2 minute read
Trailblazer Elba Pareja-Gallagher
ELBA
Sustainability director, UPS
Pareja-Gallagher
Elba Pareja-Gallagher is the Founder of UPS Trailblazers, which makes her inclusion in this month’s Trailblazer even more fitting. Now more than 8,200 members strong, the group works to advocate, educate and innovate for environmental, social and governance (ESG) causes around the globe.
Elba is a bilingual finance and strategy professional and leader with more than 20 years of broad experience in finance, investor relations, marketing and strategy. She has also lived as an expat in Singapore and Hong Kong.
An APICS Certified Supply Chain Professional, Elba holds a Master’s of Science degree in Supply Chain Management.
She has long been an enthusiastic champion for change and for finding new ways of thinking about problems.
As such, Elba applies Blue Ocean Strategy principles to building business cases with cross-functional partners, innovating with a mindset for shareholder value creation.
“I advocate for the use of the three E principles of fair process to build execution into strategy: Engagement, Explanation and Expectation clarity. People’s minds and hearts must align with a new strategy so they carry out not just the letter, but the spirit of corporate initiatives,” she says.
Elba believes in the power of diversity and inclusion to harness the creativity of all levels and generations of employees.
She also practises Blue Ocean Leadership. There are four pillars to this:
• Focus on acts and activities
• Connect leadership to market realities by engaging people who confront them
• Distribute leadership across different management levels
• Pursue high-impact leadership acts and activities at low cost.
Elba’s motivations in her current role and position
Elba has a passion for sustainability and for helping people develop their leadership skills. This enthusiasm is the foundation for the UPS Sustainability Trailblazer, giving UPSers the tools, resources and inspiration to be agents of change.
The bigger picture
Change often starts with one person’s vision, but Elba – as UPS’s sustainability director of stakeholder engagement – knows it takes
a multitude of like-minded people to solve big problems.
“There’s power in numbers,” she says, “and our vision is to have 540,000 incredibly motivated UPSers driving awareness and innovation by actively advocating for sustainability.”
Elba helped launch UPS Sustainability Trailblazers in 2021 to advance UPS’s bold ESG goals. She counts getting the programme up and running during a pandemic as the first of many successes to come. And, like all great Trailblazers, she isn’t talking about her own.
“There’s a collective force that comes from bringing diverse mindsets together,” she says. “It’s an energy that generates ideas and solutions on how we can protect our environment, eliminate waste, save money and create new products and services.”
What’s new
The UPS Sustainability Trailblazers, an ESG employee ambassador programme, is upping the game to drive change. The sub-committee, Trees a Crowd, is utilising a UPS crowdsourcing tool called Think Tank, offering employees an easy way to submit sustainable ideas.
