Monica Collings is a versatile leader whose career spans multiple sectors, establishing her as a powerful advocate in the energy transition space. As a pioneering woman former Chief Executive who navigated a company through the energy crisis, she now operates plurally as a Board Chair and NED, and champions gender diversity and sustainability, while mentoring emerging leaders. With her philosophy that kindness and courage can coexist in business, she works to ensure organisations reflect the communities they serve while connecting sustainability efforts across industries with purpose and clarity.
Xynteo’s Amy Marshall sat down with Monica to talk about her journey, what she has learned, and how she sees the future of sustainability in the corporate world.
What does your personal journey towards sustainability look like?
Monica: I believe sustainability starts with how we can build organisations that are future-fit. I connect my personal sense of purpose to my professional sense of purpose. The two are intrinsically linked—there’s plenty of research to support the fact that if you have a strong sense of personal purpose, you live a healthier life and are less likely to exhibit the signs of stroke or dementia or suffer a heart attack. And coming to work every day and having a strong sense of connection between what I’m doing and the values I believe in is important to me. This is why I champion female equality and gender diversity within the workplace so much, because my lived experience of being the sole female chief executive in domestic supply to take a retailer through the energy crisis has shaped how I see the sector evolving and the real benefits that we can leverage as a result of having the kind of diversity within our organisation that is more representative of the world that we work in.
What are the skills and experiences that you’ve valued the most on this journey and have equipped you best?
Monica: Being courageous, being bold and believing in yourself—because if you don’t back yourself, why should anyone else? And that transcends into the roles I’ve taken into my portfolio, and the type of work that I’ve chosen to do. I think organisations that very much commit to bold ambitions—whether that is to close the gender pay gap or to reach net zero by a particular year—are setting off on a difficult path. But they’re the right things to do and we must live with courage in our convictions. Also, perhaps quite relevant to the world that we live in today, kindness is really important to me—we can be tough in business, and we have to make difficult decisions, but we can do so kindly, and it doesn’t make us weak. I always try and exhibit kindness in the way I interact and behave. Kindness is very much front and centre in every choice I make—the companies that I work with, the types of projects that I get involved in and the causes that I put my weight behind.
Kindness is really important to me—we can be tough in business, and we have to make difficult decisions, but we can do so kindly, and it doesn’t make us weak.
What barriers have you faced?
Monica: I think all of us face many barriers and that this changes with time. Sometimes we put them up ourselves, like limiting beliefs that prevent us from doing things we actually want to do. And I can attest to that. I think we’ve all been guilty of creating internal barriers with negative thinking—for example, not necessarily considering ourselves for a position that’s become available and pushing ourselves forward for it (not because we don’t believe that we could do it, but because it might never have occurred to us)—or facing external factors and environmental situations that affect our ability to be at our best. Sometimes that is because things have moved on and changed, and we might not necessarily align ourselves with the direction or the new belief of the organisation; or we might feel that a particular set of values has been compromised and that’s not something we’re happy to accept.
These are some of the things that have challenged me most. They’ve not been insurmountable, because if you have a strong sense of purpose, once you get comfortable with knowing what motivates you, where your strengths are, what you fundamentally value, and understand where you’re prepared to compromise on things, it makes you a strong, capable leader and confident in your own skin—and that’s where true authenticity comes from. And I definitely think it develops as you get older. When I look back on my career, I’m much more conscious and aware of those things and actively work to prevent them from being barriers.
What has been your proudest sustainability-linked achievement?
Monica: My career’s been quite squiggly, and I’ve worked in lots of areas adjacent to the energy transition and the energy space—spending time across automotive, home improvement, retail, and property sectors. It wasn’t necessarily by design, but I have developed a skill set that really understands and connects some important sectors and themes together. I proudly look at things through the eyes of the customer, and within the energy space I’m very much known as the champion of customer advocacy. I make sure we always think about how our actions and decisions impact the end-user because irrespective of where we are within the supply chain, we all come back to the fact that we have a touch point that delivers for customers, and that net zero will be delivered for the whole planet.
Secondly, I have tried to implement and champion initiatives that I have then used to share as best practices across the sector, like my “Contract Beyond the Contract” concept, which was all about diversifying the supply chain. The way that that idea came about was from a few years ago when I sat on a panel at the POWERful Women conference and was asked a question about how we were diversifying supply chains within my organisation, and I didn’t have a good enough answer. It spurred me on to think about what I could do differently as a leader with power and influence to create a better answer. What could I do to be able to influence within my organisation, and then share learnings with others to benefit the sector as a whole from a gender perspective?
