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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is Emily Timmins from Anglian Water, the Director of Water Recycling.
[00:00:17] Piers Clark: Emily's got this incredible background of having worked in frontline operations at not just one, but two of the major UK water companies. And we're gonna be talking to her today as part of our series on women leaders in the water sector.
[00:00:30] Piers Clark: Emily, brilliant to have you with me today.
[00:00:33] Emily Timmins: Thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful.
[00:00:36] Piers Clark: Let's start with learning a little bit about your background. As I alluded to, you've been in two water companies that I know of at least.
[00:00:43] Piers Clark: Tell us a bit about what you did at school and where you went from there.
[00:00:47] Emily Timmins: I am a council house child. I come from a relatively deprived part of Birmingham. I'm also dyslexic as well, so there's quite a few things that were challenging in my universe. Back at school I really anchored on science. And I was also really, really interested in the environment.
[00:01:02] Emily Timmins: And that led me to the door of Severn Trent, where at the age of 18 I asked for some work experience, and they said, "Don't worry, love. You can come and do some filing." which I thought, " Well, I'll give this a go and see what else I can get from it." So that was my mindset.
[00:01:16] Emily Timmins: And day two into that work experience, the regional operations manager walked in and said "Who are you? What are you doing here?" I explained my background. He said, "Why aren't you in blues on the sewage treatment works?" And I said, "Good question. I'd like to do that." And so that's what he did. He put me in some blues. I stepped foot onto a sewage treatment works all those years ago, and two things hit me immediately.
[00:01:39] Emily Timmins: The first was the purpose. I could get out of bed knowing that I'm serving a greater good, right? I'm protecting customers, I'm protecting the environment. And the second was the people. They cared so much about what they did and why they did it that I just felt completely inspired.
[00:01:58] Emily Timmins: They didn't quite know what to do with me though, Piers, because I think I was the only female person operator that was in that whole team.
[00:02:05] Piers Clark: You were straight into frontline operations, aside from a couple of days doing admin. So you're 18, you're in Severn Trent, you're in frontline operations. You stayed at Severn Trent for a couple of decades.
[00:02:16] Emily Timmins: I did, about 28 years in totality. They were absolutely brilliant. And, I walked into my day job as a graduate at Severn Trent expecting to be a process scientist, and they said, "Emily Timmins, you thought you were going to be a process scientist, but actually what we want you to do is look after 22 tanker drivers out in Stoke-on-Trent." So my very first proper big girl job was running a tanker driver fleet out in Stoke-on-Trent.
[00:02:43] Emily Timmins: And so I'd moved very quickly to frontline operation experience right at the coal face through to operational leadership. And I remember setting foot in amongst these guys, they were all blokes, and they took one look at me and thought, "Holy mother of God, what is this?" And I just put my PPE on, I said, "Right, take me out in the trucks. I want to see your world from your perspective. I want to understand what's getting in your way, how I can help." And, the rest is history really.
[00:03:11] Piers Clark: So you'd not got any role models at that stage that were female.
[00:03:15] Piers Clark: Wasn't that there'd been a previous senior female in this role and you were able to say, "Oh, I can see how Susan did this. I will follow."
[00:03:22] Piers Clark: You were carving your own management style at this stage.
[00:03:25] Emily Timmins: There was nobody that I could point to. And so I was sort of having to carve my own way and learn my own way. Now, back in the day, all those years ago, leadership wasn't really a thing. It was all about management. And that sat very uncomfortably with me.
[00:03:40] Emily Timmins: I was fighting on two fronts, which is becoming a true leader in the sense that we know and understand today, and also being a female in a very male-dominated industry.
[00:03:50] Emily Timmins: Management is basically tasks and issues and deploying people into things to work, and resource management. Leadership for me is much more about the inspiration, the motivation of the why. And that means standing up and being at the front and being brave and challenging, ruthlessly caring about what you do, so that belligerence of knowing you can be better, you can do better, but caring about the people and the things that you're trying to serve.
[00:04:17] Piers Clark: And in the '80s and '90s, the water sector tended to have managers who can sort of bark at someone, "Get on, get on with it!" and they do it through a culture of fear. But hopefully we're no longer that industry.
[00:04:28] Emily Timmins: I definitely had that experience and knew it was wrong inherently in your core 'cause I think intuitively when you receive something in a certain way, you know it's wrong, and I sort of pushed back against that style.
[00:04:39] Emily Timmins: So I think that made my journey probably more difficult because I didn't fit the traditional mold in so many ways, how I looked, my gender, the way I behaved and I act.
