Elise Gautier

Elise Gautier: Managing Sustainability to Enable the Circular Economy

Elise Gautier serves as the Chief Risk and Sustainability Officer at Sims Limited. This Australian-listed company specializes in buying, processing, and selling ferrous and non-ferrous recycled metals and end-of-life management and recovery of electronics. The company plans to expand its waste-to-energy operations to close its and others' material loops. As a critical member of the Sims executive management team, Elise is responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining company-wide programs related to risk, ethics & compliance, Environment, Health & Safety (EH&S), and sustainability to achieve the company's strategic objectives and establish Sims as a critical enabler of the circular economy.

Elise has over two decades of global work experience in the industry and consultative services. Before joining Sims Limited, she was a partner at a consultancy firm that specialized in providing internal audit and risk management services. While working in consulting, Elise held leadership positions and played a crucial role in developing the consultancy's offshore practice in India. She also played various finance roles at multinational manufacturing companies in France and the United States. Elise graduated from the French Business School, l’Institut Européen d’études Commerciales Supérieures de Strasbourg (IECS).Recently, she relocated from the United States to Sydney, Australia following the relocation of Sims Limited Global Headquarters.

Leading by Example to Foster Success

Elise describes her leadership style as inclusive and leading by example. Elise’s approach, according to her, is result-driven and always follows her plan. She has a clear vision of where she wants to take her team, which serves as a basis for setting annual or multi-year goals and targets. She encourages her team to participate and share their opinions, knowing their views are important and will be heard. Elise is dedicated to empowering her team to succeed and to be the best they can be. She leads by example, and Elise believes in hands-on experience when needed, working alongside the team to overcome challenges and meet deadlines. Elise supports her team, removing obstacles, providing direction, and working towards solutions with them.

Delivering Consulting Services with Pride

Elise gained valuable lessons from her experience in the consulting world, including the importance of urgency, professionalism, and keeping the end goal in mind. She also learned the significance of taking pride in one's work and seeking feedback from others to improve the final product or solution. In the industry, she developed pragmatism and a keen eye for implementing sustainable solutions within an organization while recognizing the crucial role of change management. Through her work on multiple continents, she came to appreciate the value of understanding diverse perspectives and business cultures, which she believes is vital for successful business outcomes. Elise also believes achieving success requires adapting and changing one's leadership style to fit different contexts.

Embracing New Experiences and Perspectives

Elise has learned and continues to learn from everyone she has worked with professionally, taking traits and characteristics from them and blending them into her leadership style. She interacts with various individuals, including board members, CEOs, fellow executives, team members, and other professionals. Elise also values having a trusted group of friends and professionals as a sounding board. Her commitment to continuous learning from others is critical to her personal and professional growth.

Impacting the Industry with a Unique Vision

The company Sims Limited aims to create a world without waste to preserve the planet, contends Elise. The business is focused on delivering circular solutions for a sustainable, low-carbon economy that emphasizes the importance of keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible. Maximizing scrap inputs is crucial to reducing emissions and achieving a low-carbon infrastructure for emissions-intensive industries like steel, aluminum, and other metal-producing sectors. Sims Limited supplies these industries with scrap metal inputs through its business division Sims Metal. In FY22, Sims diverted over 9.7 million tonnes of metal from landfills and redirected them to various mills. This represents a significant step towards circularity, as the diverted metals could be reused instead of producing new metals. Sims Lifecycle Business (SLS), which offers global IT asset disposal and electronics recycling services to enterprises and data centers, repurposed 2.7 million cloud units in FY22, keeping them in circulation for as long as possible. The repurposing process of the SLS involves taking whole devices like laptops and server racks, data wiping, testing, cleaning, and redeploying them either within the customer's own business or reselling them for their original use to extend their lifespan. If the entire unit is inappropriate, parts such as memory chips, hard drives, and server blades are harvested to reuse or upgrade other units.The company is strongly committed to improving our world, with a particular focus on sustainability.

