

Amanda worked hard on taking everything back to simplicity. What are we doing and why are we doing it? She and her team would work on that over and over again until they discovered the golden nugget of what they were really trying to deliver. Just as before, she made sure the message met the audience.

All these efforts taught Amanda great resilience. Being told “no” over and over, and having to keep fighting anyway, built her flexibility and helped her learn how to deliver the message to any audience. For Amanda, it wasn’t about winning an argument but instead, helping the audience to understand. Sometimes, she’d come up against resistance simply because she was a woman. For that, she recognised the importance of having multiple voices in the room. When you’re looking to change minds, you’ll need multiple voices. It can’t just be you yabbering away constant. It’s the same for any leadership. It’s not about winning but getting through with a narrative that they’ll care about.

To repeat myself, give them the win.

Scaling up for greater impact

Amanda didn’t want to work in sustainability forever, and her next step was the source of her next lesson. She went from direct reporting of five people to managing a team of over five hundred people when she took the leap to property management. Here, all the same lessons were crucial. At times, she was the only woman on the executive panel. In fact, the whole industry is very male-dominated. Here, too, Amanda leveraged her team and has a brilliant right-hand man in operations who works beside her in many situations. They work fabulously together because she loves to talk creativity and innovation and he brings it back to the pragmatics.

Once again, her success came from knowing which voice to have in the room at which time. In four years, Amanda and her team have doubled the profitability of that business and she’s now managing a team of nearly seven hundred.

That’s a massive achievement, and it all came back to the same lesson. Be clear on who your audience is and deliver the message for their benefit. Suddenly, Amanda had to scale from having a handful of people reporting to her to hundreds. She couldn’t physically visit hundreds of people a day and newsletters aren’t read by everyone. So, what did she do? Diversify.

In the beginning, she used every channel of communication she could think of. Meeting after meeting, then town halls so everyone knew what she looked and sounded like. Following those, newsletters, broadcasts, and more, until she’d repeated the message so often, she sounded incredibly boring to herself. She also leveraged her team, using them as foot soldiers to get the message out. Unlike most executives, Amanda prides herself on how little email lives in her inbox. Working out who you can delegate to and who can help you shoulder the load is an important first lesson. Without help, management becomes impossible.

Remain true to who you are in the process

Throughout everything, Amanda has strived to maintain an open and natural style of communication. She was once told to 'own' being an executive, but it never resonated with her. Instead, she decided to be genuine, to go back to that old chestnut and told stories about people who were important to her and related everything back to her own experiences.

Do you know what? It worked!