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 TRANSCRIPTAdam: (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...