[00:04:49] Piers Clark: All right, let's bring this up to date. You left Severn Trent in 2022 and joined as the Director of Water at Recycling Anglian Water.
[00:04:57] Piers Clark: Tell us about that role.
[00:04:58] Emily Timmins: So I sit on the executive, reporting into the CEO as an operational executive. I lead a team of about two and a half thousand people, and my job is to keep them very safe, keep them very well, but also keeping sewage in the pipes and treating it, very simply, from a toilet all the way through to the river.
[00:05:17] Emily Timmins: Anglian is geographically the largest in the UK. We've got very long coastline, it's very heavily drained. We're exceedingly a drought-ridden region so water in the environment is a material challenge for Anglian Water, its customers, the communities, and the environment in general. So we house the largest population of chalk streams. We are the breadbasket of the UK, so very heavily rural. So yes, it is a very different region.
[00:05:46] Emily Timmins: The main contributory factor in the environment is actually our water recycling centers. Anglian Water sewage treatment works or water recycling centers, as we now refer to them, 70% of those are actually headwaters for water courses.
[00:06:00] Piers Clark: That's really good. We've got a bit of an insight into your journey. 30-plus years in the water sector, been in frontline operations, been in two big water companies. You're now on the executive of one of the largest water companies geographically, and in terms of population served in the UK.
[00:06:16] Piers Clark: So now let's get into what's it like being a female leader in the water sector, and how have things changed over those 30 years that you've seen?
[00:06:25] Emily Timmins: Immediately I'll go to you from a better point of view, there are more visible female leaders and female participants in operations. It's still not enough, but there are many people, right from the senior executives all the way down, that I can point to.
[00:06:40] Emily Timmins: And I think traditionally operations always on mentality, quite a challenging environment from a resilience point of view, has somewhat kept women at arm's length from those roles, and now it is absolutely possible. And in fact, it's a brilliant career.
[00:06:56] Emily Timmins: The amount of women in this particular part of the sector, is still way too low, and we have to look and reflect deeply on why that is. I just think we're not working hard enough to make the roles attractive. There's considerable work still to do.
[00:07:11] Emily Timmins: 50% of my senior leadership team are women. Three of those work part-time. We need to get those stories out because generally speaking, women have their own challenges between the ages of 35 and 55. And we need to make it much more visible what we are doing in these spaces to attract women and retain them throughout.
[00:07:31] Emily Timmins: We've certainly got a momentum. We've certainly got a movement but there's still considerable work to do.
[00:07:36] Piers Clark: Let's go to that question of why are there not more women in the sector? Is it because there is inherent bias when people are interviewing into those roles?
[00:07:44] Piers Clark: Or is it because we have the wrong working patterns and we've created roles that are impossible for women to embrace? Or is it there aren't enough women going into science and engineering-y type roles. Or is it something else?
[00:07:58] Emily Timmins: Well, I think it's a little bit of all of those things actually. I don't think it's one specific thing. If we start with the visibility challenge, the way we advertise, the role models that we put out there to say that it is possible, and you talked about inherent bias- I think all of that is still true. So I think if we start right at the very beginning of people's careers and entry points into the industry, I think that is one of the things to solve.
[00:08:24] Emily Timmins: The working environment has still got a way to go and that points to standby working patterns and working hours. They are not yet as attractive to women as they need to be.
[00:08:37] Emily Timmins: And I think the culture and progression piece is still something that we've got to work on, which is women throughout their life potentially having children, potentially going through menopause, for example, there's still significant value to those individuals in our organization.
[00:08:52] Emily Timmins: So let me just give you a quick example of something that we did at Anglian. Back in 2024, I was about 18 months in role, we created a brand-new operational leader role, which was a stepping stone from frontline operations all the way up to a traditional frontline leader. It was an intermediary position.
[00:09:10] Emily Timmins: And we purposely went out with different recruitment strategies, different role designs. And we got a significant number of women, particularly second careers, coming into our industry as a result of that.
[00:09:24] Emily Timmins: And the outcome of that has been amazing for our teams. Mental health has improved, morale has improved not because of the woman being in role, but because we've got a better balance overall.
[00:09:34] Piers Clark: Now If someone's listening to this and they're a bit old school and a bit cynical, they might be going, "Well, why do we need gender diversity?"
[00:09:41] Piers Clark: Dig into that a bit more for me.
[00:09:43] Emily Timmins: The water industry as a whole has got to invest a huge amount of money in this AMP period alone. These water companies and their associated partners have to grow and you can't just fish from the same pool.
