Pension Funds Green Agendas Continue — You Prepared?
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Are you on top of your institutional investors’ green agenda?
Today’s post focuses on a “state of SRI” article sent over by Green Journey reader and blogger, Ari Frankel.
It hints rather loudly to American real estate investors and developers that they need to step up their green investment and development programs — or else find themselves less competitive with funding from the ‘Big Money’ institutional investors.
Seems that an increasing number of pension funds worldwide are pushing for a more explicit environmental agenda within their investment holdings, according to the New York Times earlier this week. Nothing new there, for the deep green crowd, but great to know, in any event. And the Times gets kudos for being GPC — geopolitically correct — by citing the leadership of several European and one American pension fund in green investing (such factoids hammer at the “reinvent the green wheel” bias we have here in the US). It points to the United Nation’s Principle’s of Responsible Investment (to which we are a happy signatory) as now representing 381 members and $14 trillion in assets.
The Times also asks the necessary question of whether Big Money is really creating positive environmental and social change. For example, they point out that no one really knows if the pension funds’ efforts are really creating the impact they profess to seek. Or if all of the funds with a green agenda as committed as they claim (gasp!) .
HOWEVER, it was pretty surprising that the usually sharp, pro-SRI NY Times failed to dedicate one pixel of ink to the corporate watchdogs like CERES or BSR — THE acknowledged leaders in pushing corporations and institutional investors to adopt ESG (environmental, social, governance) principles within their business and investing activities. CERES has an extensive list of tools and publications documenting their efforts to educate the investment community on the value a green agenda brings. And you can take a lookat our previous coverage of CERES’ video on their engagement work as well.
Nonetheless, good takeaways and a not-so-subtle warning are there between the lines for commercial real estate. The point? Simply, most of these Big Money investors have some amount of their funds allocated to real estate. If they haven’t tailored their real estate investment criteria towards green real estate, yet, then they are bound to do it soon.
Sooner or later, you are going to call on your pension fund investors for your normal performance meetings and, in addition to the regular good dialogue, you are going to be handed more requests – possibly in the form of more compliance reporting, audit checklists, risk assessments, engagement meetings, what have you.
Will you be ready?
What if Facebook Hired Green Finance Professionals?
When you are pondering your green investment strategy, is there a silent voice asking, “how am I going to get all of these employees to actually buy-in to this? How am I going to prevent failure of the plan?”
A human capital bugaboo is quietly freeloading on nearly every one of our engagements with investors. Some clients have already figured out that the organizational learning and people challenges attached to green real estate investing might be more daunting than the physical assets themselves.
Change is a distinct skill that many businesses focus intense energies on avoiding. So they aren’t any good at it. Just google “US auto industry”. Human capital problems are nothing new, but lately we’ve been asking ourselves,
“How has sustainability changed the job of real estate finance and investment professionals? Are investors thinking correctly about the required skill sets?”
The problem’s complexity is amplified by the dimensions of networks needed to be a successful green investor. If you are a fund with operating partners and developers in many different regions, your success rests upon their ability to adopt green building practices and align their colleagues around your business direction, too. Yes, their problems become your (additional) problems. We know some investors who complain about green “cost premiums” as a thin cover for murkier issues — large, amorphous “shadow human capital / supply chain” challenges.
But, subscribers know this blog’s favorite question: “What CAN you do” to address these problems?
Look at Facebook. The social networking universe completely reinvents itself nearly every six months. They have the fortunate challenge of massive growth complicated by turbulent organizational change – and they make it all up as they go along. The volatility of their business makes green real estate sound, well… tame. Like green real estate, there’s a big vision within social networking, but no one has all the answers. So how do they address and scale up their model around people?
We’re including some snippets from an interview with a Facebook hiring manager. His insights might apply to hiring/training green finance and investment professionals, too. You decide. To speed things up for those who need to go microwave a second helping or move on to another football game, we start with our takeaways first. [Note: the underlining is our own enthusiastic emphasis.]
The Green Journey Takeways
- Real estate investors might need to re-think their assumptions on the skill sets of successful sustainable real estate professionals within their organizations. Look at Facebook’s “atheletes-people” as an example.
- Do you need more ‘clever’ people on your green team or ’smart’ ones, per Facebook’s definition?
- Are you clear on what your firm is trying to accomplish with sustainability in order to get people who ‘fit’ the best in their roles? Facebook has set Apple as its customer service standard. Look at how they challenge interviewees with related questions that make them choke.
- Are you focused on organizational excellence in green finance and investing or just copying what you see some other firms doing at the moment?
The Snippets
“You are on a crash hiring spree. How do you avoid making mistakes when you have to move so quickly?
Everyone makes mistakes. No matter how hard you try, there will be some percentage of hiring mistakes you make. Where the management test hits metal is not just in hiring employees, but in retaining and motivating them, and in fostering some collaboration and innovation inside the company.
What qualities do you seek in candidates for those jobs?
We need to find people who can “turn the big ship on a dime.” The ship keeps getting bigger because there are more lines of code, more people using the product, more features in the product, etc.
When it comes to a type of person, I am a big believer in hiring team players, but really hiring athletes-people who can play multiple positions and who have varied skills. That means you end up hiring a mix of inexperienced but bright people. I look for people who are clever. There is an adage that says “a smart person solves the problem, but a clever person prevents it from being a problem in the first place.”
Are there certain candidates who just aren’t a good fit with Facebook?
The lowest “hit rate” through interviewing are people who come out of large IT organizations because their mindset tends to be very reactive and process driven rather than figuring how to deliver excellence.
For example, we are interviewing for a help desk manager-someone who is going to run our global help desk that services all of our employees. We have interviewed a number of people who have fantastic résumés and come out of extremely high-pedigree companies.
When they interview, they say the help desk can only be run so well, that it is impossible to run a help desk 24/7 at a low cost or that it is impossible to have users satisfied with the help desk and meet these other cost objectives or time objectives.
When you try to test their assumptions by asking them how they would scale a help desk to support 1,000 or 2,000 people while providing better service than the Apple Store that’s across the street from our office (which is our standard for excellent customer service), people choke on that question.
They cannot wrap their head around why you would want to do that or how to approach solving that problem. The people we hire have to be reasonably comfortable with the unknown and be willing to put some amount of structure around it.
