Introduction
Abigail Wilmore spent two decades building the people function inside some of the most scrutinised brands in the world, Gucci Group, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, and she still remembers sitting in rooms full of senior executives convinced she didn't belong there. That tension, standing in front of people whose judgement can end your credibility in a sentence, is one most senior leaders recognise. Her answer to it wasn't a better rulebook or a sharper policy deck. It was learning to lead with heart, and unlearning almost everything twenty years in luxury had taught her leadership was supposed to look like.
From the shop floor to the boardroom
Wilmore's path into leadership didn't start with a plan. She grew up in an unconventional household, her mother out earning as an artist and makeup artist in film, her father at home raising her and her sister, and she describes herself as headstrong from an early age. Ballet was the plan until she failed her first exam at sixteen and realised she wasn't going to make it as a dancer. What followed was a stretch of years with no clear direction, until she took a job on the shop floor at Estée Lauder as a makeup artist.
She didn't go to university. Instead, she learned the fundamentals of leadership from customers, some gracious, some entitled, in department stores like Harvey Nichols and Selfridges. Diplomacy, humility, and the skill of communicating with completely different types of people in the space of a few minutes: that's where it started. It wasn't glamorous, but it was real training, and it's the part of her story that doesn't usually make it into a chief people officer's biography.
Learning to lead without a rulebook
Wilmore went back to study human resources later, part time, over four years, and came out with a master's degree despite never having a bachelor's. Her career accelerated fast after that: a call out of nowhere from Gucci Group in 2006, rapid promotion, and within two years she was among the group's top executives, expected to speak about leadership in rooms she didn't yet feel qualified to be in.
She's candid that imposter syndrome was a constant companion in those years, and that it still shows up today. What she learned was that credibility isn't built by looking the part. It's built by getting the fundamentals right first, accurate admin, reliable processes, so that when you go to a CEO with an idea about culture or people, you're not starting from a deficit. Only once that baseline was solid could she use data and storytelling to make the case for the bigger, harder conversations about how people were actually experiencing the company.
What heart-centred leadership actually means
The phrase that gives this conversation its title isn't abstract for Wilmore. She defines it plainly: people want to be seen, heard and valued, and heart-centred leadership is about being the kind of leader who does that. Not as a gesture, but as a discipline that compounds, because when people feel genuinely recognised, that generates more, for the business, for the team, for the individual.
What's changed, in her view, is the status of the skills involved. Empathy and integrity used to be filed under soft skills, a category that implied optional, secondary, nice to have. Wilmore is blunt about where that framing has landed: there's no such thing anymore. These are the skills leadership actually requires now.
The pandemic and the end of having all the answers
Wilmore traces a lot of this shift back to a specific, brutal period. During the pandemic, she says, there was no option left except to be herself, on video calls with hundreds of people, with no certainty about what the next day would bring. The old model of leadership, project competence, have the answers, never let them see you unsure, simply stopped being available.
What she found on the other side of that surprised her. Leading without having all the answers, staying compassionate and heartfelt without pretending otherwise, turned out to build more trust, not less. She calls it the biggest lesson of her career, and one she's still practising: showing up as herself in meetings, being willing to get things wrong, and finding that far more freeing than the version of leadership she'd been performing for years.
Why the next generation won't accept anything less
This isn't just a personal preference playing out at the top. Wilmore is clear that the shift is generational, and it's moving in one direction. Older leaders, shaped by decades in a working world that didn't operate this way, are slower to adapt, and she still hears the old line: we didn't have to do it like that. Younger people entering work now aren't going to accept that answer. Empathy and humanity aren't a differentiator for them, they're the baseline expectation, and companies that don't meet it will lose their people.
Leaving the brand behind
After years fully devoted to Stella McCartney, stepping away from that world was harder than she expected. So much of her identity, she admits, had become tied up with the job and the brand attached to it. What got her through wasn't a strategy, it was leaning on mentors and people who could support her through that transition, and doing the harder, slower work of recognising that her value was never actually borrowed from the company's name.
That's the thread running through everything Wilmore now builds with her own consulting business: taking what she learned inside some of the most demanding creative environments in the world, about people, culture and what actually helps someone thrive under pressure, and making it available to organisations that need it just as much, even if they'll never have Gucci or Stella McCartney on the door.
