Alan Stern, the leader of 8 space missions, once said: ‘To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyse who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.’ I really wanted to become a change maker one day but was lost in terms of working on the ‘how’ to achieve this ambition. The opportunity presented itself in the summer of 2022, as I interned at a unique stakeholder engagement consultancy called Shared Planet. The consultancy aims to spend 50% of its time on pro-bono projects for NGOs and has hard rules for working only with organisations that share their values. I identified with the obsession with social and environmental values: I was also determined never to give up and set on this mission to discover how I, one among 8 billion, could spark the light and spread the flame until each person’s hearts flamed with desire for eternal justice.
What did I do on a day-to-day basis? My work for the day mostly was a mystery until that day’s work alignment meeting. It was usually a blend of working on decks for corporations and doing research for social impact projects. One day, I could be parsing through EU regulations on fertilisers and hydrogen to help an EU fertiliser giant in their decarbonisation journey. On another, I could be scrolling through the agenda of the International Whaling Commission helping the manager @ Shared Planet and a delegate in the conference prepare some ideas to contribute to the debate.
The journey to the summit was rough and testing but I made it! I am known to have a very dense, formal, and ornate writing style that is hard to see through, which works well in academic papers but betrayed me in producing articles for Shared Planet. I overcame this by going through multiple rounds of feedback and edits. When writing about insights to stir social change in companies, I constantly asked ‘So what?’ to ensure that my articles offered implementable recommendations, a bit like to-do lists. The other challenge was being given a blank slide deck and a problem to tackle with endless ways in which it could be taken. I learned how to ‘think like a consultant’ and prioritise the most important analyses for the client. This was indeed a skill for life, where one writes history with one’s own ingenuity.
As an ongoing project, I compiled a slide deck on ‘Corporate Purpose and ESG’ where I developed a corporate purpose framework for Shared Planet, evaluated different ESG accounting frameworks, and finally performed market research on ESG consultancies. The aim was to develop a structured approach to help businesses to develop genuine, meaningful, and sustainable corporate purpose strategies as well as ESG policies that prepare them for long-term financial success. Having presented this work to Stephanie, the Managing Director, and the rest of the team, my work was embraced with great enthusiasm and it culminated into a thought leadership article for Shared Planet. I did not know then that my passion for corporate strategy, social impact, and consulting was to develop into a career ambition in purposeful consulting.
Going back to the quotation at the start, leadership is about providing the world with an inspirational vision for ‘Good’ and ‘Just’, articulating it with passion, and most importantly mobilising people through persuasion and modifying your vision into a superior and more complete form until it becomes the uniting force. I managed to convince Shared Planet to adopt my corporate purpose framework providing both the consultancy, its clients, and external stakeholders with their visions to hold onto and make their daily ‘toil’ meaningful. Successful leadership is usually attributed to ONE person but it is the outcome of a harmonious MULTITUDE’s work.
I want to end this blog post by thanking Stephanie and Maz for recruiting me to the internship and Lacee and Arielle for being dedicated mentors throughout my weeks at Shared Planet. I really wish that one day the world will be all species' shared planet and that our shared wisdom shall realise this before too late.
Please sign in
If you are a registered user on Laidlaw Scholars Network, please sign in