Shownotes:

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the podcast are Sakshi Bansal’s personal views and do not represent or reflect the views of Arup Ltd.

Excited to share the latest episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast featuring Sakshi Bansal FRSA ChMC! 🎙️ Sakshi, a recipient of The Diana Award, the world’s first UNESCO Kindness leader and Founder of Project LEAP, dives deep into the 'S' in ESG.

In our conversation, we explore:

👉🏾 Psychology's link to sustainability

👉🏾 Social equity, triple bottom line, and social license to operate

👉🏾 Challenges in reporting the 'S' factor and current industry trends

👉🏾 Global sustainability dialogue dynamics and diversity concerns

👉🏾 Millennials' & Gen Z's perceptions of Purpose-driven organizations

👉🏾 The importance of continuous learning in navigating evolving standards

Tune in for insightful discussions on sustainability and ESG with @SakshiBansal

Link to the podcast in the comments below. 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

hashtag#ESG hashtag#Sustainability hashtag#PodcastDiscussion

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Sakshi. Wonderful to have you as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Sakshi: Hi, thank you so much. It's so nice to be here.

Sudha: To start with, give us a quick introduction and tell us a bit about yourself, maybe your childhood, education.

Sakshi: Gosh a bit about myself. So, I am a psychologist by education, both a bachelor's and master's degree, but I'm also a management and strategy consultant now. And if I look back on my career, because it's so well integrated into who am I it's what I call a roller-coaster career or a squiggly career. It started in a tech startup. I was studying in Delhi I wanted to be a professional salsa dancer, And I came across these guys and they were doing something really cool at university, building an AI platform for billing and telling software and digital menus of the hospitality industry.

And I said, ah, I'll join you. And started working in a startup as one of those co-founders specifically focused on bringing in clients. So we were a bunch of 16, 17, 18 year olds with a team of 20 people bringing in clients and selling our hardware and software products all over Delhi on a tech platform that I knew nothing about. So that was my first real education, I think, into the world of entrepreneurship is learning how to not run a business, how to be a leader, how to talk to investors. And I think very early on, I got an insight into that world. And I think that sparked the sort of entrepreneurial interest in myself, and then I later went on to start a charity. So later means two years later, when we sold the startup to Amazon, went on to start a charity which is called Project Leap, and we were providing free education to underprivileged families in New Delhi. And that really came out of a very personal experience I had visiting some of these areas in New Delhi.

And I saw that while people want to help, they just don't know how to help And so we started Project Leap for the last 10, 12 years of my life, I've been running Project Leap. We've expanded to different parts of the world, to Nepal, Sri Lanka, pan Africa. Then I came to the UK, did leadership development here, capacity building, team building for three years and then started doing sustainability and ESG and investments.

It's just been a roller coaster of various different things, but I've had a real privilege of working in various different organisations such as the UN as a youth activist, talking about, youth employment even in New York, all the way to Australia doing change management. And now, in India in aviation so it's really just a mixed background.

But I grew up with a very simple idea. I want to be a dancer, and I want to travel the world.

Sudha: And now today, of course, you are dialling in from the UK, you are in the UK, like me not based in India at this point in time.

Sakshi: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's really important to be mindful of the personal, experiences you've had and how they shape you as a person. And not a lot of people have time for that kind of reflection, but I've always. And maybe that's where the psychology background comes into play, right? You make time for reflection, and you think about how things have shaped you and it helps you take the next step as well.

Sudha: So, you wouldn't assume that after degree and master’s in psychology, you'd end up doing sustainability and ESG. what's connect? How did you find that route?

Sakshi: I think it's a very good question, because honestly, I was in my first company after my master's degree doing a very psychology focused role. So doing leadership development, team building and all that. And when COVID hit and I was in parallel running my charity as well, we started taking the charity work international and remote.

I was so well versed with the grassroots challenges in India that this time I had to re-educate myself on what's happening in Africa and what's happening in New Zealand. And I had a reintroduction to SDGs as well, which is sustainable development goals. And so, this understanding about sustainability and what that means and how do we redefine it for education, which was my charity's goal, became really important.

And I think at the same time, I was growing discontent with what I was doing in my job. Not because it wasn't good, but just because it wasn't good enough. There was so much else I could do, and I think that's when the entrepreneurial spirit sort of came back to hit me. And I said, I'm working for a big company, it was Willis Towers Watson. It's a massive US based conglomerate. So, they don't just do what I'm doing, they do 20 other things. So just started ringing people up from the organisation and started asking the question. What is your role? What do you do?

What do you care about? And these are really senior people. And around that time, ESG was a word that was quite thrown around quite a lot. So some of the senior directors in my company were trying to understand what ESG means for them and for the business. And what do we take to market? And what do we say to clients?

And I offered help, I was so young, and I said, when you go and speak to clients, can I come, I can help facilitate some of these conversations. I'm good at that. And we went to Spain, we went to France, we went to, various different clients with my company.

And we just asked the question, what does ESG mean? What does it mean for your business? What can we do for you? And then we came back and synthesized all of that data to try and make a go to market offering for Willis Towers Watson. And that was my role; to go and listen and suddenly I was working with a whole different team in the company with very senior leaders. And it was my first experience of making a global strategy for a very targeted thing that I knew nothing about. But actually, I probably had done it before with the tech startup as well. So that was really interesting. And I realized that coming from a psychology background is such an advantage because I really understand some of the things around social, so ESG is Environment, Social and Governance, right?

And the social pillar and the governance pillar were really intrinsic to me.<...

122: Spotlighting the 'S' in ESG: A conversation with Sakshi Bansal, Unesco Kindness Leader, Diana Award Recipient

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