There is a growing need for professional EIA leadership training and short management courses amongst EIA professionals to ensure that they meet increasing EIA regulatory demands in the UK and internationally for an EIA ‘competent person’.
In May 2018, Leading Green held the first of a series of international workshops to discuss and identify key aspects in Leadership in EIA. This first inaugural workshop took place at Mpila Camp within Hluhluwe iMfolozi Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. These international workshops have brought together an influential and internationally recognised group of EIA and SEA practitioners and researchers from across the world. The presence of wild warthogs, running around and underneath the tables, during the workshops has given rise to their subsequent workshop nickname – the warthog sessions!
The initial observations and comments have now been supplemented by qualitative data from other Leadership in EIA sessions that have identified the critical areas within which EIA practitioners exert the greatest leadership and influence. As practice is closely related to Large Infrastructure Development projects (transport, power, water, mining projects, etc), the results highlight where the focus of all EIA practitioners should lie in exerting the greatest influence and contribution in terms of sustainable development and CSR in many of the world’s largest on-going infrastructure developments. The following 7 headings identify the leadership areas where experienced EIA leaders believe they can deliver the greatest added value to the client and the wider engineering/project management team. The points are aligned from highest rated to 7th valued contribution across the quantitative rankings.
The promotion of environmentally inclusive design (EID) is repeatedly regarded as the No.1 contribution that Leadership in EIA delivers. Linking the EIA’s awareness-raising of sustainability issues and how EID can benefit the project’s ultimate success is regarded as a key professional leadership trait. The promotion of EID informs the Project Management Team about the importance of designing large infrastructure project that meet the needs of the people and the environments that they inhabit, with minimum residual impact. Many of the workshop EIA Practitioners’ believe that EID was central to the EIA leadership role if they were to contribute to a fair society that had any chance of a sustainable future.
“Designing developments to fit their receiving environments, rather than retrofitting environments to take development”
Heikki Kalle, Estonian Environmental Institute
The crucial EIA leadership skills that contributed to EID were identified as a good baseline in environmental & ecological engineering practices, internal and external stakeholder management, influencing skills, visioning, ecosystem service analysis, with a technical understanding of investment risk-benefit analysis.
Experienced EIA Practitioners act early to exert their influence within a project’s leadership group. It is clear that many EIA practitioners sought to enable all EIA and wider Project Team members to participate in and solve the likely sustainability challenges the project raised. Enabling strategic project insights to be assessed through a variety of disciplines into ‘How’ the project will interact with the receiving environment’. They all recognised that EIA leaders had an important central role in participating in engineering debates, as these debates were the critical interface between the Design (How to provide a solution to a technical problem) and implementation of a Sustainable Development (What forms an optimal solution to all members of the team and their respective interests).
The crucial EIA leadership skills are through communication approaches based upon a sound sustainability mindset that allowed them to create new opportunities, to deploy creative (visioning) and problem-solving skills within the Project leadership team as a proactive as opposed to reactive approach early within the team’s establishment, as well as dealing with challenges.
Ultimately the purpose of EIA is to bring to the decision-maker attention issues of environmental or social significance attached to a proposed development. In most models of global EIA, this statutory responsibility lies with the consenting or approving regulator. Experienced EIA professionals fully recognise that if these facts are left too late in the project, subsequent decisions can make the process valueless. Instead, they raise the issue as early as possible in project discussions, placing them in terms of opportunity (ie easier consenting, local agreement, stakeholder relationships) and as the most effective way to avoid, reduce or remediate ‘show stoppers’.
The EIA budget is often regarded as a small element of the entire budget – <0.25% during financing and <4% during construction delivery, yet its contribution to outcome is ultimately critical to success:
It can be difficult for individuals working closely in a project team environment to go against the ‘groupthink’ mindset that often develops. No one wants to go against group consensus or be the bearer of bad news. Engineering or Technology Project groups are also averse to hearing news that threatens their preferred or agreed design. Especially designs that have already received significant project input, and have been proposed and cost for the client – before evaluation of the receiving environment. The old gospel of ‘Time, Cost, Money’ can also be an encouragement to groupthink mentality when EIA-related time delays, risks or added stakeholder objections arise late in the processor when the initial engineering appraisals and EIA timelines are ill-considered.
Experienced EIA professionals talked openly about how they often had to raise and lead on difficult project centred conversations on issues that impacted on wider social, environmental or sustainability issues. Issues that on occasion other project team members did not wish to consider or raise up to the client. They knew that they needed to have it, that what they had to say needed to be said, and they knew that they were taking a risk at times in their relationship with other senior project team members. In mitigation, they sought to use emotional intelligence and situational awareness to prepare, assess and gauge what the reactions might be and how these conversations could end.
