Mansi Hello and welcome to the latest episode of our COO podcast, ‘The Rise of the COO’, where I welcome chief operating officers to discuss and tackle pressing topics that matter to COOs in today's world. My name is Mansi Patel, and I'm our Capability Sector Leader and COO network sponsor at Baringa. In today's episode, ‘Leading Change’, we delve into the pivotal role COOs play in championing diversity, equity and inclusion within their organizations. I'm really pleased to welcome our guest speaker today, Tim McMahon, Water Managing Director at Southern Water. Tim will share practical insights and strategies for driving meaningful change in this area whilst balancing performance with purpose. We're so pleased to have you with us. Tim, thanks for joining me.
Tim Hello, Mansi. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mansi Great. Let's dive in. Perhaps, Tim, you could start by just telling the audience a little bit about Southern Water.
Tim Southern Water is a company that provides water to 2.6 million customers and deals with wastewater services. It takes waste away from customers - for up to 4.7 million customers - between Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and the Isle of Wight, so effectively the southeast coast of England.
Mansi Now, I know you've had an inspiring career journey leading to your current role, Tim. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about you, your role at Southern Water, and how it's shaped your perspective on leadership?
Tim Absolutely. So, I've been in the water sector my whole career, and I actually started pretty much when I was nine. My dad worked in the water sector for his whole career, and I went to see many of the sites that he used to look after. And I really got the itch then and joined the graduate scheme and have undertaken a whole myriad of different roles in my career. I absolutely love the water sector. It's hugely challenging and hugely exciting. And I guess what shaped me in my career is the leaders I've worked with, because it's such a good common purpose, working for the water sector; you’re there to give a very important public service, look to protect the environment and deal with some very challenging problems, and I absolutely love that. And I've been very fortunate to work with a whole myriad of different leaders, different styles, different attributes. That's really helped shape my career. So I’m very fortunate in the experience I've had in my past.
Mansi Great. Thank you, Tim. Today's topic is a key one. And I know you will have also seen how it's hit recent news headlines. Perhaps I'll kick us off with a question asking you what your thoughts are on creating an inclusive workplace, what it means to you in the context of your role.
Tim Yeah, I mean, I could answer it by saying, if you've got an inclusive environment, you're going to be 30% more profitable. You can have a better service for customers. You can sell more things. I mean, that's a given. You only have to look on the internet to see lots of facts and figures. But for me, I've experienced this throughout my career that have an inclusive environment where you, as leaders, are driving inclusive conversation, a diverse team with a different thought process makes a massive difference to your performance and makes your life much more enjoyable as a result. Make your job a lot more easy. So I very much drive for a diverse team. I work very hard to recruit that and create that within the people I employ, but also how I behave and how I work. And I'll give you an example, about five, six years ago, I had a really challenging job. I had to get rid of the whole leadership team, which is unlike me. They were not good enough. We made a mistake in our business, so I had to change that leadership team out. And I recruited a new team, and I recruited very different people - people of experience. Who weren’t experienced. From the sector. Outside of the sector. Men, women, introverts, extroverts. So, I had a whole myriad of different people in quite an operational team, which are usually very, very red. They're very much doers. They're very much directional people, very different. And that first year was mental for me. It was a hard year in the job. But in my second year there was such a good team and they performed so well from that different thought process they’d brought. But the way they gelled and the way it worked together and the environment we created, it meant we had huge improvements in performance in terms of leakage - like water leaking out pipes, one of the biggest leakage reductions ever in the industry. And actually, I was more busy in the first year when we had the problems, than the second year when we were really performing because they were a really high-performing team. It takes time, takes a lot of effort, but if you get it right, the rewards are significant.
Mansi Sounds like an incredible outcome that you managed to drive. You touched on in that example Tim, just some of what was really hard. Would you be able to just share a bit more of that with the audience today?
