Introduction
A group of girls at a new school took a book out of Colette Philip's hands and started throwing it between themselves. She was ten, painfully shy, and had just arrived at a private school in Bedford on a scholarship from a state school in Luton. Something in her shifted. She thought, these girls don't know who they're dealing with, walked over, and hit one of them. She was never bullied again.
That same fire followed her into advertising, where she was told outright that black women weren't strategists, and later into building her own company, Brand by Me, after years of being what she calls "the thing behind the thing", the person whose ideas moved brands and campaigns while she stayed invisible. On this episode of Everyday Leadership, Colette sits down with Sope Agbelusi to explain why diversity, equity and inclusion work so often fails, and what actually needs to happen instead.
The Fire That Started in Luton
Colette describes two versions of herself as a child: painfully shy around people she didn't know or trust, and full of energy and laughter with her family. The shy version disappeared the day those girls at her new school pushed her too far. She hit one of them in the face. She doesn't condone violence, she's clear about that, but it worked. No one bothered her again, and within a year she'd built a close friendship group that has lasted to this day.
She traces a direct line from that moment to a trait she still carries: a fire that sits quietly until an injustice tips it over, then moves her to act, often unpredictably. It's the same fire that lets her sit in rooms with senior leaders and say the words "white supremacy" without flinching. "I need to," she says, "because they need to know."
Wanting to Be Prime Minister
Before she had language for leadership, Colette had clarity of purpose. Asked as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up, she didn't hesitate: prime minister. She'd seen a black female barrister and the MP Diane Abbott on television and thought, female prime minister, fine, black woman, even better. She didn't expect to be first. She just knew that was the route to helping the most people, and helping people was the point.
That clarity stayed constant even as her outward personality shifted between shy and confident depending on who was in the room. It's a detail worth sitting with: the throughline in her leadership story isn't a single dramatic turning point, it's a want to help that was there before she had the words for it.
Locked Out of Strategy: Racism in Advertising
Colette fell into advertising almost by accident, after a marketing placement in Germany she disliked and a friend's suggestion that she might prefer something "a bit like marketing." She loved the ideas, the shoots, the process of understanding how creativity drives impact for brands. What she wasn't allowed to do was call herself a strategist.
"I was at an agency and I wanted to move into strategy, and they just wouldn't allow it," she says. "Every agency I went to, they were like, no, you can't be a strategist." When she pushed for a reason, the pattern held across multiple agencies and was later confirmed by friends in the industry: black women weren't seen as strategists. She was expected to be grateful for a seat in the room, do exactly what she was told, and not ask for more, the classic "work twice as hard" expectation her own parents had never told her but the industry taught her anyway.
The Thing Behind the Thing
Despite being denied formal creative and strategy titles, Colette kept generating ideas that worked, including a group university presentation reframed as a courtroom case that lifted the team's mark from around 50% to 85%. She still wouldn't call herself creative. She'd say she "worked well with creatives." It took winning an industry award for creative business of the year, and a friend directly challenging her, before she could sit with the word.
She names the pattern precisely: in advertising, she learned to disassociate herself from her own ideas, because work that could be traced back to her was more likely to be blocked or vetoed. Staying "the thing behind the thing" bought her more freedom and less flak, but it came at a cost, because when she later went for senior board-facing roles, she was told she wasn't visible enough to lead. Visible, and she was accused of making it about herself. Invisible, and she wasn't leadership material. "Which one is it?" she asks. "Both of those things." She calls this the contradictory feedback loop many black women, and people from multiply minoritised communities, are handed instead of a straight answer.
The Career Break That Became Brand by Me
The point came where every route forward felt blocked. Colette describes trying option after option in her career, hearing contradictory feedback each time, until she realised the feedback wasn't really about her, it was about the system. She took a career break, gave herself three weeks of clarity, and set up Brand by Me on her own savings.
Asked whether courage has always been a character trait, she says it's both courage and that same fire: when she can't see another option and her back is against the wall, the fire moves her to act. She's candid that people often call her brave for decisions she experiences as simply not having a choice left. Founding her own company meant she no longer had to burn herself out breaking through systemic barriers built by other people. She could build on her own terms, leading her team, her clients and her creativity without permission.
That shift is also what let her lean, slowly, into calling herself creative and visible. She points to Beyoncé's Renaissance era as the energy she wants for this chapter: having done the work of smashing down barriers, she's choosing to keep doing that work in a way that's bold and unapologetic rather than staying in the shadows as the person who makes things happen without ever being seen to do it.
Why DEI Isn't Enough
Colette's central argument, one she first shared publicly at a leadership conference and has been circling for years, draws on Audre Lorde's line that the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. DEI, she argues, comes from the same corporate structures it claims to challenge. The D and I came first; the E was added later without changing anything structural underneath it, a find-and-replace exercise rather than a rebuild.
Because DEI is designed to work within existing systems, it prioritises comfort, especially white comfort, over the structural change that genuine inclusion requires. She points to how DEI teams get shuffled back into HR departments whenever budgets tighten, a department whose function, by definition, is extracting value from people for the organisation, not delivering liberation. "If something can so often, so readily and so consistently be co-opted by oppressive structures and systems," she says, "it ain't the way you're using the thing that's wrong. It's probably the thing itself."
Her alternative isn't abandoning the goal, it's changing the tools: anti-racism and anti-oppression work, drawn deliberately from social justice movements rather than corporate diversity frameworks, aimed at delivering systemic change rather than the feeling of inclusion.
What Organisations Should Actually Do
Colette is specific about where organisations that have already invested in DEI can go next, rather than starting from zero. Most DEI work has at least generated useful data, on pay gaps, on employee experience, on where issues sit. The mistake is stopping there. Her practical steps:
Collaborate across a sector rather than hoarding data, since equity work isn't proprietary IP. Pay people who are multiply minoritised, not just any person from an underrepresented group, but genuine experts in anti-racism and anti-oppression work. Look to movements and think tanks that have already done the policy work, in law enforcement reform and beyond, rather than staying inside the safety of a DEI framework. Give existing internal teams accountability and partner them with strong external practitioners. Stop using euphemisms: say anti-racism instead of DEI, say patriarchy instead of gender bias, say transphobia instead of a softer catch-all.
She illustrates the principle with a story about her colleague Suhan, a disabled South Asian man, ahead of a client workshop on anti-racism and anti-ableism. Rather than assume he needed to sit upright in his wheelchair to look professional on the Zoom call, she asked him how he'd be most comfortable. He said lying down. So he ran the workshop lying down, and it set an expectation that carried into later interviews with other disabled professionals, several of whom said they'd never have imagined they were allowed to show up that way. "Ask the question," Colette says. "What's needed here? Then create the conditions so that people can actually come in."
Who Brand by Me Actually Works With
Colette is direct about who she'll take on as a client. Organisations doing this work to tick a box, because everyone else is doing it, or to sell more to a specific demographic, are turned away outright. She doesn't require a charity structure or a non-profit model, she points to Ben & Jerry's, which has sued its own parent company Unilever over direction it considered oppressive, as proof that commercial organisations can be genuinely serious about justice.
Her criteria: seriousness about justice and equity, a willingness to invest time and money rather than treat it as a one-off project, and an interest in how the work shapes not just internal culture but how the organisation shows up in the world. If an organisation is missing one of the three, she says, that's a conversation worth having anyway. If it's missing all of them, the conversation will be short, though she'll often point them toward other practitioners doing similar work for different reasons.