The crucial EIA leadership skill was communication, in particular being assertive in their message, ensuring that they were focused (ie clear on what they were trying to achieve) by holding the conversation, and what gave them the leadership right to initiate the conversation. These required preliminary preparation, making sure that their information was accurate and backed up by fact. They are prepared to discuss the “undiscussable” or ‘disloyal’ but also clear about how the issue affected them personally, the work that they were responsible for delivering and how the issue if unaddressed would impact ultimately on. Many were fully aware of the Emotional Intelligence skills that were needed to manage relationship conflict and used these accordingly – they were raising the issue because they couldn’t deal with the problem alone, it needed a group approach, the issue was too big for it to be ‘parked’ and left. They also understood the emotional reactions that such conversations could result in and tried to prepare accordingly to handle the expected push back, challenge and alternate perspectives..
In addition to managing the EIA team and ensuring the agreed deliverables outlined in contracts, many are active in ensuring that the EIA team is well integrated into the project team’s other disciplines. This often undertakes a systems-based approach to the anticipated environmental and social impacts and aligning them with particular disciplines and arranging for the EIA and the respective engineering/design/procurement specialists to work together on the issue to resolve matters.
They also acted as a ‘direct voice’ into the senior project team to ensure that issues were raised and addressed (see above). They all clearly understood the linkage between leadership and leading a team, as opposed to managing the EIA process, which often required them to practice strong negotiation, assertiveness and problem-solving skills.
Stakeholder consultation in EIA is often regarded as a time-consuming ‘cost’ in infrastructure development. Pressure is often placed on EIA project managers to limit activity to a minimum. Its value was fully appreciated by many of the experienced client-employed or consultant EIA leaders as an invaluable risk management tool. The process was essential in addressing and avoiding potential risks early in the design process, and in safeguarding the reputation of the project. Utilised as a design tool as well as a statutory obligation, it was deemed most cost-beneficial to the project by reducing delay, re-design, loss of stakeholder confidence.
Most considered in some detail the design & form of external stakeholder management or consultation strategy to increase the support and minimize the negative impacts of these community, environmental or governmental stakeholders. Successful stakeholder management or consultation strategy when carefully planned and followed accordingly was strongly believed to identify issues early, address concerns through transparent action by the design team, raise confidence in the project’s communications and build stronger working relationships with external parties. Anticipating issues in advance of the proposed design allowed for adaptive management, mitigation, access to critical views and information available locally and allowed discussion regarding trade-offs.
Few however had considered the benefits of developing an internally focussed stakeholder strategy aimed at the client organisation, seeking to directly consult with the Client Organisation’s Sustainability Manager, CSR or Environmental Director seeking to bring:
This was surprising as 80% of Project Managers know how their projects align with the company’s business strategy, and is a valuable tool in bringing influence for sustainability, social and environmental policies to the Project table.
The crucial EIA leadership skills often demonstrated revolved around stakeholder management, strategic thinking, communication, and engagement skills
It can be a risk in project engineering teams that they focus solely on the design and construction phase of development. Forgetting or lacking a design brief to consider the operational and eventual decommissioning phases.
Life cycle analysis is an important component in EIA philosophy and implementation and EIA practitioners often take a systems-based approach to consider the wider changes in environmental and social interactions during subsequent downstream phases. These often include but are not limited to:
The environmental professionals were aware that the Operational phases of development can be up to 3x the cost of construction, with management costs equating to 60-80% of a development’s life-cycle costs. Having such a profound impact on a developments financial outlay and environmental life-cycle, many recognised that it was important that operational and environmental management considerations were discussed by the project team during the design phase and before construction designs became fixed. Increasingly they felt responsible for leading project group discussions on ways the team could optimize the life-cycle of developments.
Core skills demonstrated and flagged up as essential for success were a sustainability mindset, visioning, appreciative inquiry, facilitation skills and systems thinking.
Building a strong working relationship with the Project’s Leading project manager was identified by many as an important leadership skill. It was accepted that the EIA project manager often had a more holistic and wider worldview of how the project integrated within society, communities and their environments. EIA project managers often worked across a variety of projects during their careers often being intimately involved with a Project Manager who could spend several years overseeing the design and construction of a development project. This exposed them to a wider range of project scenarios within specific sectors and adaptive approaches.
This made them adept at spotting potential pitfalls early in the design phases of projects and mentally mapping geo-environmental, social and natural environmental impacts as potential constraints. However, the skill seemed to lie in:
The key leadership skills identified as important were creating positive relationships, building influence, holding leadership conversations, and problem-solving.
Remember, that for any EIA scenario you encounter there are always multiple perspectives to the issue, so be empathetic of how other professions and project managers will view the problem. A key influencing skill is to retain an open and unbiased curiosity about how they see the situation and be aware of how your own worldview with its associated judgments and prejudice may impact on what you observe and how you act. One of the great strengths of a mature project management team is the diversity of experience, and the different perspective that exist within it. When seeking to drive greater sustainability in design, better stakeholder relationships, risk adaptation and overall project vision, it is clearly advantageous to appreciate personal and professional decision-making through the eyes of fellow team members, allowing you to take a more focused, strategic and informed decision-making approach to issues of note to the EIA and sustainability agendas.
