Introduction
Hannah Awonuga was independent from the age of fifteen. Her household had broken down, and she found herself homeless, then something she says was harder than homelessness itself: lonely. At sixteen, with a phone call from the only family she had left telling her to either come back to a life she did not want or go and get herself a job, she chose the job. That decision, made by a teenager with no safety net, is the starting point for a career that now includes a global head of diversity, equity and inclusion role, a run of leadership positions inside one of the UK's biggest banks, and a voice that reaches far beyond either.
What makes this conversation land is not the trajectory itself, it is what Hannah Awonuga says sits underneath it: a pattern she calls the "gratitude complex," and the years it took her to stop being so grateful for the door being opened that she forgot to walk all the way through it.
A crossroads at fifteen, and a straight-talking phone call
Hannah's household broke down when she was young, and she found herself living independently from around fifteen. She had spent part of her childhood living with a white family in Dorset, a family she describes as having become her own, and stayed in contact with them after moving back to London as a child. When her situation at home collapsed, it was a call to that family, and one blunt piece of advice, that shaped her next decision: come back to Dorset, or go and get a job.
She was not going back to Dorset. She got a job.
Turning up in a hoodie, and the power of someone looking past it
At sixteen Hannah interviewed for a cashier role at Halifax. Everyone else at the interview was in a suit. She turned up in a hooded jacket, jeans and trainers, not because she was making a statement but because she genuinely did not know how job interviews worked. The woman who interviewed her looked past the hoodie, listened to her talk about being a school prefect and being personable, and gave her a second chance to come back properly dressed rather than turning her away.
Hannah is clear about what that moment represents: the difference between a leader who only sees what is in front of them and a leader who actively looks for talent and identifies when someone needs support. That single decision by one interviewer opened the door to everything that followed.
From cashier to bank manager at twenty-one
Hannah moved from Halifax to Barclays at seventeen, initially just to cover rent and bills. Roughly three and a half years in, she decided that if she wanted to build a real career she needed a degree, and walked into her boss's office to resign. Instead, he told her Barclays had just launched its first sponsored degree programme. She did not have the UCAS points typically required, but four years of proven performance at Barclays got her onto the programme anyway, on merit.
She completed a three-year sponsored degree in management and leadership while doing rotational roles across the business, and came off the programme at twenty-one to be handed her own branch to run as a bank manager.
Learning that leadership on paper is not leadership at all
Her first branch team included a cashier who had been doing the job for thirty years, longer than Hannah had been alive. It was, in her words, a fast lesson in the gap between what you learn about leadership and what leadership actually is. She had the title, but nobody was following her anywhere, because she had no vision to lead them toward.
That period taught her that leadership means building an environment people choose to trust and perform within, not simply issuing instructions because you hold the job title. It is a lesson she says she has spent every year since refining.
Leading people who do not want your job
Managing a team significantly older than herself forced Hannah to abandon a one-size-fits-all approach to motivation. Some people on her team wanted to be promoted, and for them the path was straightforward: here is what we need to do to get you there. Others had no interest in climbing, they wanted stability, or simply enjoyed the part of the job they were already doing.
Her approach became rooted in a simple question: why are you here, and what do you actually want from this? For a colleague who loved working with customers, that meant investing in making her the best possible customer service person, not pushing her toward a promotion she did not want. For someone who openly said she disliked the job but needed the income, it meant being straightforward about what she needed to do to keep it. Service-based leadership, Hannah says, starts with finding out what someone actually needs from you.
Racism, microaggressions, and the discipline of refinement
Hannah does not soften the harder parts of her rise. Early in her career, a manager told her she would probably be better placed working somewhere like a discount supermarket rather than where she was. She was young enough at the time to shrug it off rather than fully register it. A later manager, by contrast, actively championed her, putting her forward for awards and recognition, and that contrast taught her something about the compounding effect of both good and bad leadership on the people underneath it.
She talks often about refinement rather than polish. In her framing, everyone wants to arrive as the finished, shiny article, but that is not how it works. She describes herself as constantly refining, insisting that the leader she is today is not the leader she intends to be in ten years, and that every difficult interaction, not just the encouraging ones, has been part of building the more assertive, more present version of herself she is now.
Naming the gratitude complex
One of the most striking ideas in this conversation is what Hannah calls the gratitude complex: the tendency, common among people from lower socioeconomic or underserved backgrounds, to over-invest emotionally in the company that gave them their first real opportunity. You are so grateful to have been let in that you stop advocating for yourself, and companies measuring engagement by socioeconomic background often see high satisfaction scores as a result, without realising those scores reflect fear of losing a hard-won foothold rather than genuine advancement.
Hannah admits she lived this for years, describing herself as "blue blood" loyal to Barclays for the better part of a decade. It took mentors reflecting her own record back to her, reminding her that she had not simply stayed a cashier, to shift that pattern.
Finding her voice, and taking her power back
In 2020 Hannah started posting on LinkedIn with around five hundred followers. Between 2020 and 2021 she began posting weekly from her own lived experience, and people started responding, engaging, and reaching out to ask her to speak to their teams. That response, arriving while she was still working full time at Barclays, gave her a sense of power she had not expected.
She describes the shift plainly: when she started lending her voice to real topics and people listened, she took her power back. That, she says, is what real ownership of a career looks like, not staying quiet and grateful, but stepping fully into a voice with something to say.
Leaving when everything was going well
After seventeen years at Barclays, having made director and being well respected in a role she genuinely loved, Hannah made what she calls one of the hardest decisions of her career: she left for a new opportunity, now serving as global head of diversity, equity and inclusion at a major international company. A mentor on an executive leadership programme for Black women had taught her a principle that reframed the decision entirely: go when it is easiest to stay, stay when it is easiest to go.
Leaving from a position of strength, rather than waiting until she was pushed out or burnt out, gave her leverage she would not have had otherwise, and she left the door open with the relationships she had built along the way. It was emotionally taxing, and she insisted on physically saying goodbye to the building on her way out, rather than disappearing quietly, as a way of honouring what the chapter had meant to her.