That’s one example, but from the sustainability viewpoint, if we can really ensure that our organisations are representative of the communities that we serve, then that is incredibly valuable because we will create more sustainable businesses that do better because we’re considering our audience better—you’ll be surprised just how many organisations don’t do that very well. The other thing that I try and do is a lot of mentoring—mostly with women leaders, but not exclusively. A lot of the effort that I put into those areas is to try and take the experience that I now have and enable others to benefit from it more broadly. I mean, ultimately, that’s what board roles are—that you scrutinise an executive team, challenge and advise them, and take all your experience from years of being a professional in various businesses and use it to great effect in an alternative way.
Sustainability comes up quite a lot in several ways, and that’s the beauty of it. We can obsess about ESG and reporting and metrics and trying to see how we can deliver on these things in isolation. But ultimately, if we find opportunities to be more efficient and operate in a way that is more considerate to the environment and the people we interact with, and we are conscious to leave no one behind in this energy transition, then we’re doing a really fantastic job. I think that the danger is that we don’t necessarily connect all these things. So, part of what I am trying to do now is to use my experience to bring some of these things together and think about it holistically across more than one business.
Beyond gender diversity, how can we overcome our unconscious biases and intentionally cultivate diverse thinking that reflects the world around us while challenging our comfort with familiar perspectives?
Monica: I think people get comfortable with the idea of diversity of thought, because we all understand that it’s great to have different ideas and different perspectives. My view is the bit that becomes problematic or more challenging is that sometimes, unintentionally, we use our own biases that cloud our judgement, therefore affecting how we interact with the world around us. It can negatively impact people, and to shift that we first must hold a mirror up to ourselves and acknowledge that we might need to open our eyes a little to alternative perspectives that force us to look differently at the world – and be open to accepting others’ opinions. And that’s harder to do. People don’t naturally want to do that. We want to hold on to familiarity, to group with people that look like us or have the same opinions that we do. When you surround yourself with friends who violently agree with everything that you say and think you’re wonderful, it is then trickier to think, “Actually, I’m going to do something differently here” because it makes us feel uncomfortable, and we don’t like that. And I genuinely believe that in most cases, it’s completely unintentional. But we must be more conscious if we’re ever going to make a meaningful shift.
How do you see the future of the CSO role/sustainability teams in the board room?
Monica: At a board level, I think it absolutely is a priority. People are talking about it. We are seeing that investors value organisations that have sustainable propositions at their core, and I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon. We’re talking a lot about how green skills are evolving. There’s a big need for us to continue to evolve those capabilities in our organisations to be able to compete effectively, and the market will demand that. So, whilst consumers are naturally finding it challenging to continue to be in a cost-of-living crisis that seems like it’s never going to end (and there might be some fatigue developing towards sustainability agendas), businesses are recognising that legislation and regulation are driving us towards embedding this within organisations. Additionally, while larger organisations are leading from the top, their supply chain partners must strengthen their sustainability credentials. Through tenders, supply chain requirements, and questionnaires, sustainability practices are becoming increasingly important. I’ve noticed, particularly with recent government tenders, that businesses are being judged heavily on their sustainability approaches—this is no longer a tick-box exercise but a substantial requirement-scoring factor.
Thirdly, the role of the sustainability officer shares similarities with the DEI agenda in some respects. Organisations initially thought they could simply appoint someone responsible for sustainability and magically everything would change overnight, allowing them to tick that box. However, as we better understand cultural change (especially whilst leading through adversity), we recognise that organisations must act with integrity and credibility to genuinely deliver outcomes benefiting both people and planet. This transformation must start at the top, with all levels embracing sustainability principles. The CSO won’t drive this change alone—they might catalyse conversations, but ultimately this is a leadership issue. When leaders fully support sustainability initiatives, positive changes will follow, ideas will emerge, initiatives will receive sponsorship, and you’ll see sustainable practices becoming truly embedded across organisations. Propositions that meet customer needs brilliantly will grow, and profitability follows.
I think there’s a lot of speculation around the future of things like B Corp, and you’ve got all sorts of different ways in which you can measure sustainability—such as EcoVadis, Science Based Targets and other various grading frameworks. And it’s great because we know what gets measured and delivered, holding organisations to account. But ultimately, we are holding ourselves accountable to the world, to ourselves, to the planet, and to people, making sure that we are fully considering our impact. I just wonder, you know, fast forward 10 years—we will have been past the 2030 deadline and will be charging ahead towards 2050. What will look different, what will have changed within our organisations? Will we have better gender representation and see the benefit of that? Will we be looking at our supply chain through a lens of making sure that our companies are aligning in terms of values as well as looking for businesses that can deliver on cost? I hope so.
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