Susan Hunt Stevens on Leading Sustainably Podcast – Women in Leadership

Susan Hunt Stevens - Leading Sustainably

Susan Hunt Stevens is CEO of WeSpire a technology company that runs employee engagement campaigns using proven behavioural science techniques. Younger employees in particular she says are purpose driven and think about the ethics and integrity of the organisations they work for.



Environment Social and good Governance principles ESG not only matter to individual employees but also to organisations and to investors. Good management she says are also discovering that there are business opportunities in thinking sustainably and  considering the environment when it comes to business decisions.



"The ability to build new products to innovate, to think differently about how you do things in order to generate greater growth and greater profits happens when people started looking at environmental factors and sustainability factors. "There's the risk lens, then the next lens was a cost savings lens, and organisations are thinking wow, if I can figure out how to reduce packaging, or I can figure out how to do this with less energy, or if I can figure I can save money. Companies have saved billions of dollars through a through an environmental strategy."

Tired of Old Tyres

Some of the clients WeSpire work with are building entire new businesses when they put ESG into action and they start looking through an ESG lens at what's going on in their workforce and in their business and in their supply chain. "So an example is we had a company that when they were trying to hit a zero waste goal, recognise that a huge part of their waste stream were old tyres, and  it's because they had a big automotive component to their business. And there just wasn't the infrastructure to recycle tyres. So if they're trying to hit a zero waste goal, and there's no infrastructure to recycle tyres, how do you hit that goal? Well, what they decided was that there was an opportunity to start a business that not only helped them recycled tyres, but helped everybody in the regions in which they operated recycled tyres, and that's now a business that's growing exponentially because they became the only business that enabled large companies to recycle large quantities of tyres."



Susan Hunt Stevens says leadership is not taught sufficiently in business schools. Her advice to younger people on learning to lead is to focus on good role models. "And if those people that are above and around you aren't very good, you're not going to be very good. And so one of my pieces of advice I always give young people is focus less on what you want to do and focus more on who you want to learn from."

The Covid Effect on WFH Not Good For Women Generally

Where their WeSpire platform came into its own was in the early days of the Covid pandemic when there was a shift to working from home. "As people have come back into the workplace, and staff realised that not only was the work from home a One Time Crisis thing, but actually more effective than many expected, that employees wanted to have a hybrid work environment and that this might be permanent and a permanent dramatic shift, companies began saying, wow, we really need better tools to do this."  They saw that companies they had always worked with generally forward looking companies who were kind of ahead of the curve and better able to adjust to working from home. "We saw a lot more mainstream companies recognising and moving faster. The analysts in our space, estimate that it probably took two years off the adoption curve."



Contrary to a common belief Susan Hunt Stevens says COVID has not been good for women. "It just hasn't. We've seen, at least here in the US, millions of women drop out of the workforce, because what they were being asked to do with schooling from home and all the safety issues around COVID. You know, getting vaccinated and lining up and you know, all those kinds of things.