“Sustainability is our ticket to the future” – Karen Daniels

Title: On social sustainability with Karen Daniels

Guest: Karen Daniels, Founder, Ethical Edge

Episode overview:
In this episode of The Good Comms Podcast, I sat down with Karen Daniels, founder of Ethical Edge Advisory and co-founder of Blue Earth. With over 20 years of global experience in procurement and supply chains, Karen shares powerful insights into inclusive leadership, social sustainability, and the systemic changes needed to create dignified work and equitable communities.

From transforming the role of brand promoters in Nigeria to leveraging technology and data for impact, this episode is full of practical takeaways and inspiration for purpose-driven leaders.

Key topics & takeaways:

• Karen’s journey from corporate to entrepreneurship
• Defining social sustainability and why it matters
• How inclusive leadership creates lasting social impact
• A powerful story of dignity and transformation in Nigeria
• Where to start if you’re new to social sustainability
• Practical metrics for inclusion and impact
• The role of informal networks and collective action
• Emerging trends in inclusive leadership and tech-enabled change

Memorable quotes:

“You don’t set out to be a leader. You set out to make a difference and then leadership follows.”

“Social sustainability is really about creating and maintaining conditions that support human well-being, equity and social progress.”

“Procurement is such a vital function within the organization because it connects the organization with the community.”

“Change like this, changing the whole ethos and dynamic of a role like that, takes leadership. It cannot be changed from the ground up. It has to come from the top down.”

“Would you let your daughter be a brand promoter? Absolutely not. And therefore, we had to change this perception.”

“Sustainability is not a choice. It is our ticket to the future.”

“Technology is absolutely an enabler and we should be using it to make that impact and to make the change.”

Resources & links:

🔗 Connect with Karen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-daniels-38064021/
🔗 Learn more about Ethical Edge: https://www.ethicaledgeadvisory.com/
🎧 Listen now: https://goodcomms.podbean.com/e/on-social-sustainability-with-karen-daniels/

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who cares about creating a more inclusive future!

On social sustainability with Karen Daniels

[00:00:00] Chared Verschuur (she/her): Hello and welcome to The Good Comms Podcast, the podcast where we explore the power of inclusive leadership and communication and shine a light on individuals who are committed to creating a sense of belonging and building a better, more equitable world.

[00:00:36] I’m your host Chared Verschuur, Inclusive Leadership and Communication Consultant, and I’m thrilled to have you join me for this episode.

[00:00:44] In this episode, I’m excited to welcome Karen Daniels, founder of Ethical Edge Advisory. Karen is a champion for inclusive leadership and social sustainability, with over 20 years of experience in global procurement and supply chains. Through her work, she’s demonstrated how leaders can foster equity and belonging while driving meaningful social impact.

[00:01:08] I’ve had the privilege of connecting with Karen through our Lean In group, and I’m thrilled to share her wisdom with you. In this episode, we’ll explore the connection between inclusive leadership and social sustainability. Practical tips for fostering equity in organizations and Karen’s vision for a future where business leads with purpose. Let’s dive in. Welcome, Karen.

[00:01:32] Karen Daniels (she/her): Hi Chared. Thank you. And I’m really excited to be on your podcast and thanks for having me.

[00:01:37] Chared Verschuur (she/her): Would you like to add anything else to that introduction? Tell us more about you.

[00:01:41] Karen Daniels (she/her): Thank you. As you said, I’m the founder of Ethical Edge, sustainable consultancy. Very recently, I’ve started a technical company, a B2B SaaS company called Blue Earth ESG Technologies. Before venturing into entrepreneurship , I’ve had a long career in corporate. I’ve had a lot of senior roles in procurement and supply chain for big multinationals like Shell, Diageo, and Heineken. I’ve worked across Africa and Asia Pacific Spent five years in Nigeria, in Lagos, heading up the procurement division for Heineken. I am also a mom of twins and I’m now living in the Netherlands with my partner and my children for the last five years.

[00:02:19] Chared Verschuur (she/her): So how have your global experiences shaped your leadership philosophy?

[00:02:24] Karen Daniels (she/her): There’s no one size fits all when it comes to leadership. I always believed that you have to meet people where they are and not where you at or where you’re coming from. And culture having worked across Africa and every country in Africa it’s completely different to the next. The culture is different. The people are different. And then having worked in Europe and at Asia Pacific, you find that culture is important and understanding the dynamics of culture in your team and the diverse nature of your team is key. For me, my philosophy is that you don’t set out to be a leader. You set out to make a difference and then leadership follows.

[00:03:06] Chared Verschuur (she/her): That sounds really inspiring. You set out to make a difference and then leadership follows.

