The Sustainability Champion: Isabela del Alcázar

Isabela del Alcázar, Chief Sustainability Officer at IE University

Isabela del Alcázar, Chief Sustainability Officer at IE University

Isabela del Alcázar knows that a smile can often reflect quiet resistance. When she became the global head of sustainability at Spain’s IE University in October of 2019, Alcázar witnessed many smiles as she began proselytizing the need for sustainable practices in everything at the university.

“No one said no,” she recalls in an interview with Poets&Quants at last month’s Global Sustainable Development Congress in Bangkok. “Everyone smiled but everyone did not necessarily act immediately.”

As metrics were put in place to create accountability and track progress, the laggards quickly fell into line. “The good thing is that as we measured, we could go back to someone and say, ‘Ok, you are not doing this.'”

IE UNIVERSITY TRACKS 254 METRICS IN ITS SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVE

Passionate, creative and driven, Alcázar favors an inclusive and collaborative approach to sustainability. She listens to others, solicits their ideas, and puts them into action. That is the only way, she says, you achieve true transformation. A top-down approach doesn’t work. It is important that this is a collaborative effort and you listen to their input,” she says. “Many times I might say this is easy or the solution is this way.  And you start talking to a person and they say, ‘Yes. I hear you but there is this and that.’ I don’t know the tensions that they are living every day. So if you want to change anything, you need to engage them. After two or three years, if you don’t see results then you come up with a policy,” she says. “But it is much better if there is a real transformation with beliefs.”

Five years into the initiative, IE University is among the world leaders in sustainability. It takes both a broad and deep approach to sustainability, incorporating environmental, social and governance issues in defining sustainable practices. Today, the school boasts 254 performance indicators that range from  energy consumption to the number of women in an educational program. IE even tracks the salary gap between women and men and, perhaps not surprisingly, measure the sustainability content in just about every course taught at the university.

Alcázar’s results are impressive. Last year, IE University was recognized as one of the first carbon neutral universities in Europe. It reduced its scope 1 and 2 CO2 equivalent emissions by 50% through a mix of larger institutional initiatives and the combined efforts of 1,300 employees and more than 8,000 students. Things like remotely shutting down computers at 10 p.m., training people to turn off machines and equipment when not in use, switching servers to the cloud, and only buying Amazon Web Services which uses 100% renewable energy. The university has also reduced its use of paper consumption by a remarkable 98%. Some 35% of the faculty is now involved in teaching and researching courses or sessions on sustainability, a vast improvement from the three profs who were in the area five years ago.

‘SUSTAINABILITY IS ABOUT ADAPTING TO CHANGE’

Her efforts have won praise from the Financial Times annual global MBA rankings. In 2023, when the British newspaper first ranked schools on carbon footprint, IE was in second place. This year, IE ranked third best in the world. The school has done even better on ESG, ranking first in the FT in the last two years.

To Alcázar,  sustainability is about adapting to change and remaining relevant. “ESG is a framework to understand what are your dependencies and your vulnerabilities and to transform them into understanding who you are and how you relate to society and the environment.”

Her devotion to both the cause and the university is a natural outgrowth of her upbringing and a personal desire to have impact on a world her three children will inherit. Her father, Diego del Alcázar y Silvela, founded IE Business School with a group of entrepreneurs in 1973. Her brother, Diego del Alcázar Benjumea, is the CEO of the university. With a PhD in molecular biology and a Master’s in biotechnology management, she brings to the job experience as an entrepreneur who can seamlessly blend science with high-level management skills.

‘I HAVE BEEN LINKED TO THE UNIVERSITY ALL MY LIFE’

“I have been linked to the university all my life,” says Alcázar. “This is more personal, and this has been my life for the last five years. I realized there were things we were doing inside the whole organization that amounted to confused messages. The narrative wasn’t permanent. People inside the organization thought of sustainability differently. One school may be linked to sustainability through the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Other schools were thinking that sustainability was linked to the environment. Others thought it was linked to the social side. As an organization, there wasn’t a plan. I decided that if you think you can do it, you come and do it.”

And that is exactly what she did. After a series of jobs, including being CEO of a drug delivery startup, Alcázar joined IE in 2019 to take on the sustainability challenge. “I like to look at things that are complex, analyze the parts individually and extract the dynamics,” she says. That is an assessment I like doing. Actually, I have done that all my life, as a scientist and as an entrepreneur.”

