Inclusion first, diversity follows: Dr. Sarah McMath on leadership in the water sector

Dr. Sarah McMath has spent three decades in the water sector, most of them as the only woman in the room. In the latest episode of the Exec Exchange, the Chief Executive of MOSL joins Piers Clark for the second conversation in the podcast’s series on women in water. What emerges is less a case for diversity than a working account of how one leader built an unusually balanced organization, and what it cost her to get there.

A career that moved sideways as well as up

Like many in the sector, McMath says she fell into water by accident. A microbiology degree led to a doctorate program at Thames Water, and an expected four years became 24. She started in water quality, moved into frontline wastewater operations, and rose to Head of Asset Management with a team of nearly 1,000 people.

Then the CEO asked her to lead the PR14 price control in strategy and regulation. She asked her director at the time, who happened to be Piers Clark, whether declining would be career limiting. She was told firmly not to be silly. The role came with a small budget and a team of regulatory economists who could not have been more different to her in personality, background, or approach.

She now calls it the best career move she ever made. The lesson was that leadership is not measured by headcount or budget. What the role gave her was the ability to influence the future of the company she worked for. She went on to become Competition Director, leading Thames through the opening of the non-household retail market, and then Managing Director of Water with accountability for assets, operations, maintenance, health and safety, and innovation.

The market operator, explained

McMath left Thames in 2019, looked outside the industry, and came back to it as Chief Executive of MOSL, the market operator for the very market she had helped Thames exit two years earlier.

England has 1.2 million business customers who can choose who sells them their water, accounting for around 32% of the water consumed in the country. MOSL’s role is to make sure that market runs efficiently, from managing entry to operating the settlement system that tells retailers what their customers owe the water companies. It is not a regulator. It is funded by the trading parties themselves, is independent of Ofwat, and works closely with it. Increasingly, MOSL is also involved in water security work, on the basis that business consumption at that scale is part of the solution to future scarcity.

The networks she used to dismiss

McMath is direct about her early attitude to women’s networks. She was progressing well, never felt she was held back because of her gender, and saw the networks around her as militant. She believed, with some discomfort in hindsight, that the women involved were dismissed by her male peers as shouty and difficult. She disengaged.

That changed in 2014, on a course for senior women, where she realized how unusual she was in never having felt lesser than her male colleagues. Something her mother instilled early had spared her a doubt that even very senior women carried. She joined out of a sense that she had not been supporting other women. Twelve years on, she sits on the board of Women in Utilities Networks and describes such networks as essential.

The value, she says, is specific rather than abstract. Returning to work after both of her children, she battled on and pretended everything was fine. During menopause, being able to talk to other women and understand there was a physical reason she was losing her thread mid meeting was, in her words, hugely supportive.

Learning to lead in someone else’s style

Early in her leadership career, McMath was good at observing what got people promoted and behaving accordingly. It was effective. It was not authentic.

She describes challenging something in an all male meeting roughly five years in, asking questions she felt were being deflected, and watching her line manager fold his arms, sit back, and tell her she would never lead in that company if she could not control her emotions. She did not dismiss it. She became less emotional, more constrained in how she asked questions, and deliberately slowed her speech. She changed the way she dressed after a senior colleague touched her inappropriately and her line manager responded by looking her up and down and remarking on short skirts. It was a knee length skirt. She trained as a football referee to have something in common with the men around her.

Her style shifted when she built a team from scratch in strategy and regulation, and she leads that way now: including people, listening, accepting ideas that are not her own.

Why she set no targets

MOSL has 96 people. The organization is 50/50 on gender throughout, against a sector figure McMath puts at under 30%, and 35% of colleagues are not white British. There are no diversity targets.

Her argument is that you do not lead on diversity. You build a culture inclusive enough that people can be themselves at work, and diversity follows because people join and stay. She quotes a colleague who led a workshop on neurodiversity and described being able to thrive at work rather than survive, simply by being a brilliant data person every day instead of performing acceptability.

Harder to lead, better decisions

Pressed on whether diverse teams risk becoming decision by committee, McMath concedes the difficulty without conceding the point. Leading people who are like you is easy. They agree with you, they tell you that you are right, and they do what you ask. The decisions are worse. As a chief executive, she says, she needs people who will slow her down and tell her she is wrong, which few people are willing to do.

Where a leader actually starts

For anyone who wants to change how they lead, McMath offers two concrete actions. Be demanding of whoever supports your recruitment, internal or external, and refuse an all white male shortlist. When she pushed back on one at MOSL, the headhunter asked whether she wanted women on the list. She should not have had to ask.

The second is to listen. Ask people directly rather than assuming you understand how they feel.

Her closing advice to a 24 year old starting a 40 year career in water is to ignore the negative press and recognize the sector for what it is. Whatever the job, the work stops people dying of cholera. Without clean water and basic sanitation, there is no society.