Tim Yeah, absolutely. So, you can't compromise on it. I talk a lot to my peers about, when you recruit teams and how do you recruit such diverse teams – it's about not compromising. I've got one role in my team I've been recruiting for, for nine months. It's a hard role to find, but the reason it's been taking so long is that, though we’ve had some good candidates, but it's actually about the team dynamic. I didn't think they'd be the right fit, so I haven't employed them for that reason. I'm looking for someone who's quite challenging, quite pointy, who’s going to add a different thought process to the team and really try and change the way we work now. So you've got to take time. You can't compromise as a start. And the second one, you got to be courageous. You know, you've got to be brave, and you can't take a backward step. Now if you have a look at one of the examples recently in Southern Water, we've had a spate of bullying, harassment in a particular team. So, I actually got rid of 5% of my operational staff in one week. We suspended them and then they left the business because of their bullying harassment behavior and sexual harassment behavior. It’s unacceptable. And you’ve got to be brave. And these were important people to our operations. These were not sort of low-level people in operations. These were sort lower-level managers, but very important managers to keep water going out the door. So, we were really brave. You’ve got to be courageous. The other one is you've got to really think as a leader, you know, no leader is perfect - if you think that you're foolish really, in my view. You've got to learn and adapt all the time, and you've got to treat people the way they want to be treated, not the way you want to be treated, the way they want to be treated. And therefore you've got to adapt your style on a daily basis. You've got to assess what you've done well, what you haven't done so well, and make an improvement the next day for the benefit of your team. There are loads of other things I could go through, but probably: be courageous, be challenging, and be adaptable with your style, this is really, really important, and take your time. It's going to be tough. It's not perfect. It's not going to be solved immediately. But take your time.
Mansi That speaks volumes of both you as a leader and Southern as an organization, Tim. I really commend you on that. And I think some of these points that you've made are so easy to walk by. So that point just about not compromising, to be courageous on these topics, I think, is such an important message to send that to our audience today in terms of that being the right approach to take as well. Tim, in taking that approach, what do you see or did you experience as the biggest challenge in aligning leaders and teams around the approach?
Tim I think the hardest thing is actually getting people to take the time to be curious and being self-aware, and making people realise that they need to do those two things. You need to be curious with your teammates or the people that you manage, or the people that you lead, to really understand how they tick, but also understand how they can become more inclusive as a team. You've got introverts in a team, right, who are not going to be active in meetings unless you draw them in. So, who in your team is an introvert? Who in your team is an extrovert? You need to try to get their ideas out, absolutely, but not dominate the meeting and get the ideas from introverts, which might be in the meeting, or might be after meeting, or might be before the meeting. There’re different ways, but the introverts in those meetings are usually the people who come up with the best ideas. So, the curiosity on your team, what makes them tick is really important. That takes time. You've got to invest time as a leader to really understand how you can make people tick, and then self-aware as a leader and making people think they're self-aware. And it's sort of two parts to that. The unconscious bias that people all have. You've got to work hard at that as a leader, individually and within your team. People have an unconscious bias that they will always revert to. You've got to really think about that and say, no, I'm going to listen in on that point or now I'm going to jump in on that point, or I'm going to let this person speak so I can reflect on a little bit instead of just to change my ideas. And also cognitive dissonance. So people have a particular view on things that they get quite wedded on. You as a leader, can't always do that. You are not perfect. You do not have all the answers, and it’s arrogant to think that you do. But equally, a lot of people are very clever and have some good ideas as leaders. You've got to listen to the audience. You've got to let people have their say to challenge in your own thought process. So the two I think the most challenging are, as I say, curiosity, getting to know your team, spending time with your team, your colleagues and teammates, and then being self-aware and taking the time to listen to people.
Mansi Thanks, Tim, for sharing that. I hear some really strong parallels with other C-suite members that I speak to, particularly around them finding and carving out the time to be exactly as you described. And it's fascinating just to hear you touch on that point around unconscious bias. And perhaps it links to a topic that I might pull us into next to explore further, which is with the eruption of AI on the scene and the use of that being really prevalent across different organizations now. There's always been this kind of underlying thread around, well will AI just be trained to have bias within it as well? I guess, rather than probe on that topic itself, because we could be here for a long time, I was curious to understand how you might have used technology, data, any forms of AI to actually drive forward or progress your D,E&I initiatives, or whether you've got other innovative tools or strategies that you've enjoyed?
