Membership Directory - Individual

Tom Parish

Management Consultant at Alpha Finanical Markets Consulting

About

Bio: "My name is Tom Parish and I work for a consultancy called Alpha, who work with Asset and Wealth Managers. I've had the pleasure of working with the excellent team here at Alpha since we were a group of about 25, to what is now a growing team of 350 consultants globally. As you might expect of the much smaller company I first joined, LGBT+ topics were not particularly discussed amongst the workforce. The overwhelmingly positive experience I have witnessed here at Alpha (and hopefully partly a reflection of the broader direction of our progressing society) is that our LGBT+ agenda has been totally self-started by junior members of the team. This is not to say that it has not been fully supported by our leadership; indeed what has been very liberating is having these conversation with my peers and realising just how much unsaid thought had already been given by our leadership to LGBT+ topics (professionally, and also personally) and through this getting to know more about their lives and outlooks.

It has been brilliant seeing graduates join our team open and confident in themselves, and able to bring their whole selves to work.

When I joined the working world I would say things were more in the "don't ask, don't tell' camp" (for me at least)… and whilst at the time I had reconciled with myself that my private life was just that; on reflection, I hadn't realised just how unnecessarily exhausting this could be and the distance it can create in working relationships. I guess I was lucky to be able to become more open as our company grew and ride on the wave of change; this has prompted me to think that we must all remain mindful that it perhaps gets progressively more difficult for older generations still in the workforce to be able to come out' professionally despite what are now very visible LGBT+ programmes existing across the Asset Management industry. And, whilst I am sure they are happy to see these changes, may feel slightly excluded from this. I'd like to see us all continue to work as a community to make sure nobody is left behind.

One topic particularly relevant to my career in Management Consulting is that we often work with new Clients and hence people, and this means that we can often have to relive the coming out' experience frequently. The same will be true of a number of sectors that provide professional services. I'd be delighted to speak to anyone navigating similar paths in their career."