Michael Nates

As an Executive Director, Management Consultant and Leadership Coach, Michael has 30 years of expertise in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and sustainability, focusing on organizational growth and transformation, pragmatic risk management, cross-cultural dynamics, leadership and team capacity building. He has directed and developed multiple strategies, policies, management frameworks and training initiatives across various sectors from conception to implementation.

Trained as a Mechanical Engineer and with a Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA), he has worked in corporate, consultancy and NGO roles. Michael has been awarded Fellow status of IEMA and IIRSM and is a Chartered Environmentalist and registered on the UK Occupational Health and Safety Register. He is a certified Executive Coach with a proven track record of developing and scaling teams to match aggressive targets. One of his core strengths is his focus on practical and people-centric solutions which he accomplishes by integrating his technical, management and social competencies.  

Successes and key skills are:

• Coaching, empowering and enabling executives and teams to reflect upon their strategic business and ESG perceptions as a precursor to challenging and transforming their sustainability performance
• Synthesizing, sense making and sense giving to complex business challenges notably sustainability and low carbon agendas
• Providing long term critical thought leadership on sustainability and CSR issues
• Conceiving and delivering award-winning business transformation and ESG strategies and performance
• Combined professional and management expertise that drives communication and practical leadership from team and technical management up to Board level

Over his extensive career, Michael has worked across a wide variety of sectors including finance, and insurance, power and renewable energy, industrial and engineering, petrochem, O&G, construction, built environment and real estate, transport, manufacturing, pharma, education, and professional services.  

Michael is multi-cultural, having worked for several years in Southern Africa, the UK and MENA. He has a deep understanding of the nuances required to be effective in cross cultural contexts and has provided several training seminars to support multi-national clients’ teams.

In short, Michael is a Professional ESG & Sustainability Generalist with a suite of management and technical experience that enables him to coach and lead organizations of financial, technical and content specialists to deliver demanding business goals, transformation and growth in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.