Tim We haven't actually used that many. I will answer the question, and I personally think it in ED&I is all about leadership and it starts from the top. Our CEO is very, very driven on it, and it's really about cultural behaviors, talking about it in the workplace. And that's what we focus a lot on in Southern. But strategies that we have adopted is around our recruitment as part of the need to spend and invest in our asset base we are having to really increase the size of our workforce. And as part of that, we are trying to drive a different approach to get new people into industry, because there aren't loads of people sitting around who you can recruit, who've got water experience. It just isn't there. So, you need new blood and new thoughts into the business. You need to recruit from a different pool. So as part of that, as an example, we're currently making one of my water sites – that's a site that produces water - a 24/7 site, that will be a shift point looking after that at site, instead of someone who works 9-to-5 who is on call that can come in, as team of five. And actually three of those or women. And that is in a male-orientated business. And we've worked again very hard to do that. We spent a bit more time to do that. And we complete overhauled the way we do recruitment. You know, in terms of the pictures you see on the website, the pictures you see on the job ads here, who are we talking to, you know, different bodies that we're looking at, how we attract working mums, how we change the words in our recruitment campaign because they were quite male orientated. When it comes in to us, we take taking the names of the CV's, so you don't know if it's male or female or what ethnicity they are. So we've done all those things that have made a real difference, which is mean we're seeing more women come into to see our environment. And if I compare, you know, my colleague elsewhere in business, my key counterpart, is not probably to E,D&I as well as I am right. I'm really into it. It's really important to me. I now have double the amount in percentage terms of women working for me than men. When I joined Southern Water two years ago, it was the same. And that's because we’ve driven a lot of these processes and really pushing it from the leadership down. So, in answer to your question, you can't just say, I'm going to do some AI stuff and make it happen is all going to be great. It's got to be sponsored by your leader in the top, and my boss is really into that. But then a second time, it's having the right strategy with a few sort of little tools here and there that's really helped us in Southern Water. Clearly, AI is going to open up the opportunity to look at that unconscious bias in a much more detailed way than we do today, not just on recruitment, but on everything that we that we do. And it will create lots of opportunities. It will, I think, create some issues because actually some of these office roles, which are great for working parents that can't work full five days a week or have particular issues with childcare, whatever it might be, those roles could be at risk if you're not careful. So you've got to get that right, that right balance. But fundamentally it will give us opportunity around unconscious bias.
Mansi Great. And whilst there isn't necessarily, rightly, at this stage, the AI thread through what you've said in terms of driving recruitment, what I do hear very strongly is both that leadership and culture shift from the top being so pivotal, but also actually the data that you're using and the processes that you've adapted and changed within something to support and enable this. Is that fair? Tim Correct. Absolutely. That's very fair.
Mansi And just as you described some of that, what prompted a thought in my head was you were able to attract people to have the conversation, be part of the recruitment process. Did you experience any barriers in their reasons to believe that this actually would be an inclusive environment for them on the other side of that process?
Tim Yeah, absolutely. So if you're going into an environment and it's all men and there's no female toilets in the interview, that is not very inclusive, is it? Fundamentally, and in an operational environment where you've got hundreds and hundreds of sites and very much an male-dominated industry, there aren't female toilets and therefore that puts people off, doesn't it? So, we are investing heavily at having male/female toilets across our across our sites. Sounds pretty basic, but that’s hugely important for all women.
Mansi I must confess I was not expecting that to be the answer, but what an insight into what you have to invest into it to really create the right environment as well.
Tim Absolutely. It takes time, it’s not a quick thing to do, but absolutely is exactly what we're trying to do. But equally, I'm a big believer you can start from the top right. You cannot say to people, I want 30% of your team to be like this. You just can't. You can't expect it unless you have it at the top. And half of my team are women, and therefore they’re recruiting new teams, and they're recruiting more women! And then people are actually seeing that in the business. When people come to interviews or when people come to southern, they can see that, they can see that in our communications, etc., etc. and that really helps the sort of ethos that Southern is a very inclusive employer.
Mansi And what have you learned, Tim, about leading change effectively, particularly in the context of cultural and structural shifts for inclusio
Tim So I guess what I've learned is you've got to you've got to be brave. So in one of my previous companies, through Lawrence, who I work for - my CEO - we had to create a new team. And as part of that, we want to do it differently. And at the time, there was no job-sharing policy within this company. And we set up a team where it was five people and they were all job sharing, and it all was all working mums. And it was real anti at the time, from the CEO, it he was not interested. They didn't want to do it, just didn't think it was the right thing to do, would open up Pandora's box of job sharing. But we really pushed it and we were supported and it was a trial and it was incredibly successful because you offered them a sort of a job in an environment where they could care for their families, etc. and from that, they ended up giving us way more than they were probably paid to, in time and effort. And the love for us and the business was amazing and I love that. And that really strives for me to do lots more of that since, because that's what really motivates me. So. And culturally, that's great because that spreads like wildfire and people support that in throughout the business. And that changes people's ethos. So very much being brave and challenging. And as I said earlier on in the podcast, being brave when things aren't going right and really challenging the status quo, not saying it's acceptable if something goes wrong and doing something about it. So I think it's about that that braveness point and getting rewards for when things go well.