[00:09:55] Emily Timmins: We've got to attract more people. And so the strategies and approaches and the reliances that we've had in the past will just not work. So there's a business point there, which is we need to attract a whole diverse range of people.
[00:10:09] Emily Timmins: But of course, what we do know about diversity and diversity of thought is it makes businesses more resilient. It brings in innovation, better ideas. There's genuine business reasons for why the water industry, and also other engineering infrastructure industries, need to think about this thing and be really serious about it.
From a water industry perspective, we've got lots of money to invest, we've got lots of growth in our sector, and it can't come from the traditional ways of doing it.
[00:10:37] Piers Clark: Excellent. I do think a lot of public services, the people working them should reflect the communities they serve, both in their ethnic diversity and in their gender diversity.
[00:10:47] Piers Clark: Now, you've mentioned the menopause there. Let's talk about what it's like going through the menopause in the water sector, and what we could do better.
[00:10:56] Emily Timmins: I will talk in general terms, but also specificity as well, as a woman that is perimenopausal and has been for nearly 10 years. I think when I look at it between the ages 35 and 55, there's a lot of change for a woman. Generally speaking, at the beginning of this it could be childcare, children. Then going into perimenopause, and then at the end of this, probably having additional caring responsibilities for our elderly relatives.
[00:11:22] Emily Timmins: And I think when you smoosh that together, it makes it really difficult for women, and that's something we've got to be really thoughtful of.
[00:11:28] Emily Timmins: But specifically menopause. I'll give you some stats. So 20% of women have no symptoms whatsoever. 20% of women have very extreme, debilitating symptoms. And then 60% of women have something in that continuum. Talking of personal experience, utter exhaustion, brain fog, and a loss of who I am or who we are as women, is something that I experienced very rawly throughout my career.
[00:11:54] Emily Timmins: And the outcome of that is that you lose confidence, you're less resilient to deal with the issues that you face. But I've been blessed with absolute support. Because I'm so upfront and honest about how I am and how I'm feeling, it's made it really easy for the people, not only who work around me, with me, for me but also the people that I report into, to support me in whatever challenge that's been.
[00:12:20] Emily Timmins: I'm blessed at Anglian Water specifically, where our private health covers menopause. It means that I'm on the right drugs that I can take, that there are ancillary supporting groups and networks that I can link in with. But unfortunately, throughout my career, I've seen women fade away during these periods of time.
[00:12:39] Piers Clark: And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but actually, you've gone through an experience that now means you've got an even broader perspective of what's required, what the communities are that you're serving, what people are feeling, and how you can be a better leader in managing your team.
[00:12:54] Emily Timmins: Yeah. When I took this job, I remember talking to my uncle about the fact that I was taking this very important, very privileged role. And I said, "I need to reflect on how I need to be." And my uncle turned around to me and said, "There's only one thing you need to be, and that's compassionate."
[00:13:09] Emily Timmins: It just really sat with me, and I just thought empathy, understanding is really important as a leader, and certainly I have a very personal level of empathy and understanding in this space. It doesn't mean to say that I've always been successful in catching these women before they've hit the ground.
For some women, it is very challenging. There are some really awful statistics about women leaving the general population of work. It is very sad that we're losing such experience and skills. So that support and that enablement and that community is pivotal for women during this period of time.
[00:13:45] Piers Clark: Emily, sadly we are running out of time but it's been wonderful hearing your journey, your experience.
[00:13:51] Piers Clark: We like to finish with the question: What advice would you give your younger self? Any regrets?
[00:13:58] Emily Timmins: Oh, plenty. Plenty, but they're all learning experiences without a shadow of a doubt.
I think if I was to talk to my younger self as a sort of like cheerleading 52-year-old woman, what I would be saying is "Back yourself, Emily."
[00:14:13] Emily Timmins: There was voices that were very, very loud in certain parts of my career, internal voices that were saying to me, "You're not good enough, you can't do it. Look how amazing all those other people are."
[00:14:24] Emily Timmins: I think the regret was there were moments where I held myself back. As I've got older, and I've had some coaching and had some great sponsorship, those voices are well managed.
[00:14:34] Emily Timmins: I think the other piece of advice would be just remain mega curious. You will become a better leader or a better senior expert, or whatever it is you want to be, if you create insane curiosity within you, and you look left and right rather than just forwards and back.
[00:14:46] Emily Timmins: So that would be my two pieces of advice: back yourself, and remain super curious.
[00:14:53] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Emily Timmins, the Director of Water Recycling at Anglian Water.
[00:15:02] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.