Nimesh Patel

I think it's incumbent on leaders to be brave. I joined Spirax Group as CFO. It would have been easy for the board, for the CEO, for the Chair of the Audit Committee to say ‘you can't be CFO of a FTSE100 company unless you've had experience of being CFO of a listed company before.’

And they absolutely could have found someone who did that. They could have found someone from a FTSE250 company or another FTSE100 company, or they could have cast the net a bit wider and found someone who's been a listed company CFO, somewhere outside of the UK and brought that person in.

And this role, CFO role for Spirax Group, would've been such an exciting prospect that I'm sure they would've had no shortage of candidates to take up that role. But what they did, and of course I was on the outside because I was an applicant for that job, but what they did in my sense is that they said, what attributes do we want in that role? What do we want that person to be able to do? How do we want them to contribute to the group? And actually, yes, we would like it if that person had been a CFO before, of course we would, because in some senses it just means that they'll hit the ground running faster, that they will have had experience of some of the things they need to do, et cetera, et cetera. But is that the principal area of value? Or is it that actually, we want these other things as well and where do we make that trade off?

We've been through a transformation in our executive team over the last year or so and gone from actually having one member of the executive team who is a woman to now having four. And that's something I'm really proud of.

But I think the thing that really struck me as I was thinking about my team for the future is we didn't set out to hire a woman. We set out to hire the best possible person we could, but we also recognised that we wanted to look harder and longer and make sure that we're really pushing ourselves to find that best possible person. And I think we did in all of those roles. And a great example of that is in our new CFO, Louisa Burdett, [who] joined us from a career of having been CFO of a number of large public listed organisations, but also with a career in finance behind it, even before that.

And from my perspective, what I recognised, there was someone who's come up from a very different background to mine into that CFO role. I was in financial services for a very long time, and from there I went into more of a corporate finance strategy role within a large FTSE100 corporate. And then my first real finance job was actually a CFO job before I then later came to the Spirax Group.

And in a similar way we've got Maria Wilson, who leads digital for us. And Maria joins us from what was a private company and joined principally to lead our digital journey and [is an] engineer by background hugely experienced in the R&D space, but also with a real commercial lens thinking about how do we implement innovative practices? How do we develop the tools we need for the future to be successful, but importantly, how do we make sure that we don't lose sight of the commercial objectives we're trying to achieve?

And that's, again, a new position, in fact. Group Director of Digital on our executive team and a new lens or perspective that we've not had represented around that table before. It's working brilliantly for us across all of these new hires.

More recently we've also got a new group general counsel, and we've also got a Head of Sustainability. But at the same time this isn't just about hiring women into the team and what they bring, we've brought additional male members into the team as well up through the ranks quite often. And we've got a search going on for one open role as well.

So for me, this is about how do we pull that group together with a real diversity of perspective, diversity of skills, different backgrounds to get the best out of each other and our collective.

One of the things that differentiates us at the Spirax Group, is the fact that we are highly customer centric. So yes, we manufacture products in many locations around the world and a wide range of products. And yes, we innovate and invest in R&D to develop new products that serve our customers’ needs in the future. But fundamentally, our business isn't driven by our ability to innovate and manufacture those products. It's driven by our ability to build partnerships with customers, understand their processes, understand their pain points, solve those pain points using those products, and sometimes using products that we might even bring in from outside.

So, this is about solution selling. It's about understanding what adds value to our customers and how we can partner with them to unlock that value. As a result, the pathway to success in our group, despite the fact that we're an engineering company like so many others, is probably a bit different. It depends on having that curious mindset. On wanting to serve the customer, on wanting to understand their needs and their problems and, like all good engineers do, actually solve those problems. But doing it with a tool set that sits behind you which is very powerful but has lots of different elements to it, and our culture is built around that.

It really encourages it - our culture of being curious, high sense of duty to the customer wanting to solve problems, wanting to make a difference, being very collaborative internally across our businesses with our colleagues to try and identify how can we borrow from others?

How do we bring out that best solution to put it in front of our customer? That's all embedded in our culture. And so as we think about leaders going forward, we want people who understand that mindset, have that within themselves, that natural level of curiosity, that desire to learn, that desire to think about how we solve problems, and can transmit that also within the organisation, carry the culture with them as they lead.

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.

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.