A Career in Sustainability: from Environmental Management to Leading Sustainability

Tatiana Montero is the Corporate Sustainability Manager at Nidec Global Appliance and has achieved her ‘Leading the Sustainability Transformation’ Professional Certificate, a program powered by WholeWorks. She sat down recently for a conversation with WholeWorks CSO Laura Asiala to chat about her work and career.

Let’s start where you are now. You are the Corporate Sustainability Manager at Nidec Global Appliance, part of Nidec, a Japanese multi-national manufacturer. What are your most important responsibilities, why are they important, and how do they fit into the business of Nidec Global Appliance?

One thing that is important to understand is that Nidec is a large company, famous for many products, but in our division, we focus on making motors and compressors for the appliance industry. We are a ‘B to B’ (business to business) company. We don’t make the appliances, but we supply the different motors that are critical to appliance performance, and the parts that we make can be responsible for 80-90% of the climate impact in the life cycle of the appliance, so our work is essential in terms of the end-product sustainability.

We want to be the preferred partner of our customers, and sustainability is a key strategy to get there. How we impact the sustainability of our customers—and their customers—is important, and energy efficiency is the most important aspect. Think of your refrigerator—it runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Even a small adjustment for energy efficiency can make a huge difference over years of use. Innovation in our company comes through multi-functional teams—research and development, sustainability, sales, and marketing—and there is a big focus to reduce energy in order to multiply a positive impact.

We also focus on miniaturization, which means reducing the amount of material that goes into our products, because that also reduces our environmental footprint.

I see you have long been committed to sustainability, and especially environmental sustainability, with your first job as an environmental analyst. Can you give us a quick overview of how your career evolved to become a leader in sustainability?

I always loved mathematics, analysis, and science, especially biology, so when I found that I could get a degree in environmental engineering, I said, “That’s for me.” It just made sense.  

In my first job, I worked for an environmental consulting firm that focused on making renewable energy plants viable, especially hydroelectric projects. I was responsible for the environmental studies and doing the research so that we could get the necessary permits to build the plants. We knew the environmental impact could be big, and we had to consider how to mitigate the impact. I worked on a multi-disciplinary team, and when we went into the field, we had to go into the communities to interview people who lived there. We went knocking door to door, talking to people who would be impacted by these new hydroelectric plants. It was the first time that I realized the social aspect of the work and began to realize the complexity of this big undertaking, because of course we also had to consider the financial implications.

Later, I changed from consulting to working within a company responsible for building energy plants and     focused on wind-powered projects. As the Environmental Coordinator, I hired the consultants and made the connections with the government to be able to get the right licenses and build in the right time frame. I had to manage the economic part along with the environmental and social parts. I remember that during the building phase of one of the projects, we had some trouble with trucks delivering the materials to the site. The dust the trucks generated impacted people’s homes, and I was responsible for managing the conflict and finding a solution. Environmental coordination was my job description but managing community and other stakeholders relationships was a very big part of the job. All of these were building my experience and my purpose.

Then I got the opportunity to come to work for the company that is now Nidec, to work with corporate sustainability on a global level. In the end, it was very natural transition.

What would you say is one of the biggest accomplishments in your career (so far!) with regard to sustainability?

Well, I think one thing is to be an important part of the team that really helps to make our products distinctive and more sustainable, as I discussed before, with energy efficiency being the main point. We developed Simplified Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) to show our customers how our solutions would make their products more efficient and more sustainable. In addition to energy efficiency, we can also reduce the refrigerant climate change impact by 99.9% by using natural refrigerants instead of the traditional ones. All of this contributes to making our customers’ products more attractive and sustainable. We sell millions of compressors every year; it has a big impact.  

There is one project, however, that really makes my eyes sparkle—and that was a movement that we started in the city of Joinville where I live and work—to incentivize more sustainable transportation. I saw this article about an Italian city giving ice cream and beer to incentivize people to ride bikes, share rides, or walk, and I thought, “We have ice cream! We have beer! We can do this.” I went to the VP of the company and he encouraged me to do some research. I did and formed a small team. Ultimately 7,000 people in the community participated in this 1.5 month project, in partnership with the Mayor of the city, and we prevented 100 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. It really showed that citizens can have a big impact. It was also a meaningful way to engage our employees at the site.

What is the biggest challenge facing your business, your industry, or business in general as it seeks to become more sustainable?

The big challenge is what our customers want—and that depends a lot on what the end user (the consumer) wants. Energy efficiency saves money and resources over the lifetime of an appliance, but it can make the up-front costs more expensive. People want more sustainability, but sometimes are not willing to pay for it. It’s important for the whole society to rethink consumption habits, balancing short term cost with long term benefits for then and the planet, in order to have a more sustainable society. We need to continue to communicate to people about these benefits.

What advice do you have for people and/or organizations shifting for more sustainable careers and/or sustainable business?

I see a lot of people who want to work in sustainability, and a relatively easy way to start is to work sustainability into your current job. If you are in procurement, start to consider how you can shift your purchasing and purchasing processes to become more sustainable. If you are in human resources, understand how sustainability impacts your ability to attract people and reduce turnover. If you are in research and development, look for ways to use less material and energy. All of this impacts a firm’s sustainability.       

Start with what you already know and work from there. This is how my career naturally evolved from environmental focus to sustainability—expanding beyond the environmental consideration to also include social and financial. You can’t just look at one thing. 

It is also important to see how to connect everything. For example, we use life cycle assessment with our products—parts for appliances—and that means we have to look at how they are used over the life of the product they go into and what happens after that product’s useful life is over.

It’s one of the reasons I really appreciated the simulation in LST (‘Leading the Sustainability Transformation’ program powered by WholeWorks). You see the result of decisions you make—both the positive ones and the negative ones—on the whole system. Information about sustainability is easy to find online—you can find and read or listen or watch, but the simulation makes you put that into practice. And you’re not taking the decisions alone! You have a team—a global team—with different backgrounds and experience, and you have to discuss and decide together the strategy for the team and how to deploy (fixed) resources. Compromise and negotiation are a very important part of the process. The ‘behind the scenes practice’ is so important. How do you get everyone to support the decisions and make your deadline, with continuous encouragement and engagement? In the end, it’s the same way in your company. I think it was a very good experience.

Photos courtesy of Nidec and by Mohammad Esmaili on Unsplash, respectively.

About the author:

Tatiana Montero, MBA

Tatiana Montero is the Corporate Sustainability Manager at Nidec Global Appliance. With more than a decade of experience in sustainability, she is also a guest teacher for executive education at Fundação Dom Cabral. She has an environmental engineering degree from Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho and an MBA from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. Tatiana is an alumna of ‘Leading the Sustainability Transformation’ Professional Certificate Program.

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