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Ep 1: Tabitha Scott on Leading Sustainability in Construction
17 Plays7 months ago
In the debut episode of Sustainability Square 1, Tabitha Scott, Executive Sustainability Officer at Gilbane Build Company, joins GLYNT.AI’s CEO Martha Amram for an engaging conversation on leading sustainability in the construction industry. From her path in finance to green building to the challenges of aligning teams on data and impact, Tabitha dives deep into what it takes to build sustainable systems. Listen to hear her strategic views on balancing compliance with meaningful change — and discover what drives her commitment to sustainable development in the built environment.
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Transcript
From CEO to Sustainability Advocate
00:00:00
Speaker
what what
00:00:07
Speaker
Thanks, Tamitha, for joining me on a video interview for our series, Sustainability Square One. And we'd just love to ask you a few questions about you know your life in sustainability. So let's start from the origin story, like what brought you into this field?
00:00:22
Speaker
I got to it in kind of a roundabout way. I was CEO of a small electronic payments company and we did military housing payments. We moved the rent payments from military members to private developers who were going in and renovating and building green housing for military service members and their families.
00:00:44
Speaker
And so the clients that I was working with were large development companies, construction companies that were doing green buildings. And I thought, wow, if I could do something really interesting, I think I would love to do something more around energy reduction and clean energy development.
Leveraging Financial Skills in Sustainability
00:01:05
Speaker
And so I ended up going to work for one of my clients and working four years and then a different one and working for eight years. And both of them were based overseas where we had carbon taxes. And so we had to count our carbon. We had to count our energy and really measure what we were doing because it was part of their regulatory requirements.
00:01:28
Speaker
So having that occurred over an 18 year span and now the United States with the SEC legislation with California regulations, it's really starting to catch up with the rest of the developed world with tracking of carbon and carbon reduction and what that means for organizations here and their value chains. So I kind of came into it in an indirect way. I was very interested in it.
00:01:54
Speaker
And I believe having a financial background and leadership background really gave me an advantage in working with sustainability because some Americans still think climate change is a ruse. They you know are kind of turned off by the whole notion of carbon and carbon reduction. And so being able to speak to leadership in a way that um talks about value adding flexibility, agility as an organization. That's what everybody's concerned about.
Role at Gilbane and the AAA Framework
00:02:25
Speaker
So it's really important that sustainability leaders get back to the basics and think about how does this help your business move forward.
00:02:34
Speaker
We see that a lot too. And um so now that if you want to tell us a little about about where you're at and who you report to, it might bring those threats together. Yeah, where I am now, I'm executive sustainability officer for Gilbane, which is a large 154 year old company that is owned by the Gilbane family. And it was started many, many years ago in Providence, Rhode Island.
00:03:01
Speaker
and has grown into an $8 billion plus organization. And where we are, like many American companies, is we are at the beginning of a journey of starting to measure everything. In my last book, Powering Change, I talked about the AAA framework and its assess.
00:03:22
Speaker
You have to know what you're using. You know you can't improve it anything if you're not measuring it. So assess, align, adapt. And so aligning is the next step where you get your culture transformation going. You make sure leadership understands the new regulations, what's happening, why we should do it, both for heart and mind. One doesn't work with some groups. The other doesn't work with other groups.
00:03:47
Speaker
And so assess, align, adapt. um It's a journey. It's not a sprint. It's a marathon. And so you're constantly iterating. You're constantly adapting. And I know as a software provider, as a solution provider in this industry, it's the absolute wild west right now in the United States. It's gone from maybe 1,000 offerings to over 4,000, I think they said, at at Climate Week.
00:04:13
Speaker
um So it's just this wild west mess.
Cross-Department Collaboration Challenges
00:04:17
Speaker
And so as an organization, you have to really be thinking about how am I assessing, aligning my team members and my colleagues, and then adapt, adapt, adapt as you go.
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, I did not realize there were 4,000. That's sort of a mind-numbingly big. But when you think about who you need to explain your data, your software to, who is that person in your company right now? That's the first first party of your explanation. And then I'm going to come back to the team nature.
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, explaining the software and the tracking component, it's really a broad mix of people that are stakeholders in the organization. Of course, you have the CTO, the CIO, the folks that are running the technology group, because whatever you do needs to be cleared through them, it needs to be secure, and it needs to have their wisdom involved.
