Nimesh Patel

I've always felt that we're trying to make a change in our organisation, but a change, I think, across business more generally in the UK. And ultimately, we'd love to see this be global. We do that better when we do it together, when we learn from each other, we learn what works, but also what doesn't work. We are honest about the challenges we face. We lean into the fixes for those challenges.

Which may go from how do we feel about hybrid working? How does hybrid-working impact differently between men and women? What are the opportunities that hybrid-working bring to us as well as how do we compensate for the fact that we need people to spend time together to, collaborate, to have an exchange of ideas. How do we get the best out of that? It's just one example of where working together with other organisations and understanding their perspectives around it can be brilliant. Another one is developing talent in STEM. So what can we collectively do to encourage more women into engineering, more graduate engineers into our businesses? How can we develop digital skills?

We do them better when we do them together. And so, from my perspective, that was one of the reasons we joined 25x25. Because we can see the impact we can have by these organisations such as the ones that are your sponsors, your ambassadors coming together, to champion what we're trying to achieve with better gender representation and equality across business.

And it's the same reason why I wanted to chair the FTSE Women Leaders Review alongside Penny James, who is fantastic and our new CEO in Vivienne Artz. And again, it's the same kind of philosophy. It's advocacy for, what we're all seeking to achieve. It's sharing best practice. It's sharing some of the challenges. It's learning from each other. And it's supporting that with research.

I grew up in Croydon in South London, and it's fair to say it was a very different environment and time to where I find myself now. I did go to university, and from university I did a short stint with the Bank of England, and then I later went into investment banking.

And what really struck me when I started in investment banking in particular was how different that world was to the world that I was familiar with and the world that I'd come from. And that was a difficult thing for me in my twenties, with no one in my family who had any experience of that different world.

It was a difficult thing to navigate. And the way in which I coped with it was I reached the conclusion that the best way to thrive in that environment was to try and be like everybody else. And I think that's probably a common story that you'd hear from lots of people who come from different backgrounds and find themselves in an environment that they're unfamiliar with. You look around at what makes people successful, and you look to emulate that.

It wasn't until years afterwards when I was working with leaders who were more open to embracing diverse perspectives within their team, more open to different styles of working, more encouraging of people to bring their genuine authentic selves to the workplace.

And actually, one of the big things for me was moving into this organisation, the Spirax Group, where just meeting my colleagues around the world and being a very international group with people from so many different backgrounds, I started to feel much more comfortable. And I felt a genuine sense of belonging that allowed me to be myself.

And together with my colleagues now as I experience that in my own way within our organisation, I have that sense of people bringing more creative ideas to every conversation rooted in their perspectives of the world, their personal experiences, their strengths, but also being prepared to be more open about their weaknesses, the things they don't see, and more welcoming of other people filling in those gaps.