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I am in the fourth year leading our coffee retail business, creating growth in the category and building our brands, including Nescafé and Starbucks At Home. I love engaging in the fast-changing external market, and I enjoy developing the team rich in the potential to lead and deliver great outcomes. Day to day, I enjoy the variety of experience in my role, and I make it my mission to reflect and learn every day.

You've held mentoring sessions for women in the business. What's inspired you?

I have mentor discussions with many people across the business, including women. The mentor opportunity is to create a safe, bespoke conversation to help develop thinking – where our future leaders can ask questions that are not always easy to express, they can develop their ideas, or they can explore how to navigate our organisation to fulfil their dreams or purpose.

Coaching and mentoring are both processes that make me more effective as a business leader and I encourage reverse mentoring on all topics, so that I also learn and gain insights across our organisation. The quality of our talent, their wisdom and their questions are a source of constant inspiration.

What does embracing equity mean to you?

The difference between equity and equality is an important one. Equality - treating everyone the same – is good, but still presents a challenge because we don't all start from the same place. Equity is about fairness of opportunity - addressing the specific needs of the individual and tailoring resources and support accordingly.

So 'embracing equity' for me means I commit to making opportunities more accessible to everyone. For example, I encourage all of us to become aware of our bias and I regularly participate in gender balanced interviewing. Regardless of gender, race, ability, I encourage everyone to get involved - there’s so much to learn together and from each other.

You sponsor the Gender Equity Network and the Eradicating Racism Network at Nestlé. Tell us more about it and the importance of the networks?

When I started this role I could see the opportunity for accelerated action in gender equity, so together with other like minds we created the Gender Equity Network. One of my reflections in the last year was that for our Networks to succeed, good 'allyship' from across the organisation is essential. To learn more fully what this means, I asked to be adopted as an ally - or sponsor - to our Eradicating Racism Network.

Our networks are critical to the health of our business and are resolutely open to everyone. They are respectful communities in which to learn to lend our support, to be part of the solution and sometimes to ask the questions you can't ask anywhere else. We invite external speakers into our discussions, we reverse mentor many of our leadership teams and we provide learning materials on a variety of topics throughout the year. We are also working on the intersectionality between the networks so that we increase our efficiency over time.

What would you like to see more people doing to be more inclusive?

We need to bring more and different views into our teams and 'around our table'. Then we need to make sure these voices are heard. If you are hosting or leading a meeting, the one thing you can do is run it in a way that ensures each and every individual has the safe space and the time to comment or share a view if they wish. Otherwise, why did you invite them?