Coo

 Did you go to estate School?

Yes, I am state educated I went to Colchester County high school for girls. It’s a grammar school and I believe strongly that grammar schools offer the opportunity for education to people who come from backgrounds without privilege.

Tell me about your home background

I grew up in a family of four in a two bedroom bungalow in Essex. It was a commuter town. Both my parents would get up early to walk the mile distance to the station to catch a train to stand for an hour into London and then walk to their offices or onto the tube to finish their journeys to work. That was the norm, and I knew no different, and it is what I went on to do when I first left School. At 18 I began the commute the mile walk to the station, the hour on the train, the walk to the office. 

Werewolves that job

My office was on old Broad Street. I worked at Barclays Bank as an office clerk.

Two bedrooms?

Yes, I shared a bedroom with my sister growing up until we were 18. She was two years older than me, which means she did move out when I was 60, but then she moved back in again, so we did share a room until I was 18.

And then what?

So obviously I’m 18 so I move out and it seems like the best option really used to go to university. There’s not a lot of workaround. This is 1990 so 1989, 1990. There was a recession in this country and some kind of option had to be created. I had to create some kind of option as to somewhere to live and somewhere feeding myself now that I was 18, but work was pretty scared at this point I did the commute, but I also applied to university . And I was offered a place through clearance, which, of course I took one I thought was my best option at that time.

Going to university change my life. It was just the 1st to 3 days that completely changed my life. I couldn’t afford Hawks, so I took a room in a family home with a single mum and her daughter to. They were letting out a room as they live near the college and needed the money. And that was my first lesson that it’s possible to work near your home. The mum in the house, Gail, Worked at the college, and it was a five minute walk from the house. Every morning at 8:45 she kept me trying to leave, but my college course and she go, but it so early. You don’t need to leave yet.. But of course, I’ve been used to getting up early and then travelling for a couple of hours each way.

Because my parents were commuters before me, they’d obviously get up and travel for two hours each way for work which means it would leave no later than seven and be back no sooner than seven in the evening which of course also means I was allowed kid and we didn’t use the term latchkey kid back, then it term been coin since Because it wasn’t unusual then but I get myself up get myself ready for school. Go to school come back from school, do my homework cook the dinner and my parents would return about 7 pm at the earliest, but they also returned later than that. Partly because my mum wanted an education which she hadn’t had an opportunity for before so she was taking an open university degree  And she also chaired the students unions so it was the students association for the university so she would actually get off the train stop early in order to hold meetings with the students association so she might be back at 9 pm .

And this covers another aspect as you’re asking me to describe my home life. Mum was bipolar and not diagnosed so there was quite a bit of mania which explains the commuting working studying socialising and I would say and raising two children, but as she says I was raised by the cat and I think she’s got it about right.But she did work very hard.

In addition, my father is partially sighted, so he had that disability. He’s essentially blind and therefore a lot of household chores for example could not have been picked up by her husband my father couldn’t he couldn’t fill in the way sometimes partners successful women do now where they might pick up the kids or cook the dinner Takeaway or run the Hoover around or something they sort of pick up not as much as I should, but they pick up a beat of the warm work, but my dad didn’t have the physical ability to do that and in addition to that he had no paternal role. He had no role model as a father because his dad died when he was three so he was raised by a single mum and he was institutionalised because disabled children were sent away education back then state education obviously sent children away you think of boarding schools and well the Tory party these days, but actually she’s  my father was born to poor family in East London, my dad from Waltham Forest and it was normal of course and the nineteen fifties to send children with disabilities, presuming especially those whose single mothers are poor and widowed .

Motherhood features quite high in my family. My mother grew up with her mother mother in a multi family a multi generation house with her grandparents and her aunts also under the same roof. Mum was born in Islington and that house was barking, and again her father was absent until she was 14, so the idea that women do all the work was clearly strong in both parents, as well as his physical ability to do any work, and all of her manic energy filling in the gaps.

Do you have any experience collaborating with the CEO to shape strategic direction?

Yes, absolutely so when I join Tunny environmental it was a one-man band, the CEO and one or two support staff. The support staff were operational costs and the CEO was delivery of the product, but the salt so there was one sales person and a part-time PR person. It was a did everything else in terms an admin for example.