[00:03:11] Karen Daniels (she/her): My goal was never to be a boss because being a manager is not the same as being a leader. If you inspire people, if you motivate them, if you help them to unlock their full potential, they naturally follow you. And that’s what makes a leader. I think.

[00:03:28] Chared Verschuur (she/her): And now you’re focusing on social sustainability. What inspired you to focus on social sustainability?

[00:03:35] Karen Daniels (she/her): I spent a lot of time working in developing countries across Africa and then also I spent a lot of time on the ground in Nigeria. From a procurement perspective, you get to see the community that you’re working in with through the suppliers. Procurement is such a vital function within the organization because it connects the organization with the community.

[00:03:55] I was confronted with the social inequalities on a daily basis with suppliers, with the communities, even with people coming in to look for work or opportunities, and even your own team that’s working for you. And I could see the difference corporates can make or that we could make as a corporate.

[00:04:12] Karen Daniels (she/her): We’ve got power. Corporates have power. They have power in the community. They have power, the governments in the countries that they are operating in. They have power as a collective if they come together and they can make real change happen. And they have the power to change lives. I saw that firsthand when we started to implement social sustainability initiatives and the power that we had to change lives and the impact that it had on people.

[00:04:37] Chared Verschuur (she/her): And how would you define it, social sustainability? Because when we talk about sustainability, we often talk about environmental sustainability and climate justice. How would you define social sustainability and what role does leadership play in advancing it?

[00:04:53] Karen Daniels (she/her): Social sustainability is really about creating and maintaining conditions that support human well being, equity and social progress. And how leaders play a role is that they shape organizational priorities. Leaders have the power to determine what the organizations are going to do and organizations on the whole are quite powerful. Especially if they come together. They are crucial in establishing organizational culture and engaging with stakeholders in other organizations and the community, and they can help influence the broader system.  

[00:05:26] Chared Verschuur (she/her): Can you share a story or example where inclusive leadership supported social impact initiatives such as empowering local communities or improving workplace equity in your experience?

[00:05:38] Karen Daniels (she/her): Yes, I have quite a good example of that. When I was in Nigeria, we started the Social Sustainability Initiative. There was one particular group of people that we wanted to address, and that’s brand promoters. Brand promoters are the people that promote, our product in outlets, in restaurants, in bars. And we’re not the only ones who have brand promoters. All beverage manufacturers have brand promoters. It’s an industry thing. A brand promoter is well known in the industry for, promoting the product, but these people have a really tough time. They were sexually abused. They’re not treated with respect. Sometimes the uniforms are also quite disrespectful because they’ve got to wear short skirts and that type of attire. It wasn’t a very dignified profession and a lot of the people were women. Many of them were the breadwinners in their family.

[00:06:32] We set out to change this as part of our social impact initiative.

[00:06:37] Change like this, changing the whole ethos and dynamic and of a role like that takes leadership. It cannot be changed from the ground up. It has to come from the top down. And through that, we were able to change the scope of the role, change the uniforms. No more short skirts. No more tank tops. Respectable attire, education. Educating the brand promoter, the outlet owner, the pub owner, the restaurant owner about what the brand promoter’s role is. It’s to promote the product. Teaching the brand promoter, the outlet owners about harassment and abuse and educating the brand promoters: that’s not part of your job. You’re here to sell the product and only the product.

[00:07:23] What it created was a pool of young women, talented young women that we started to train and educate and change the nature of their role. It created a pool for us to actually draw on for young and new salespeople. So it started to give them a pipeline for their career. It changed their role. It changed the way they saw themselves. It gave the role respect, but moreover, it also made business sense. Because these brand promoters knew our product better than any salesperson and they could sell it. And to train them and to educate them and to bring them into the sales force was no brainer and it really worked well. And, the impact that it created was far reaching for the brand promoters, for their families and for us as an organization.

[00:08:15] Chared Verschuur (she/her): I can also imagine not just for them and their families and you as an organization, but for them personally in terms of dignity.

[00:08:25] Karen Daniels (she/her): Yes. It was amazing to witness the change and also the type of talent that we started to attract because the role became more meaningful and a dignified role and was seen different because even our own sales director, when asking him, “would you let your daughter be a brand promoter?” he’d say, “absolutely not”. And therefore , we had to change this perception of the brand promoter role, but it didn’t just end there.

[00:08:51] We took it further. We partnered with the UN and other organizations in Nigeria to continue the training and to establish a speak up line and a emergency system. If brand promoters found themselves in compromising situations, they could call a particular number and get help and make sure that there was always a means for them to get home, and then we started to cascade it across the industry and got other beverage companies to do the same. The effect in Nigeria was just astounding.

[00:09:22] Chared Verschuur (she/her): Now everyone wants to be a brand promoter.