Alcázar dove in. “The first approach was analyzing what was there and identifying who were the leaders in each department, what were their initiatives and understanding the IE culture. This is very important when it comes to change management and becoming sustainable. You need to understand culture. It was a challenge, but it turned out to be an opportunity because everyone at IE is entrepreneurial so it was like perfect. How would you make sustainability a focus in your school and improve your methods? Each unit defined different performance indicators.”

‘COVID WAS A GREAT ALLY TO US’

And then the pandemic hit, and instead of stalling the effort, COVID accelerated the initiative. “COVID was a good ally for us,” she believes. “Suddenly there was a lot of talk about climate change and reducing activities was in the mission. People had more time to think about collective action. It was an amazing time for us, sustainability wise. I do think there was a transformation after COVID. We also got some very good results with sustainability content in the FT rankings.”

The institution reduced its emissions, electricity consumption, and refrigerant gases by 50% in 2020-21, and the faculty rose to the challenge as well, creating courses and class sessions on sustainability and ESG topics. Students now participate in sustainability initiatives across the university through a Social Impact Lab, which supports social enterprises in South Africa and Spain with consulting projects, and the IE Net Impact Club which aims to raise awareness, inspire and train the IE community to promote socially responsible business management. An IE Alumni Sustainability Club promotes awareness of the United Nations SDGs. The IE Social Responsibility Forum brings together senior executives to discuss the challenges of CSR. And among other events, the university now holds an annual IE Sustainability Week, in which the planet, the circular economy and social volunteering centered the debate on campus. The school also launched a new master’s program in Sustainability & Business Transformation.

“At the end of the day, I take a systems thinking approach,” she explains. “You break it down into more simple nodes that you can tackle. Those are the different units inside the organization that have embraced the transformation. Yes, it takes a lot of time to talk to everyone in an organization and understand how they can participate. At first, it’s hard work to talk to people and listen to their proposals. We did take some time for this because we wanted to be authentic, and we still have to do a lot of work.  Sometimes you forget about certain KPIs and you have to go back and look at the basics. But the truth is now and last year was a very good year because we have been measuring these KPIs for four years now and you start seeing evolution and you can share with everyone how the efforts are real and showing result and transformation.” 

‘WE WANT TO MOLD OUR STUDENTS SO THEY ARE PREPARED FOR THE WORLD’

Her title changed from global head of sustainability to chief purpose and sustainability officer in 2022 to reflect the broader definition of sustainability. “We want to mold our students so they are prepared for the world,” says Alcázar. “We want to transform them as citizens of this world. We have a purpose as a university to pursue positive change through education and research. I want to empower everyone at IE to go out and do good things and change. That is why everything had to go together. If you only talk about purpose, some people don’t understand and see a lack of connection with sustainability. It’s a very long title but sometimes it helps to be specific and not abstract.”

Consider her objective to recruit more women for IE’s finance program. “How do you solve it? Is it a problem from our admissions department? Or is is that we need more scholarships for women? Could be. Now we have that. It’s many different units working toward one common goal. You can imagine that it is a coordinated effort. It is a complex issue but with ideas from different people and more scholarships, it can be solved.”

That approach requires patience. “You have to be very patient,” she confirms. “The most frustrating thing of all is bottles of water at events. It’s just a simple thing to change. But aesthetics are important. We don’t believe so much in imposing. Sometimes I have students who say, ‘Why don’t you ban plastic inside the campus?’ And maybe that is something we will eventually do. If you put limits, you can nudge it. But you shouldn’t be banning.  

THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN WHAT PEOPLE THINK AND WHAT THEY DO

“There is a disconnection between what you think and what you do. It’s about making choices. If you are banning, you are not allowing someone to make a choice. And the second issue is that often times we believe it is up to others to solve a problem. It’s up to the government or the oil and gas companies. But we are also part of the problem. The problem is not BP or Shell because they are selling to people like me so I am also part of the problem and I have to realize that. That is why I think the messages need to be clear that the analysis is not so simple. They are not little kids. I cannot be banning.”

One thing is certain: sustainability is a work in progress. It is not a done deal at IE or anywhere. “For me,” Alcázar says, “my next step is to more deeply engage the community with purpose. Now there is a little bit of a disconnect. I don’t have that in the depth I would like. It’s there but it is not deep enough. We are putting in place actions to build on top of. But now there needs to be full integration so that what we say is what we believe in. This way the empowerment to drive this change will be much more robust.”

At IE, these days, a smile isn’t about resistance. It reflects the school’s progress toward its ambitious sustainability goals.

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