Joining the Co-op Executive in August 2019, as Chief Financial Officer, I permanently took up my role as CEO almost three years later exactly, proud to take my place as the first Chief Executive of colour, and the first woman.
Every day I bring all aspects of who I am to my role, including my cultural heritage – my mother is Turkish and my late father was Palestinian. And as well as drawing upon the perspective and teachings of both my parents, I’d like to think I also inherited my father’s head for numbers and a drive to fix things, to be where I am today.
My father was a geophysicist which meant we travelled all over the world. By the time I was 12, we’d lived on every continent except for Antarctica. This allowed me to be surrounded by lots of nationalities, lots of religions and lots of different types of people – I grew up recognising diversity as a wonderful thing!
Before university in Australia and then the US, I worked in restaurants like Pizza Hut and McDonalds to support myself through school. And when I moved to the States and had to wait for my Australian qualifications to be re-evaluated, I went on to sell vacuum cleaners door to door.
In addition to holding senior positions at IBM, McDonald’s and insurer Catlin Group, I have worked in a number of regulated sectors in the UK and overseas including retail, IT, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods.
I was Chief Operating Officer at Lloyd’s of London in 2014, with responsibility for global operations, business transformation, data, information technology and corporate real estate. And while all this was happening, a few years before my move to Co-op, I went on to have twin girls via surrogate in 2016.
Today, I bring my life experience into developing a Co-op culture that recognises the socio-economic barriers to progression, which I’ve seen since working as a teenager; the prejudice faced by women and mothers, especially in male dominated workplaces; the systemic racism and discrimination that can alienate and divide a workforce.
My heritage, my identity and lived experience intersect, and I am motivated to make words like equality, inclusion, aspiration and diversity actually mean something. They must be enablers in how a modern-day business succeeds, rather than some form of compliance check-list to cover within an annual report.
I say this on behalf of 54,000 colleagues, but also more than 6.5 million active members, who own this business. They all have a right to be offered products and services which represent them, from a business that understands ‘equity’ and how to bring it from concept to reality.