[00:09:25] Karen Daniels (she/her): Yeah

[00:09:28] Chared Verschuur (she/her): It’s a really great example. For leaders who want to integrate social sustainability in their strategies. If it’s new to them, where should they start?

[00:09:36] Karen Daniels (she/her): Now that’s an interesting question because I think a lot of people are looking at that now. Social sustainability alongside environmental. It’s just grown in momentum.

[00:09:46] The first step would be understanding where they are now, understanding their current state and where their gaps are, both internally and externally, in terms of equity, social involvement in communities, et cetera, but looking internally first, understanding where their gaps are, looking externally in the communities in which they operate. Understanding how they impact those communities, how they impact human capital there and social capital and come up with a plan that they then build into their business planning and strategic processes and make it part of the strategy, part of their goals, part of their business objective. That’s the first step in integrating social sustainability into their business. It’s looking at your core business and where that impacts human capital and social capital and starting from there.

[00:10:40] Chared Verschuur (she/her): And what are some practical steps organizations can take to measure and improve inclusion and social impact in their organizations?

[00:10:49] Karen Daniels (she/her): So now you’ve got your objectives and you’ve set your goals. The next thing would be to set clear metrics the same as you would do for financial targets. Look at each objective, find a clear metric that you’d want to achieve and measure and build it into your business reporting cycle.

[00:11:08] So internally you could look at pay equity. You could look at engagement and belonging scores. You could look at your diversity scores.

[00:11:17] Externally, you could look at supplier diversity, community investment, and also environmental considerations when it comes to waste and impacting the environment, other than energy. Energy is spoken about quite a lot, and many companies are addressing the energy issue. But there’s a lot of other environmental factors that have a direct impact on the community and people.

[00:11:43] Chared Verschuur (she/her): If we’re going to use that example earlier, the brand promoters, can you share what the KPIs were or how you measure that?

[00:11:52] Karen Daniels (she/her): The first thing was we put in place a brand promoter policy. Setting out the rules of engagement. What a brand promoter should wear, how a brand promoter should work, time, access to emergency contacts, making sure that brand promoters had a safe means of getting home from very late events. So all of this was put into a policy.

[00:12:13] Then extracted from their policy some tangible things that we could measure, like the training. Harassment training was the first set of training that we did, and we ran the training company wide. So it wasn’t only for the brand promoters, but it was for our people themselves to understand what does harassment mean they could understand why we were doing this. So we did harassment training and we started to measure that to see how many countries had done training, how many brand promoters were trained, and then how many external customers, like our outlets, taverns and pubs, how many owners were also trained around harassment. That was the one.

[00:12:51] The other one was we recruited. The recruitment process of brand promoters, recruiting talented people and not only women, we included men as well. We had some targets on making it a more diverse team.

[00:13:06] Chared Verschuur (she/her): That was going to be my question, but you already answered it. Did you recruit men to be brand promoters?

[00:13:12] Karen Daniels (she/her): Yes. So we wanted to take the gender issue out of it. We took that sort of a stigma out of it being, oh, only women can go and do that. Men can also do it. That it’s not just women in short skirts. We had quite a lot of, young, men joining and loving it, the opportunity to be a brand promoter. So with brand promoters, it was a bit of a flip side where it was women-based and we had to get more men in. They were so proud of it.

[00:13:40] The uniforms were so beautiful and they were so proud to wear them. The women and the men had matching uniforms and you could choose as a promoter, whether you wanted to wear a skirt or whether you wanted to wear pants and they looked so smart. And when they did wear skirts, they were of a decent length and there was no connotation of the woman had to look sexy.

[00:14:01] That’s still like that in Nigeria and in a lot of our countries where we operated. And the trend started to increase. It’s not worldwide. No, this was just one initiative, but I think initiatives like that are so important because they have far reaching effects in that some of those women the breadwinners in their family, and they can feel comfortable in the work uniform because they are doing a job.

[00:14:26] Chared Verschuur (she/her): You also mentioned earlier that you set out to make a difference and not to want to be a leader. So how can team members advocate for inclusion and social sustainability if they’re not in leadership roles?

[00:14:40] Karen Daniels (she/her): That is really important to promote in organizations. The one way that can be done is to create informal networks to support diversity and social sustainability efforts. These informal networks can challenge exclusive practices in an organization because a lonely voice is not always listened to. You’re just seen as somebody who is negative or a troublemaker or something like that, but if you create these informal networks they helped people to have a voice, to speak up, and I’ve seen it in practice.

[00:15:17] One was about women in supply chain and getting more women involved in supply chain and creating this network around it. Informal network, asking people to join men and women to join this network. Men as advocates and mentors and sponsors. This network was started by just ordinary colleagues in the organization.

