Ep. 158: Dawn Emling and Tjeerd Krumpelman with Shari Littan - Management Perspective on Sustainable Business Information and Reporting

Contact Dawn Emling: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawn-emling-a04b361a/
Contact Tjeerd Krumpleman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjeerdkrumpelman/
Contact Shari Littan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shari-littan-58bb40114/

IMA's Statement of Position on Sustainable Business Information and Management: https://www.imanet.org/insights-and-trends

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:04)
Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host, Adam Larson, and I'm here to introduce you to our panel of speakers who joined our podcast to talk about sustainable business and sustainable business information. Shari Littan, IMA's Director of Corporate Reporting Research and Thought Leadership moderated the discussion between Dawn Emling and Tjeerd Krumpelman. Dawn is the head of sustainability initiatives for Lincoln Financial Group. And Tjeerd is the global head of advisory reporting and engagement as well as group sustainability at ABN AMRO Bank N.V. Together, the three of them discuss the purpose and value of sustainable business activities, the impact of reporting and how to overcome potential challenges relating to technology and streamlining processes relating to sustainable business. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now.

Shari: (01:05)
So many of the professionals who now find themselves working in the area of sustainable business came from other backgrounds, other disciplines. The younger professionals, yes, they are finding a way to this area directly from their education. And they can go directly into sustainable business or corporate responsibility teams or whatever companies are calling it. But for the rest of us, we all came from somewhere else because the field is essentially emerging and new. So I'm gonna ask Dawn and than Tjeerd to let us know, where did you come from before you got involved in sustainability? What's your basic background?

Dawn: (01:51)
Yeah. Thanks Sherry. I agree with you that most people now are coming from different disciplines. I actually started out in the U.S. government and state department doing human rights work, that also included, a number of, kind of nonprofit roles. And then I was an early practitioner with Credit Suisse, in Asia and then EMIA on sustainability, the first sustainability kind of head for each of those regions so setting that up and then fast forward, I worked at Thompson Reuters on sustainability of global sustainability. And then eventually now I am with Lincoln Financial heading up their, sustainability initiatives. So yeah, kind of a long and windy road here.

Tjeerd: (02:40)
Yeah. And for, for me, it's been, it's been a little less windy, because I have always worked in banking. But I worked in the private bank first with clients and then in our investment bank and our retail bank, but always with clients and always on the more commercial side of the bank. And in my recollection, I think sustainability in some sort of, some form has always been part of our conversations with clients, but, but it was like eight years ago when I moved into the group sustainability or group strategy and sustainability team, for the first time that it became, let's say a regular job. And back in that day, or in that time, it wasn't considered a promotion, right. It wasn't considered to be very fancy to move from the commercial side of the bank in a managerial role to a, let's say a cost center like sustainability. So it has evolved a over the years, to becoming quite a popular destination, for people to work, nice place to work with lots of applicants whenever we have a role available. That's interesting to see, but yeah, I came from the commercial side of the bank.

Shari: (03:53)
So that's quite a bit of difference: diversity in both of your backgrounds and how you both come and arrive in almost similar roles. So I think that says a lot about the type of work and the almost entrepreneurial mindset of many of the people that you've found or have found in the sustainable business arena. Now, one thing that we are hearing over and over again is that much of the work behind the company inside the company, let me say, internally is crossdisciplinary - that there are people coming from different parts of an organization to work together on sustainable business matters. However, when the finance and accounting function get involved and they bring their skillset, it creates set of capabilities and skills to the work that's going on. And it's incredibly valuable. So if I can hear from both of you, what your experiences are in engaging the-- we'll call them management accountants or accounting and finance function members.

Tjeerd: (05:10)
Happy to start to kick this one off. I mean, we need everybody in the sustainability space, right? So we need, so I'm in banking and we need everybody across the bank in all different types to step up from their own skillset. So to embed sustainability into their day to day role. So, facility management takes responsibility for the sustainability of our buildings, right? So, and of the workplace, HR needs to think of travel policies, Risk needs to think of sustainability, embedding into risk policies. And where does controlling and accounting, come into place in measuring, in reporting in disclosing all sustainability. That's where we need the talent and the skill sets of financial professionals and accountants and management accountants. And I think they are relatively late to the party, but they are most welcome. And we need them there in the reporting space, in the disclosure space, in, getting the right quality of data, getting this into the dashboarding, into the steering of companies. That's where we need management accounting. But actually I think we need everybody so I can think of, I can think of a role for IT. I can think of a role for HR, for risk finance, strategy people. We need all of them. And in that sense, we definitely need management accountants as well.

Dawn: (06:37)
I would a hundred percent underscore that this is an enterprise-wide effort. We group our kind of work into 16 or 17 business lines and the E, the S, and the G cross, many of them across all of them. I would also just add that we've seen, this is a very evolving landscape. So in the last six to 12 months, for example, we are now focusing on, or we're being, you know, asked to focus on, or we're being pressured to focus on kind of new areas that we didn't six to 12 months ago. And I'll bring out, you know, human capital development, human capital management. During COVID, it was kind of a brand new issue for us to look at under the ESG umbrella or rubric. There's been a lot of focus on strategy in the last 12 to 18 months with TCFD pushing on strategy and governance. So because it's such an evolving space, you really do need senior management across the business units, and that helps you with, in my opinion, it helps you getting acceptance, across the enterprise. If senior management in every line of business is pushing this, then you, you can get enterprise-wide acceptance. You can stay ahead of the evolution because you can say, "Hey, Human Resources, I'm coming to you about this human capital management issue that we're saying, oh, yeah, we've heard about this". And then you keep the momentum going. So I completely agree that all business lines are necessary and we don't...