At a previous agency, I worked with a girl who came in ten minutes late because her dad had just had a heart attack that morning. I watched our boss shout at her for her timekeeping. When she explained what had happened, he told her to get on with her work. “Go home if you really have to,” he said. But if she wanted to be with her dad, she’d need to take annual leave. It wasn’t in her contract to have compassionate leave.
I am not making this up. It seems mental in 2026 to say that.
This was 2016 by the way, but that moment has always stayed with me. Not because I hadn’t seen bad management before, but because of how ordinary it felt in that office. Nobody flinched. The culture had been built in a way that made that behaviour feel almost normal.
It was the moment I knew I never wanted to be part of building something like that again. And eventually, it became a founding reason and driver for my own agency.
What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that this wasn’t just a values decision. It was an ambitious one. There’s a version of ambition that’s about being the biggest, the loudest, the most awarded. And then there’s the kind of ambition that asks: what kind of business am I actually trying to build? Who thrives here? What motivates me and gets me up in the morning? That second kind of ambition is harder. It requires more courage, more patience, and a much longer view.
The courage to be different starts with honesty about what you’ve seen
We talk a lot in marketing about insight, getting under the skin of human behaviour, understanding what really drives people. If you lead a marketing team - agency, in-house, anywhere- you know this tension. But somehow that rigour doesn’t always get applied to how we actually run our businesses and lead our teams.
It’s easier to replicate the environment you came up in. The long hours, the hierarchies, the “this is just how agencies work” culture, than to stop and ask whether any of it is actually right. Doing things differently requires you to admit that the way things have been done is broken. And in an industry that moves fast and rewards confidence, admitting anything is broken can feel like weakness.
Building on real human truth
When I started Sunshine, I made a decision that it would be grounded in real human experience, not just in the work we create for clients, but in how we operate as a business.
Ten years ago, I was working from a hut in Bali. People genuinely couldn’t believe it. Now it’s completely normal to work remotely and have work-abroad policies, but back then it raised eyebrows - what kind of agency lets people do that? We also had a work-from-home policy long before COVID forced everyone’s hand, and people couldn’t believe that the team actually got the work done. We just believed that trust and flexibility were the right way to treat people, full stop.
That thread has never changed in ten years of running Sunshine. What has changed is our understanding of what people actually need.
We give team members a full free day off when their kids start school. We have leading policies on miscarriage and IVF. We have pet bereavement leave, Pawternity leave, birthday days off, prize-draw bucket list competitions and we’re now a 4.5 day a week agency. We give new parents sleep therapists, there is an unlimited training budget and a tonne of other things besides.
None of these came from a policy handbook. They came from listening and learning, from asking what our team actually needs and being willing to act on the answer even when it’s unconventional. And that question doesn’t have a finish line. I’m already thinking about what the team will need in 2027 and beyond. What does support look like as lives get more complicated, as the world keeps shifting, as people themselves change? That curiosity is my favourite part of the job.
And yes — we have a really good time together
Something that doesn’t get said enough in conversations about inclusive leadership: joy matters.
We blow our social budget pretty much every night we go out. We let our hair down properly. We create space for people to be completely themselves - not a professional version of themselves, not a LinkedIn version, but actually themselves.
I believe you cannot do your best creative work in an environment where you feel you have to perform or conform. Psychological safety isn’t just about policies. It’s about culture, and culture is built in the moments when the guard comes down. The late nights that nobody regrets. The in-jokes that make no sense to anyone outside the team. The knowledge that you can be weird and brilliant and human all at once and nobody is going to punish you for it.
The good news? Some of the world is catching up
There are leaders out there doing extraordinary things, rethinking parental leave, building real mental health infrastructure, creating cultures where people can bring their whole selves to work without it being a performance. Every business that raises the bar makes it easier for the next one to do the same, and harder for the ones still operating like it’s 2005 to get away with it.
But I’ve also watched the last two years with interest. DEI programmes that were announced with fanfare are being quietly archived. Return-to-office mandates are being sold as “collaboration” and enforced through performance reviews. The language of inclusion is still everywhere. The practice is retreating in places you wouldn’t expect. So when I say the world is catching up, what I really mean is: some of it is. And the rest of it is waiting to see which way the wind blows before deciding what it believes.
That’s why this conversation still matters today.
When people feel genuinely safe, genuinely trusted, they take creative risks they wouldn’t otherwise take. They bring ideas they’d have kept to themselves. The work gets better. They stay, which means they know your clients deeply, which means the thinking gets sharper year on year.
What I hope is that we keep pushing it forward and don’t go backwards. That “progressive” doesn’t become a ceiling we’re satisfied to reach.
Inclusive leadership isn’t a destination you arrive at and tick and box, and you’re done. It’s a daily choice: to listen harder, to act on what you hear, to hold the line when it would be easier not to. And the courage to lead differently starts the moment you decide that the way things have always been done isn’t good enough anymore.