[00:15:37] There was another one around diversity, cultural diversity in the organization. A place for people from all different countries to share the challenges they face in a different country, how they can be supported, what the company could do to set them up for success.

[00:15:55] Those are the two networks that come to mind and they were quite effective as a forum to challenge exclusive practices, but also on the other hand, you could also look at if you in a more senior role, not necessarily leadership, you can also mentor others. You can help amplify diverse voices and ideas in meetings. You can help support others because once somebody feels supported, even by a colleague, they feel more confident.

[00:16:22] It talks a lot to the work that you do with belonging. Inclusiveness and belonging and engagement really helps to foster social sustainability in the workplace. And it does start with a sense of belonging.

[00:16:36] If an organization is trying to bring more of that into the culture of the organization and start embedding it into the fabric of who they are, you would see that more people would then be open to advocate for these types of initiatives. Where it isn’t, you wouldn’t find much of that happening, then those are the places that need it and in that situation, I would strongly advise for creating these informal networks because it’s a sort of a group that can take these ideas to management and to leadership and that’s when inclusive leadership comes in and to say we should listen to our people and try to start incorporating more inclusive practices in the way we do business on a daily basis.

[00:17:24] What trends in inclusive leadership and social sustainability are you most excited about?

[00:17:29] I think the biggest trend that I’ve already started seeing is the shift from compliance to impact where the companies that really are taking this on board and you find that they are the companies that are attracting the better talent. And they are the companies I think that do better from a profitability perspective as well.

[00:17:48] Karen Daniels (she/her): It’s not just a ticking the box exercise. It’s actually about the impact that they want to make. It’s authentic and it’s real and that I see happening more and more even smaller companies are saying, what can we do to start this journey of being a sustainable business?

[00:18:05] The other one is technology integration which can drive systemic change. Because when you have more advanced technology around this, like I was saying with Blue Earth, you have more advanced analytics, you have better feedback, have better reporting, and you can identify systemic barriers that you can start solving. With more integration and organizations, the impact could be more visible. If you really understand what is going on in your business, what is going on in your supply chains, and you can start putting initiatives in place to change it.

[00:18:38] Chared Verschuur (she/her): I often say that data, that’s their language in the boardroom. So that’s why it’s important that we have this data. So that’s also what you’re doing with Blue Earth. That’s what technology can enable.

[00:18:51] Karen Daniels (she/her): Technology is absolutely an enabler and we should be using it to make that impact and to make the change.

[00:18:57] Chared Verschuur (she/her): And one of those technologies that’s really hyped up is AI.

[00:19:04] Karen Daniels (she/her): AI can help us come up with these or identifying these barriers and helping to work with us to develop solutions. If you’re using it correctly, it can be a game changer for your organization. It’s the future, I would think, using AI responsibly, can create really sustainable organizations and organizations that are future proofing themselves.

[00:19:28] Chared Verschuur (she/her): I also agree with that. A lot of people are against AI, but AI is how you use it, right? So the impact that you can create is endless. What’s your vision for a future where businesses lead with equity and purpose?

[00:19:43] Karen Daniels (she/her): My vision is where businesses start to understand that sustainability is not a choice. It is our ticket to the future, because if we’re not building sustainable organizations and taking care of human capital and natural capital, there wouldn’t be anything left for the future. There wouldn’t be businesses and there wouldn’t be markets or businesses. So sustainability is the future.

[00:20:07] And my vision is that organizations can see this more, see how they are impacting and are impacted by natural capital and preserving that. And also how are they impacting human capital and how they need human capital and also start taking care, growing and developing human capital and making sure that they’re taking care of the communities in which they operate and sustaining those communities.

[00:20:33] Chared Verschuur (she/her): Totally agree. Thank you for that. Do you have anything else to add?

[00:20:37] Karen Daniels (she/her): No. And just to thank you for the opportunity to have this discussion with you that’s so close to my heart and that I’m so passionate about.

[00:20:43] Chared Verschuur (she/her): Thank you for your time. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Good Comms podcast. I hope you found our conversation with Karen insightful and inspiring. Karen’s perspective on inclusive leadership and social sustainability reminds us of the power of equity and belonging in shaping a better future for our organizations, our communities and beyond.

[00:21:05] If you’d like to learn more about Karen’s work, visit Ethical Edge Advisory or connect with her on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to share this episode with someone who might benefit from these ideas and let us know your thoughts by leaving a review or reaching out on LinkedIn or via chared@goodcomms.nl.

[00:21:24] Make sure to subscribe to the Good Comms Podcast for more conversations like this. Until next time, remember, inclusive leadership isn’t just an ideal, it’s a practice that starts with each of us. Thanks for listening. This is Chared Verschuur, podcasting for Good Comms.