Introduction
Aggie Mutuma can trace her life's purpose back to a school playground, aged five or six, where classmates were unkind to her because of her race. In that moment she made herself a promise: whatever she did with her life, she would make sure no one else ever felt the way she felt.
That promise became a career. Aggie is CEO of Mahogany Inclusion Partners, founder of Black Inclusion Week, and a former people director who has worked inside major organisations including McDonald's, Tesco and Arcadia. In this conversation with Sope Agbelusi, she explains why leading with love is not the soft option it sounds like, and why boundaries had to become part of her definition of love rather than its opposite.
A purpose she resisted before she accepted it
Aggie describes her purpose, as she currently understands it, as spreading love and light. For years she rejected the idea, aware that the word love barely features in professional life. It kept resurfacing anyway: repeated under hypnosis during an NLP and coaching course, and in a game she plays with her daughters imagining superpowers, where hers was always the same, more love in the world. Eventually, on a speaking course asked to name her purpose, she said it plainly for the first time and stopped fighting it.
Why lead with love rather than anger
Growing up on a council estate, Aggie heard racial slurs graffitied on walls and shouted by a neighbour's friends. Her response was not to internalise it but to deflect it early: that's not for me, that's not who I am. Her faith reinforced the instinct, drawing on "forgive them, for they know not what they do": if people knew better, they would do better. Leading with love does not mean she never gets angry, she is candid that she does, and has what she calls "home talk" about difficult situations, but she works to return to a place of seeing the human in front of her and asking what they are actually afraid of.
Crucially, she is precise about what leading with love is not. It does not mean low standards, avoided feedback or blurred boundaries. In her HR practice, it means being explicit about what is expected in a role, what support will be given, and what the person needs to bring themselves, then having the direct conversation early if performance slips, rather than avoiding it.
Titles blind us
Early in her career, Aggie noticed HR's junior ranks full of women and people of colour, a picture that inverted almost completely by director level. It struck her as a warning sign for a profession that claims to champion human-centred, inclusive practice. A second defining lesson came on reaching an HR director role herself: titles create an illusion that the person holding them has everything sorted. In reality, the same doubts, am I good enough, what if I make a mistake, follow you all the way up.
Black Beauty Dolls: building representation before it was mainstream
While pregnant with her first daughter around 17 years ago, Aggie researched child psychology and landed on a consistent finding: representation matters, in toys, books and media. At the time, the dolls available to Black children were overwhelmingly white, blonde and blue-eyed, echoing her own childhood experience of absorbing, without anyone saying it outright, that beauty looked like something she was not. She started importing dolls from friends and family in the US, then built Black Beauty Dolls, a name that came to her in a dream, eventually designing her own plush doll and manufacturing it herself. It was never meant to be her main job; it was, in her words, a labour of love that she ran alongside full-time employment, sometimes on almost no sleep.
Multitasking, purpose, and choosing when to close the laptop
Asked how she manages a demanding career, a business, and raising two daughters, Aggie credits a natural capacity for multitasking, but the real engine is connection to purpose. When work, parenting and business all trace back to the same underlying why, spreading love and inclusion, none of it feels like sacrifice, even on the nights she is running on coffee.
Her parenting is deliberately intentional: individual one-on-one dates with each daughter, a standing "safe space" conversation where they can say anything, including what is not working for them, and shared ownership of problems like bedtime rather than one-sided rules. She frames this not as breaking a generational cycle but building a new one: her parents, she believes, would have parented differently had they known better.
Boundaries are not the opposite of love
Aggie once believed love meant being available at 100 per cent, always, with nothing held back. Boundaries felt like a contradiction of that. She has since reversed the equation: boundaries are what keep the cup full enough to keep pouring from. She is honest that her daughters are watching how she loves, and that modelling boundaryless giving risks teaching them an unhealthy pattern, so she now narrates her own boundary-setting to them directly, including the wins when saying no to something did not damage a relationship.
The hardest thing to give herself
Asked whether she celebrates herself the way she celebrates everyone else, her answer is immediate: no, not at all. She recounts ignoring an award nomination for weeks, embarrassed by the idea of being celebrated, until a friend posted it for her. She names it as ongoing work, tied to the same insight as her poem reference: shining your own light gives others permission to shine theirs.
Letting someone go with love
Asked how organisations can dismiss someone without turning them into an adversary, Aggie's answer centres on staying human. If the reason is true, say it plainly rather than softening it into vagueness, and recognise that avoiding a hard truth is often worse for the other person than delivering it with care. Her test for leaders: if this were your friend receiving bad news, how would you tell them? She has had people she once let go later return to work with her, proof that a respectful parting can preserve the relationship.
Leadership, defined
Aggie defines leadership as giving people the why, living and breathing it authentically, and setting the vision and destination. The how of getting there, she believes, should be shaped together with the team, with room to steer and pivot, and genuine openness to hearing when something is not working.