00:05:05
Speaker
But you also need to be working with your CFO. You need to be working with your accounting teams because we need to track. We need to have ways of flagging these invoices in our system. So you need to be working with your legal team because they need to know what regulations are coming down um the pipeline. So it's really a cross-functional piece. And then you need to work with your COO and your operations because, of course, they have to execute this on your job sites.
Construction Challenges and Net-Zero Goals by 2040
00:05:34
Speaker
Now I'm working in the construction industry right now. And so that, you know, unique to us, we don't have like a standard building where you can just stick a meter on it and it's going to be there for 20 years. We have a very moving and fluid process where we might build for two years and then the next project we might be building for five years. And so there's a lot of complexity added in the construction and development sector.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yes, we often see that the data management system is only as good as its change cycles. And instruction, I guess, would be the litmus test of constantly changing in and out with data set and so on. So what do you think would be a big win for you and your position over the next 18 months? And then what is the bigger win over the next five years?
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think the short-term win in 18 months is getting a real handle on assessing. We need to measure everything, and we need to get that organized. If you looked at the sustainability journey as kind of a maturity matrix, at the very bottom is getting organized. Where's my data? And it's enterprise data that we need. So getting organized, getting procedures and process in place, that's the win over the next 18 months.
00:06:52
Speaker
um Those procedures are going to require working with people using hearts and minds, you know, both. What's the business advantage? Why should we be doing this as an organization? Why should I care? So making sure to answer those questions along the way. Then beyond 18 month horizon, the longer term strategy is to start getting serious about where's our carbon coming from. Now most companies 90 to 95% is gonna be scope three. So that's by subcontractors that are producing those emissions. So I need to go upstream, start working with suppliers, start looking at the materials, decarbonize the materials we choose, really get sticky about our waste. We don't wanna produce or purchase anything extra that we don't have to. So that will take us through 2040 where we have a net zero commitment by 2040.
00:07:45
Speaker
for waste and greenhouse gases so that's very ambitious to be in the built sector. um So long term it's going to be this long journey of working with subcontractors and it's it's complex. If you think about a company that has 800 job sites at any given time with 800 sets of different subcontractors It's not like you can go create you know a few different strategic relationships. It gets very complex. And so long-term, it's just going through that complexity journey and working with our supply chain upstream, working with our clients downstream to find unique financial models that are going to help them use these more sustainable products, track things and keep tracking it after we
Regenerative Building and Blue Ocean Strategy
00:08:32
Speaker
leave. It's a habit we want to kickstart and then pass on to our clients and customers.
00:08:39
Speaker
That's a huge yet ambition and agenda. And so typically the next question would be, what keeps you up at night? But I want to turn it around and say, what motivates you to get up in the morning? Because you know you have an awesome, pretty pretty awesome opportunity.
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah, it is an awesome opportunity what motivates me to get up in the morning and the reason that I went back into big corporate after leaving it was complete burnout at the end of 2016 working with sustainability. I came back because this is an opportunity to do something really special with a very special company.
00:09:13
Speaker
And what I mean by that is they're privately held. um They are very interested in building regeneratively. So we say building more than buildings, and they actually mean it. So making each place better, it's like in sustainability, the common thing to say is like do no harm in safety. you know do know What is that? Don't kill anybody, right?
00:09:38
Speaker
um that We need to think bigger than that, especially as a country. We need to think beyond just, let's just do no harm and then we can wash our hands of this. We need to take responsibility. We need to build regeneratively. And I'm very excited about if we can figure out the financial models, if we can do this as an American then we share it. Sustainability is one of those aspects of business. It's more of the blue ocean strategy instead of the red ocean strategy. And what I mean by that is like the more you give it away, the more you share with each other your ideas, the more everybody wins versus, you know, this is competitive, you know, tight-lipped information that we need to hide from everyone else. Sustainability is not like that. So I love that attribute of it.
00:10:28
Speaker
I love working with other companies in our sector and sharing ideas. And I think we're all as a society, as an industry. This is a huge opportunity for a pivot point. The construction sector is almost 40% of global emissions. We're a third of global waste. Like where else would I want to be if I want to help Mother Nature get back in balance with you know these parasitic humans?
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, you know I'm right there with you with aren't we lucky to have a seat on the front edge with clay in our hands and a white space in front of us. um It's very fortunate and we can make that difference. you know the world like Hey, thanks for tuning in to Sustainability Square One. If today's insights sparked ideas, share the episode and subscribe for more conversations with sustainability leaders committed to transparency and impact.