TROY COYLE

Motivated metalhead

The same day Troy Coyle was born, her father was killed. In the uneasy years that followed, restlessness drove her mother to move around and the Brisbane-born girl notched up seven primary schools.

Dr Coyle doesn’t really want to go into the details of her father’s death, but it was an unpleasant end he did not choose. And the tragedy propelled her on a path where she picked up influences that moulded her into today’s animal rights advocate, scientist, Heavy Engineering Research Association (HERA) chief executive, vegan, and legal app developer.

‘‘Yes, I have multiple identity crises,’’ she says in the HERA boardroom in South Auckland. ‘‘Where do I call home? What is my skill set? What is my philosophy and ethics?’’

She believes her mother is an atheist who probably identifies as a Quaker and was previously ‘‘a hippie’’. Her paternal grandparents were Catholics, and Coyle, 46, says that element of her upbringing created ‘‘a lot of Catholic guilt’’ that’s taken her a long time to jettison.

The HERA building is in a Manukau subdivision near car yards, car yards, more car yards, 550 metres from a service station where a wire chip stand wedged in front of a restroom door reads ‘‘bathroom closed due to vandalism’’.

The research association’s neighbours include the Salvation Army and a Pentecostal church. In HERA’s unpretentious boardroom, the softly spoken chief executive seems bemused at the mythology and pomposity associated with the CEO acronym. She says the title she holds is not one she long aspired to.

‘‘I wanted to save whales. I have never had a career path. So mentors and managers have struggled with me because I can never tell them exactly where I want to go.’’

In Australia, she studied journalism and communications, then a PhD in marine science, and worked in multiple industrial research, management and innovation roles.

Seven years ago she moved to New Zealand Steel, working in steel innovation and product development. She’s director of dolphin charity Hector’s Protectors, and sits on the board of animal rights group SAFE. She’s also a mother, and is setting up a legal services app called Justly.

‘‘There’s such a mould for people to become a chief executive that I feel like we’re missing out on people who might be just as good, perhaps even better chief executives, because they’re not fitting this mould.’’

Steel is a carbon-hungry business where, in the developed world, labour costs, global trade realignments and soaring Chinese production have hit some businesses hard. Coyle says some heavy engineering and metal industries face cutbacks, layoffs, and trouble recruiting talent and making manufacturing jobs attractive to students.

Globally, the industry is estimated to generate 7 to 9 per cent of all direct fossil fuel emissions, and Coyle says it must confront these. She’s clearly disturbed about the global ecological crisis, with this summer’s Australian bushfires making her wonder if she wanted to stay in Auckland. ‘‘ . . . I had a moment of crisis where I said to my partner: Should I go back to Australia and we can do some work helping in a conservation sense?’’

She says he urged her to think about the impact she could have from inside the industry.

If dairy and steel and Air New Zealand can all make changes, they’re significant changes, she says. ‘‘Whereas me helping a koala, dressing the wound, is not, it’s not enough.’’

HERA gets funding from what she calls a levy on ‘‘basically any steel that would require cranage to move’’ and on welding consumables.

Coking coal is the major source of carbon needed to reduce or ‘‘convert’’ iron ore and produce steel. ‘‘The longterm programme is really to look at an alternative to coal. Coal is used as a reductant, part of the chemistry of steel rather than one of the energy requirements of steel.’’

Coyle says, worldwide, little research into coal alternatives is under way, but exceptions include Victoria University of Wellington. HERA, she says, needs to influence the industry to make short-term changes and not just wait until a holy grail is found. She’s looking at how a carbon-offset programme would work, establishing rules for calculating each steel product’s carbon footprint. Offsetting broadly refers to investment in carbon-reducing projects to compensate for emissions.

Given the variety of steel products, building an offsetting standard could be complex, but HERA is also examining better welding techniques and ways of improving building design and fabrication to minimise waste and maximise steel use.

‘‘Insetting’’ is another approach, where companies cut emissions by making changes to their supply chain. They might use solar panels, plant trees, or otherwise reduce how much their own properties and buildings belch out greenhouse gases.

‘‘Every idea has got its timing. There was quite a bit of focus on sustainability probably seven years ago and it kind of died down because the market interest and the government drivers weren’t really there.’’

But Coyle says with people in 2020 ‘‘starting to tangibly see the impacts of climate change’’, businesses feel a stronger imperative to adapt. New research this year shows companies with lower carbon emissions outperform more carbon-spewing counterparts on the the NZX sharemarket. ‘‘On this carbon issue, for example, I don’t think anyone wants us to say ‘no, steel isn’t a contributor’. They want acknowledgement and a sign the industry is working towards addressing that.’’

Though her personal and conversational style seems unrushed, she worries about a lack of urgency and a disconnect between lawmakers and corporate leaders when it comes to tackling emissions.

‘‘I don’t think any industry or companies are really thinking fast enough. That’s a real challenge for governance.’’

Coyle can push for change, as she moulds HERA into what it calls ‘‘a tribe of engaged metalheads’’. But she still sometimes runs into embedded stereotypes when meeting male business leaders. ‘‘If no-one knows who I am, they will often assume the man I’m with is my manager. I have been to meetings in the US where [men] never shook my hand, never gave me eye contact. Those kind of things really require a lot of resilience, they really make you feel unnoticed.’’

In New Zealand, only about 16 per cent of engineers are women. Across the economy, with the gender pay gap stagnating at close to 10 per cent, and a 2018 study finding ‘‘glacial progress’’ for women on the boards of New Zealand’s biggest companies, women will likely have to work harder and spend longer paying off their student loans than many males competing against them.

She advises women of her generation to think about women in their 20s, and try to support their younger counterparts. To the younger women, a hint of resignation tinges her advice. ‘‘I’d want to say just be yourself and don’t conform. But that’s probably the wrong advice, because they would need probably to conform in order to progress.’’

While diversity measures often highlight race and gender demographics, Coyle says a lack of personality diversity can also hold companies back. She says bosses often don’t value ‘‘people who think a bit differently, and maybe fringe-dwellers who people disregard because sometimes they say something really insightful and sometimes they say something really crazy’’.

Coyle is unconcerned about her legacy, at least in the sense that word is usually understood.

Her view on this might change. Just as a cocktail of influences shaped her early life, her search for truth and meaning continues. ‘‘I’m constantly synthesising ideas from everywhere and then coming up with what I think is my own view.’’

She knows how she doesn’t want to be remembered – as someone who did nothing to stop the world’s biggest problems. But she’s probably not worried about what people other than her son might think when she’s gone.

She visited her father’s grave once. It was confronting, and she does not desire to go back. It’s tough to talk about his death and it can make other people uncomfortable. That tragedy’s impact and influence cannot be ignored, even though many other experiences inform Coyle’s worldview.

‘‘I’ve ever really thought about my legacy. I think it’s part of my dad dying on the day I was born. Looking at that gravestone and seeing your birth date as the day your dad dies, it kind of makes you feel as if you’ve got to have meaning in your life. I’m not going to be happy at the end of my life if I haven’t made some kind of substantial difference that betters the world.

‘‘I don’t care if no-one else notices it but I want to be able to know that I did the best that I

could.’’

‘‘I want to be able to know that I did the best that I could.’’