Over the past few weeks, my view on communication as key to team success has expanded. Normally, team structure in the corporate world takes a hierarchical positioning – with a project manager, client liaison, deliverable editor, among other responsibilities. However, based on the transparency of our team, we settled on a flat structure by building on our strengths and availabilities instead to perform a particular task – and it has made all the difference. This structure entails that we have an open and honest communication about which tasks need to be completed and who is willing to do it given their interests and abilities, thus, ensuring that everyone feels fulfilled. Although it works well for us, I am aware that it may not be suitable for all scenarios granted that personalities and emotions may cloud engagements leading to a sour team dynamic but it is worthwhile exploring the strengths of a flat structure.
I also find this communicative adaptability to be useful in our client engagement. Our client was open to discovering the type of research which the team was excited about. In order for it to be a win-win situation, our research needed to be value-adding to the client defined as being on a topic that they had not previously published, as well as value-adding to our team defined as taking a topic that is valuable to the sustainable investment world as a whole. As a result, we performed a literature review on gender bond financing in emerging markets and realized that the preliminary assumption of only exploring the gender component of green bond financing was limiting if we wanted to provide actual improvement of gender bond financing. Thus, we realized that we needed to explore the labelled and unlabeled sustainable bond financing; to investigate the extent of which the output of gender financing was lacking rather than reducing the sample size based on the ICMA sustainable bond eligibility criteria. Thus, our research morphed into a scoping review where we would explore the challenges, risks and research gaps on gender financing in emerging markets – thus a win as defined by what is important for both our team and the client.