As part of the company's leadership team, Elise's role is to ensure that the necessary frameworks and processes are in place to meet the company's strategic goals and live up to its purpose. This involves assessing and managing risk in terms of potential downsides and opportunities for upside and keeping a close eye on emerging trends and changes in the business landscape. Through providing guidance and insights, Elise supports the company in achieving its strategic objectives and building resilience for the future.

She takes great pride in the recognitions and accolades that Sims Limited has received. The company was recognized by Corporate Knights as a top 100 global sustainability company, named by Newsweek as one of America's Most Responsible Companies, and acknowledged as a leader in Climate Change disclosure with a score of A- by CDP, to name a few.

Elise makes a difference by focusing on actions that help the organization succeed. This includes keeping up to date with trends in her areas of responsibility, formalizing and developing processes, and ensuring transparency and focus on matters important to stakeholders. Although some of these actions may be considered basic requirements, Elise understands that discipline is necessary to implement them effectively. With the help of her team, she strives to achieve great work and outcomes.

Overcoming Initial Challenges in a Diverse Portfolio

As the portfolio of disciplines overseen by Elise is quite diverse, one of her initial challenges was to build sufficient knowledge and expertise in the various fields under her responsibility, including EH&S, Sustainability Ethics & Compliance. Her background is in risk management, internal audit, and finance/accounting.

To bring it back to risk management: Risk management is sometimes more of an art than hard facts. It is about anticipating what could go wrong and negatively impact the company's strategy, but also understanding what could limit seizing opportunities. Quantifying and measuring risks accurately can be difficult. It also deals with the likelihood of an event or uncertainty materializing itself.

While everyone manages risks daily, risk professionals sometimes make it more complex than it needs to be through complicated terms or complex process when risk management should be embedded in how the business runs and focus on risks material to the strategy pursued.

Encouraging Collaboration in Achieving Common Goals

Elise emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, humility, and empathy for leaders. Leaders must understand their strengths and weaknesses and how they impact others. Equally important is understanding the team and what motivates them to build trust and get the best out of them. Genuine interest in team members is necessary for this. Elise believes humility is essential, and leaders should acknowledge that the team's success depends on everyone's contributions.

Communication is another crucial skill for leaders. Listening is essential to encourage discussion and build trust. Leaders should have a clear vision and convey it, along with the strategy to execute it, to motivate their team and others to follow them. It is also important to communicate expectations, address issues and conflicts, and keep things moving in the right direction.

Continuous learning is a necessary trait of successful leaders. Leaders should adapt to new situations, learn from mistakes, seek feedback, and inspire others to keep learning and adapting. Elise had to acquire new knowledge and skills when taking on new responsibilities. The pandemic has also forced everyone to adjust to new working methods, which requires agility. She firmly believes that integrity is a fundamental attribute of successful leaders. Without integrity, leaders have nothing.

Leaders’ Role to Drive Long-Lasting Change

Elise feels a deep sense of privilege to work for an organization with a vital purpose - to create a world without waste and preserve the planet. She is grateful for the opportunity to influence the organization's actions, drive change, and make a positive impact. As a leader, Elise places great importance on having a clear vision of what the organization can aspire to achieve and working towards it. She believes in setting clear goals so that her team has a sense of direction and can work towards a common objective. Elise is committed to empowering, supporting, and collaborating with her team to enable each member to realize their full potential.

Balancing Priorities and Advice for Emerging Business Leaders

Elise believes that the key to success in business is to love what you do, persevere, and have fun doing it. She emphasizes the importance of staying focused on what matters for the company’s success and working towards executing the company's strategy. Elise believes bringing the team along and collaborating effectively to achieve goals is essential. She encourages emerging business leaders to be bold and not hesitate to try new things or propose new ideas. Elise believes that a willingness to innovate and take calculated risks can help companies stay ahead in today's rapidly evolving business landscape.

Management: Elise Gautier, Chief Risk, and Sustainability Officer

Website: https://www.simsltd.com/