[Ed. Note: This blog was written by Andrea Viera, Senior Sustainability Analyst at hospitality investment and management firm Highgate. Her perspective is that of someone new to the sustainability profession.]
In my first week as a sustainability professional, I uncovered a product boasting a “green feel,” which pulled back the curtain on a world of misleading claims – “landfill degradable” plastics, fuzzy eco-labels, and hollow carbon neutrality. I knew my mission: to shield our practices from greenwashing by making our claims transparent, valid, litigation-proof, and genuinely sustainable, while future-proofing the organization against emerging risks.
This need for transparency highlighted a broader challenge: sustainability often lacks the clear structures found in other fields. There is a stark contrast between fields like Finance and Legal – built on rigorous data frameworks, well-defined processes, and standard operating procedures – and sustainability, which often operates with ambiguity. For example, sustainability metrics can vary significantly depending on the standards or guidelines chosen, making it challenging to establish consistent reporting or benchmarks. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts, where reporting regulations are still being developed, and you get to create processes that work best for your team. You decide how data should be collected, displayed, and acted upon, with the only playbook being prior experience.
Many claim sustainability starts with building a reliable data stack – collecting cleaner data, analyzing it with custom algorithms, and visualizing it through Power BI or other accessible tools to drive company-wide decisions. But tackling the ambiguity requires more than data; it demands people – collaborators who believe in the mission. How do you build a team when there’s no dedicated funding? You (1) lean on tech where possible and (2) recruit others to join the cause.
I had a good handle on the data side, but how do you get people to rally behind you? I posed this question to my mentor. He shared a concept from his long career in hospitality – building an “emotional bank account,” a term from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s all about building trust by making deposits – small actions that show kindness, respect, and reliability – much like growing your savings over time. If you want someone to give you their time, they need to feel there’s something in it for them.
Just like guests at a hotel make an initial deposit of trust by choosing you, relationships with colleagues require a first deposit too – but the nature of this deposit differs. In a corporate setting, it might mean demonstrating reliability in your work, providing support during challenging projects, or simply showing genuine interest in a colleague’s perspective. Are you grabbing them a snack? Inviting them out to lunch? Sending them a holiday card? As a data analyst, I didn’t expect to spend so much time socializing. But I’ve learned that building these “emotional bank accounts” is essential – it’s what allows us to communicate the value of our work and move sustainability forward.
The idea of the emotional bank account isn’t unique to hospitality; it’s a concept newer corporate departments embrace as well, like Business Intelligence and DEI. In tech, the socialization of new ideas often determines whether a project gets off the ground—engineers and product managers need to buy in, and that buy-in is often won through personal connections and shared excitement. In DEI, creating cultural shifts requires building trust and educating on the value of these initiatives through hard data and facts. For example, initiatives like unconscious bias training or mentorship programs have successfully used data to demonstrate improvements in workplace inclusivity and employee satisfaction.
Whether it’s in sustainability, tech, or HR, the lesson is clear: socialization isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s critical. Building emotional bank accounts helps others see the value of what we do, especially in a field as new and evolving as sustainability. These deposits pay off – they’re the first step in realizing the immense value our teams provide.
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