Mansi I love that. And I think what you've also described in there and touched on Tim, is there are some really important moments that matter in terms of how an organization sets up these types of initiatives, but then how it executes and lifts them in the organization. And then it really sounds like in Southern, in those moments that matter through making the right choices, through being brave, through being courageous, through not compromising - you seem to have been able to make the shift and the change, but then garnered a huge amount of loyalty, that I guess in some ways can then be infectious in terms of how it flows through the organization as well. So, it's wonderful to hear. I might, if it's okay, take us to a slightly more macro question, which is, when you look ahead how do you see the role of the COO evolving in creating equitable workplaces over the next 5 to 10 years?
Tim So I see the role of the COO doing some of the things I've been alluding to already and building on that, you know, it's all about leadership and it's all about leading from the front and taking ownership. So, the Women’s Network in Southern, I lead on that. And a lot of my peers lead on other initiatives that we that we've got. So, it's very, very important that you still do the basics and lead from the front, because if you don't do that, it's not going to happen. So, I'm a big one of just do the basics really well and lead from the front. So that's something that I think one needs to make sure that they do. Secondly, the world's changing be it on AI that we've talked about or be it actually the new generation of staff coming through the process. The big one for me in Southern Water and probably the water sector in the UK, is we are in a massive investment curve now. We haven't been investing enough and now we're starting to see huge investment. But actually, the people aren't there to do it. And how do we therefore bring in a new breed of young people who are engaged into doing that but probably aren’t necessarily the same type of people we employed 30 years ago who will stay in the job forever. So how do we try to keep them in the business, so we don't lose that skill set or how do we keep them excited? How do we make sure the technologies at the heart of what they want? Because they they're much more technology driven than what we may or I may have been when I grew up, so very much around thinking about how do we recruit and how do we start onboarding this new blood of people, apprenticeships, and those type of things, into the business. Every business will be different, but for Southern Water and the water industry, that's definitely an area that will be that we'll be focusing on.
Mansi I'm sure there are really similar thoughts going through the minds of COO listeners today as well, in terms of the journey they're on, on some of that and where they also want to take it. So thank you for sharing that, Tim. Perhaps before we wrap up, there's something that I could ask you to share with the audience, which is a key takeaway or action you'd encourage our listeners to focus on as they work to build more inclusive workplaces.
Tim So the key takeaway for me is everyone's different and you need to really be mindful of that. You know the story of they treat everyone like how you want to be treated is a load of rubbish. It's everyone is different and you need to treat them how they want to be treated and get to know them and understand how one works and how one really ticks. That's the key to E,D&I in my view. Then aside that, making sure you've got some of the right processes and forums, cultural of things in place that will make a step change. So we have a Women’s Network out in Southern Water, which is amazing. I'm very fortunate to chair it. It's really scary when you're the only man in there with 200 people. But my gosh, it is the most inspiring thing I've probably heard in my 20 years. Some of the stories I hear from the ladies are horrendous, to be quite frank, and actually makes you quite ashamed to be a man. But my gosh, in terms of being courageous, being sort of a leader in Sales, and talking about some stories and just sharing with their colleagues and making people feel really empowered and just part of a team, part of a family. My gosh, it's amazing. So, making sure you have some of those courageous sort of process changes, those forums that are going to make a step change in your business - make sure you've got some symbolic things in place that will help build on those leadership improvements that one needs.
Mansi That's amazing and inspiring to hear. Tim. Thank you for sharing that, and wonderful to hear the space that you've created within Southern with your leadership team there, to really allow some of that vulnerability to be on display, to be discussed, and also just acknowledge the privilege you feel to be able to hear that first hand as well and listening. So, thank you. Time, as always, flies on these podcasts. I can't believe we're at the end. If I could wrap up with a few thoughts, which is, wow, we've covered a lot of ground, I think you started is at the top of our session today? Sharing that you started work at nine years of age. I'm still reeling a little bit from that. If I'm honest. I don't know if your dad got you paid, etc. but perhaps that's a conversation for offline. It's been incredible just to hear some of the language and examples that you've shared with us today on this podcast on such a key topic. I love the themes around being courageous, around not compromising, around having a high degree of curiosity and ultimately not leading with latest technology and AI, but leading from where it really needs to start, in terms of some of these initiatives, which is from the top and with leadership and culture in mind. So, it's been an absolute pleasure having you with us today. Thank you for joining us, Tim.
Tim Thanks for having me.
Mansi My pleasure. And also, I just like to say a huge thank you to our listeners. Please do join in the discussion, comment and tell us what your thoughts are and what you think on this topic as well. And I'll look forward to welcoming you back for our next episode. Thank you.
