Hello everyone, my name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people that simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehapen.co.uk. That's S-E-E Change Happan dot Co dot Uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going.

Today is episode 93 with the title engineering inclusive excellence and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Claire Angliss. Claire is a leader of learning for large engineering organisation and is also the owner of her own inclusive coaching business. When I asked Claire to describe her superpower, she said she is honest and delivers clear talk backed up with action. Wow. Hey, Claire, welcome to the show.

Hi Jo. So nice of you to invite me to talk today.

Absolute pleasure. We've worked together in the past and it was an honour to invite you along and even more of an honour for you to accept. Thank you. So, Claire, engineering inclusive excellence, tell me why we chose that as a title.

Well, Jo, as you know, I'm the head of learning for Thales in the UK and we've been looking at engineering excellence within our business and leadership for a long period of time now. And when I talk about engineering excellence, I'm really talking about a place where everyone feels valued and that they can contribute their best. So all of that head in for any engineering organisation, in delivery for the customer, of course. But a place where people can achieve and thrive and feel that they belong, feel that they're trusted, feel that they can contribute and be their most authentic selves, that they feel they want to be at work.

That's easier said than done, isn't it? I mean, we hear this buzword, bring your whole self to work. And I always say, well, that's easy to you, easy for you, because the further you are from the bell curve of normality, the harder it is to bring that whole self, isn't it?

That's why I chose my words really carefully there, Jo, because I said that you choose to do. Because I think I had a conversation and I'm trying to remember where it was. It was a couple of years ago now, at a learning conference I was at and I was listening to a speaker there who was talking about bringing your whole self to work. And I was thinking, the same as you. That's really easy if your whole self is something that's well accepted or very, I guess, the norm of where you work. And they were talking about a really senior leader in a large, organised, complex organisation and saying that they'd been talking about how you were your most authentic self at work. And he had been sharing that he couldn't possibly be that. And the reason was that his extracurricular activity was one that maybe others wouldn't understand and wouldn't accept.

And being a very senior leader, he decided that he wouldn't share that. His choice of extracurricular was to be naked in the woods with other people that like natureism and love to be outdoors naked in the woods. So he made a decision not to share what his extracurricular kind of hobies were outside of work. And I guess that's where I share my words really carefully. It's of what you choose, of what is comfortable. And I would have loved to get to a place, Jo, as you know, where we could really be our most authentic selves. But it's always about what you choose to share about you, because there will always things about everybody we choose not to. So I think that's important, that as HR and learning leaders, we're really understanding that you can't possibly be asking that of everybody.