I joined so immediately doubling the number of delivery people and at that stage was of the product. In my case it was a new product I was delivering a service of carbon reduction services within three months. We were very successful and started to take on part-time staff of my own, so I took on two part-time people Support staff as well really except these weren’t support. These were training delivery stuff they were students and they were working part time and studying part time. And yes, there’s definitely a feel of wanting to give opportunities to ordinary students like me who worked their way through university and he did to pay the bills  so offering this part-time work and allowing them to complete their studies in errors case he was writing up his PhD and in its case he was completing his MSC and it was it was just brilliant so at that point I started to shape the shape of the team who would join the team what would their aptitudes be what type of people what type of culture  What is the shape of the team going to be? What’s the hierarchy going to look like so from the ground literally that’s that’s what I did a build a team and over less than three years. I’ve built a team of 10 absolutely amazing scientists and engineers at first time managing just a couple of part-time people then I’m managing three full-time people and then eventually managing a team where my original people have become team leaders in order of the size of the team we managed so I managing three team leaders, they each managing a couple of reports  And the strategy really grew, she makes it sound very much like a pyramid, but it didn’t feel like a pyramid because I was close enough to the team to involve everybody at all times and I continue to be able to muck in not just lead because the team was still small enough, but I could wear many hats and when necessary where the work was overwhelming, and because it’s me who defined the work and me who handpicks the team and it’s me who created the training and decided on the standards of work that we would do that wrote the policies and procedures and defined  Everything because it had originally been only made it was doing the work and then the team I was able to when necessary and I’ve always felt I don’t. I’ve always felt that managers who don’t know how to stepping put on their overalls and roll up, their sleeves are not respected by the team and can be messed around by the team. There’s a lot in the corporate world  of managers who only know how to manage and they do get taken for a ride by staff that don’t particularly want to work or as I had a team of people who were genuinely conscientious and diligent and because of the dynamics and culture of the team they were about to take the Mickey  And that’s an important aspect of what I did because we weren’t remotely nobody had to come into an office so you couldn’t be seen arriving late or leaving early and I didn’t manage an input have managed on outputs in any case that had flexible hours of working, but it was open transparency system, rather having a clocking clock out will be skiving off  so it was a wonderful culture and everybody enjoyed working there because of the flexible hours the ability to work from home, the trust and the teamwork of camaraderie .

So yes, the KPIs were set once there was a strategic vision, the milestones objectives the tasks necessary to get from a to B, so we’re here. We want to achieve 1,000,000,000 kg of carbon dioxide removed from industry. How will we get from here to there we had a set of Vision values which were visions of values that we wrote as a team not visions of values of imposed upon the team and they were so they were ours. We owned them and they were what we felt so things like being very honest things like quality things like knowledge, as in teaching others about carbon carbon literacy sustainability, gaining our own knowledge and sharing an Lidge between us, so that we continue to grow and develop as a team both professionally also as people  so working collaboratively collaborations of such a keyword for us and she’s great because when the workload got heavy collaboration made it feel so much lighter. We have big piece of work and we just go well how much ever gonna get this done by this deadline and we get together and it wouldn’t even take that long 1520 minutes and we go right  I can write that bit I’ve got some information on that but I can both write that bit and give that information to you and you can write that and 1000 words would just mean 200 words each of five people and 1000 words felt like a big thing, 200 words and I go I’ve never done my lunchtime  And so our collaboration was a very important aspect of our teamwork ?

The hole is greater than The sum of  its parts. Yes exactly.

Do you have colleagues friends connections that are also state School educated who would be advocates.

Yes so I have a network of friends and the people I’m thinking of you would be that would feel that category of advocates and friends from the same of the background but it also professionally successful are those are my friends that are both LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends. These are people that I grew up with that I went to school with and who I am now connected professionally with They are people who have gone onto FO have gone on to be kind to professionals in other fields, but have known for many years people that were the first person in their family to go to university, and there’s that strong feeling of family of siblings, so fraternity and society  Between us because we were there when something happens to somebody that’s so similar to us but we’ve never met. We always feel the sense of family with them so there was an MP who was killed murdered and she’d also been a grammar school girl who was the first member of our family to go to university  And I think there was a strong feeling in that particular he died in the country, but through my friends, it seems like a strong thing that we shared hit us, particularly there are other successful women from our walk of life that you feel strongly for there’s another, who is a lot  of difficulty in, so she’s the MP for Walthamstow and she’s from my old school and she’s always in trouble for being a bit too outspoken and for things like breastfeeding in the Houses of Parliament so it seems that we were encouraged to be difficult girls .

Data lead decision-making

I would never make a decision in any other way I’m an ITDJ so all of my decision-making easy in fact based on judgement and thought to quickly logical in my thinking and I like the base things on facts rather than thieving and INFJ is one that would be the choices of feelings rather than on logic. No in some test I come up as INFJ appear to be 50-50 T and F. That means that I have empathy as a leader rather than just cold Data decisions so yes always date it land I’m always considering the impact honour team because I don’t want the team to be adverse affected. I like the clarity cohesive comrade we have data decisions is the only way I can make a choice because I want it to be formed by the fax, so collecting the KPI data  And working with the team so the KPI data is genuine. Data are not well will put in any old number because this is a pointless exercise data. I’ve always asked the team to be truthful because I want about to make decisions on the date they put him so if for example, they’re being asked to share how many hours I worked for a client and they know the answer should be 20 hours because that’s what the contracts with the client says but actually they work 16. I just want to tell me 16 I don’t want them to go, but I don’t we make sure they knew that because there must be something as honest, diligent hard-working  There must be something causing them not be able to do those extra four had we sold more hours and we had available where we spending four hours a time fiddling around for something that could be eliminated I want the truth because I can’t make decisions, the truth and the truth is data data lead decisions informed decisions so yes, always informed my life as an engineer  Measuring and monitoring and that I took over to leadership from engineering other people are not machines. I’m always going to be using those engineering skills to analyse data and apply the learning from that at university strengths were in experimental design, mathematics, as well as the technical subjects with physical chemistry being  Strongest .