Global Head of Responsible Business
After starting out as a mechanical building services engineer I decided to go travelling for a year. I had grand plans to travel around the Americas but after only making it as far as Peru I got involved in building wind turbines and set up a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which I ran for three years. I taught volunteers from all over the world and, once built, the turbines were transported to remote communities in the Andes where they would serve schools and community centres that didn’t have electricity.
I joined Mace in January 2014 as a sustainability manager, before then becoming operations director. I'm now Global Head of Responsible Business. Half of my time is spent with clients, supporting them to achieve their global corporate sustainability ambitions, and the other half is spent helping Mace to develop as a responsible business, which includes developing workplaces that enhance our wellbeing or creating opportunities for social enterprises.
It’s the variety that has kept me here this long. I can’t ever answer the question ‘what is a typical day like’. I could be bid writing, creating a campaign, advising a client in North America, visiting a construction site in London, reporting, number crunching, developing concepts into designs, or researching and trialling new tech.
It has to be the launch of our ‘Knowledge Hub’. Because sustainability touches so many parts of Mace we felt that we were in a good place to create a platform to share knowledge - sharing expertise with ourselves and learning from it when something goes wrong. It isn’t just about sustainability initiatives, the Knowledge Hub is helping the whole business to learn from our mistakes and replicate our successes so we can deliver better outcomes for our clients.
Show passion, interest and commitment. To succeed in sustainability you need to have a mindset that you can, and will, make change happen, on any scale. At Mace, we like people that think differently and we want to see people demonstrating a commitment in their own life - that counts for a lot.
Making a difference. I’m not sure what that will look like but it will definitely have purpose.
I like landscape photography – it was the first reason I went travelling.