How the arrest of 30 activists refocused Greenpeace’s people policy
There can be few more terrifying phone calls for an HR department to receive than the one Greenpeace answered on 19 September 2013. An entire crew of its activists had been detained by the Russian authorities on the Barents Sea while staging a protest against drilling in the region. Later dubbed the ‘Arctic 30’, they were charged with piracy and taken, with their ship, to the port of Murmansk.
Their fate became an international cause. But for Janet Dalziell, the conservation charity’s director of HR and global development, it was uncomfortably local. Those charged were a mix of professional crew and staff, volunteers, part-time activists and media professionals, some of whom spent more than three months in custody before being released.
“An incident like that gives you a bit of a fright,” says Dalziell. “And that’s an understatement.” But it also underlines the unusual challenge of leading HR in the organisation: “Across the globe, we need a really professional structure, but at the same time we are doing activities that run the risk of people ending up in prison. Obviously, we hadn’t planned for anything as extreme as this, but in our history we have had incidents like this and will continue to have them.”
Dalziell began working at Greenpeace not long after the bombing of its first ship, the Rainbow Warrior, in 1985, during which a photographer was killed. She spent almost 20 years coordinating campaigns before becoming head of HR in 2009 and later assuming responsibility for a new global strategy and worldwide HR operations.
Her front-line experience has taught her the importance of clear communication with personnel, she says. “One of the most important things for the organisation is: do people really know what they are signing up for? How do we make sure participation in an activity is really voluntary, even if you’re on staff, and that they understand the full implications of what that means?”
But as someone who helped document the dramatic loss of ice shelves in the Antarctic first hand, Dalziell is equally clear about the imperative for action. “Climate change is an existential threat to life as we know it. Life on earth will be fine – it just won’t be very pleasant,” she says.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents 95 countries, issued a ‘final warning’ to governments to act in November, and called for an end to the global reliance on fossil fuels by 2100 – with catastrophic consequences should they fail.
Dalziell says: “We think that creating the change that’s needed now is going to take the involvement of billions of people. We’re talking about needing a billion acts of courage to create the change that confronts the status quo.”
To encourage and enable these acts, she says, Greenpeace needs to extend its reach. Her new global people strategy is key to achieving this. But what can HR do to ensure Greenpeace triumphs amid such alarmingly high stakes?
Value volunteers
Greenpeace has 2,500 staff worldwide but its 18,000-plus volunteers remain integral to its campaigning power. While HR manages employee needs, activists and volunteers have traditionally been coordinated by various departments and locations. The new global strategy emphasises the increasing importance of volunteers, says Dalziell: “It’s one of the reasons the organisation is regularising its systems, not in terms of operational HR, but so we think about people in the same way. For example, we want to have the same value proposition for volunteers as staff – which is why we call it a people value proposition, not an employee one.”
Full-time talent often emerges from a volunteering route: Dalziell began her own career after being a student activist. The organisation wants to attract people who understand campaigning, she says. “We need people who understand the dynamics of politics, media and social media, people’s emotions and the science behind it all. They need to know how the system works, so they can subvert it. It’s not anything that gets taught in universities, which is why I call it a mentality or a mindset. It’s not a trade.”
That means looking beyond the traditional graduate routes, and emphasising diversity, she adds: “We want to find and recruit unusual people in all communities.”
Commonality helps talent
Unlike multinationals, the campaigning NGO is a federated organisation. It means that each of the 27 national and regional offices have their own governance and executive structures – and their own separate HR systems.
That makes talent mobility difficult, says Dalziell. “None of our offices are big enough for a really long career path, but being an international organisation means there are other opportunities that may not be vertical but that represent new challenges.”
Dalziell is working with colleagues to decide how much standardisation is needed to make global moves easier. That might mean a global salary and benefits strategy (“As we move people around more and more, it’s become obvious that some offices just can’t take people from elsewhere because the pay cut is too big, even when you take local markets into account”) but whatever happens, nobody can mandate change from above.
“It’s about persuading people that even though their system might be perfect for them, it would be better for the whole organisation if they took a bit of a reduction in what they consider perfect.”
Leaders are the answer
One of Greenpeace’s largest recent investments has been a new leadership development programme. Dalziell says discussions about strategy revealed “we don’t have reliable leaders coming up through the ranks that we know and invest in.”
Previously, the assumption was that you “kind of knew everybody and that you could pick out talent and pull it up”. But as the organisation looks to grow internationally, Dalziell says Greenpeace needed a more systematic method and understanding of leadership. “When things go wrong in national offices, it’s pretty much always a leadership problem,” she adds.
She put a lot of thought into how to develop “a constituency of ownership around what we define as leadership skills” to ensure success. Senior people are involved in choosing attendees, and an emphasis is placed on strategic relevance. Members of the first cadre of graduates have already been promoted.
Winners take breaks
Responsibility for leadership can’t only lie with a designated talent pool. Dalziell wants Greenpeace to be what she calls a ‘leaderful’ organisation. It means finding a way of describing leadership behaviours that means something to people who may not feel particularly senior. This includes taking responsibility for yourself and your contribution to the organisation, which could mean being more mindful of work-life balance.
“Greenpeace is not typically an organisation that has problems with motivation,” she says. “Our problem is getting people to take breaks and look after themselves.” This has led to what Dalziell calls a ‘macho’ culture, with a focus on actions and the rigours of life on board activist ships.
“It might have been seen as admitting weakness if you said you wanted to get some sleep in the middle of an action. So it’s about getting people to take responsibility for their own energy and input into the team. If they’re getting cranky, they’re not helping anybody by powering through it. Managers can create the right environment.”
The Russians’ seizure of the Arctic Sunrise prompted a review of training and volunteering processes, adds Dalziell. “We made sure that people going on such actions are really volunteers, that we make it genuinely possible for them to pull out. That’s a real challenge on a ship in a remote location.”