Leadership Lesson with Amanda Powell-Smith, Sustainability Comms Professional

Can you tell me a bit about your background, and what drove you to pursue a career in both comms and sustainability?

I studied biology at university and after university, I started as a PA in a PR business, as I graduated during a recession. I worked my way up in mainstream PR, learning core communications skills, teamwork, media engagement, and writing. Towards the end of the 1990s, I became interested in corporate social responsibility, so I set something up internally in my then-employer’s business.

Later, I joined Forster Communications, one of the first purpose led businesses that uses the power of communications to protect and improve lives. We focused on environmental and social issues, including mental health destigmatisation and sustainable travel working with clients in all sectors. The momentum and awareness of sustainability continued to grow, leading us to explore new areas and bring people together to tackle these complex issues.

What personal attributes do you think have helped you succeed?

It starts with core communications skills. You need to be interested in the world around you. You need to be able to connect the dots and join things up. You have to have a certain resilience, because things don’t always go the right way. And you must be able to look around corners and predict what’s coming. 

I think curiosity is incredibly important, and never more so than in sustainability where we are constantly dealing with firsts and things are changing all the time.

What do you think are the key qualities needed from leaders in sustainability in 2024 and beyond?

Changing systems, improving sustainability, repairing the world around us is difficult. There are few easy, quick fix solutions, and we can’t solve environmental problems without looking after people – it’s incredibly complex.

Leaders need imagination and must be connectors. You can’t sit in a small team on the side and do your stuff, because sustainability needs to be in the boardroom and run through an organisation.

They have to be able to stay motivated and to motivate, inspire, and support others – to recognise that even though steps might seem small, they are all part of a long journey. It’s good to see the big picture while you’re also dealing with the small details.

And they need to be brave. We’ve never decarbonised the world before – it’ll be the first time for all of us. And that’s quite a thing to do.

What are the key challenges you face in your role as a leader in sustainability comms?

We are moving at an incredible speed and as technical leads and specialists learn more, the goalposts can shift. The trouble with being at the vanguard of everything, is that you’re always working into unforeseen consequences, and that can make a lot of people feel nervous. There’s a sense of needing to be able to see the future, and be adaptive, reflective, and learning at the same time.

How do you see the field evolving over the next 5-10 years, especially as public awareness of environmental and social issues continues to grow?

The good news is that people are much more aware of the issues. Looking at all the public surveys, the overwhelming sentiment is that people do want to tackle climate change, the cost-of-living crisis, the need for social justice.

I think that’s only going to continue, so we need to make action more accessible and normalised, to get everyone involved. We at Forster have our new climate positive plan called Take It Personally, where we’ve actually shifted from talking just about climate and carbon emissions to focusing on people. We’re doing that by committing to look at living wages through our clients and suppliers, and we are committed to that ourselves. Because unless we make this good for everybody, change isn’t going to happen in the way it should.

What would your advice be for someone looking to pivot from traditional comms into sustainability comms?

The core PR skills are the same, so anyone can pivot at any time. I think you have to be interested in, and able to look in-depth at, quite complex issues. It’s about ensuring that you’re representing voices from across the world in a way that is that is fair and right to everybody – having a genuinely inclusive communication style.

Then it’s about not being afraid of the science, since everything that we do is evidence-based. Being able to work with information and date and put things forward in an engaging way.

It’s really exciting as a career, and I think it’s going to grow. And I don’t think there’s one right way in: people should never feel that they haven’t got the right profile. Because it’s going to take everybody, coming from a lot of different directions, to get to a sustainable planet.