Working life story: Tesse Akpeki

Tesse Akpeki has years of experience in governance, having started in the field when it was still developing. She was delighted to then be headhunted to run the governance development programme of a City law firm and has since gone freelance as a consultant.

But everything changed for her in 2020 when her elder brother Tony was killed by a speeding hit and run driver as he delivered Covid tests to care homes in Dover.

Tesse was extremely close to him. She needed time to grieve and to sort out all the legal and other issues that arose from his death. His death changed her. She felt she needed to focus on the things where she felt she could add value and on her own wellbeing and mental health.

Since then she has done a lot of work on resilience on both a professional and personal basis, coaching [teams and individuals] and mentoring others and doing mediation work. Her long-time passion is exploring the relationships between people and getting people to understand each other better, particularly at a senior leadership level.

“I have good listening skills,” she says, ‘and over the years those skills have deepened. My interest is in working with people to achieve alignment when it comes to what they are doing to achieve their vision.”

Early years

Tesse’s interest in relationship and conflict management goes back to her childhood experiences.  Tesse’s family moved from London to Northern Ireland when she was four years old as her father was studying at Queen’s University.

There she and her siblings were taken into care and spent six years in a children’s home. They were separated, but would occasionally see each other.  It was the late 1960s and early 70s, when the Troubles were at their height and conflict was everywhere. Tesse said she made a childhood promise to herself to ‘make peace’.

Being a person of colour in Belfast at that time was not easy. “I hardly saw anyone who looked like me,” she says. She was witness to a lot of abuse and neglect at the children’s home, which she blanked out until recently. That abuse was worse for her and her siblings because they were Black. “Denying what happened was my way of surviving,” she says. 

Much of the institutional abuse that went on in many children’s homes was covered up until recently. Tesse launched her own action under the Historical Institutional Abuse Redress Scheme and last year, after four years of pushing for recognition of what she suffered, they finally ruled in her favour. Tesse had wanted to let Tony know, but never got the chance.

Nigeria

By the time she was 10 Tesse’s parents had moved to Nigeria and had had more children. They sent for Tesse and her siblings after Tony and his brother John narrowly escaped being blown up by a bomb planted in the shop they had gone to. Tesse had never been to Nigeria and found it difficult to adapt to a new family dynamic fraught with the potential for conflict and a new culture.

Although Tony loved Nigeria, unlike Tesse, that experience cemented the bond between the two siblings. “Tony was alway my rock, my solid place,” she says, adding that her experience of such a complex family dynamic also taught her a lot about conflict management. “I learnt about the importance of trying to make the best out of something that is not so good,” she states.

Tesse was very bright and started working for the Nigerian civil service.  At 16 she went to university and graduated with a law degree at the age of 20, being called to the bar a year later. She left Nigeria for the UK at the age of 26 for personal reasons and to study for administrative exams. However, her law qualifications weren’t recognised in the UK so she had to start all over again. It took her 10 years to get back to where she had been in Nigeria.

Career developments

In the 1990s, Tesse went into the governance field, which was fairly unknown at the time as a discipline. She puts her interest in exploring something so new down to “a curious mind”. She got a job in governance development, thinking she would only stay a short time, but was there for 13 years, qualifying as a solicitor along the way.

She says of her career that it has been difficult to explain her complicated journey in a simple way in her CV.  A person she met on a life-changing leadership course in the US recently told her: “People don’t know what to do with you. You don’t fit in any particular box.” She thinks this is very true. She has also had counselling to try and extrapolate all the different identities she holds within her.

Wellbeing

Tesse has for a long time been interested in health and wellbeing through her work on relationship management and addressing dysfunctional organisations. She says many organisations only take a tickbox approach to mental wellbeing and there is a big divide when it comes to provision between those who are just jumping on the bandwagon and hoping to make money and those who genuinely want to make a difference.

Tesse definitely falls into the latter camp and Tony’s death has made her more passionate about wellbeing and about helping others. Indeed Tony [pictured right], who was dedicated to helping others, had health challenges of his own and had to fight his way to fitness.

Tesse had started a podcast – TesseTalks – just before Tony died. She told him about it and he was encouraging her to do more episodes. The podcast shares leadership and management strategies. After Tony’s death, Tesse set up another – Tesse Leads – which is her legacy to her brother. It has a wellbeing focus and is described as a safe space to share, hear and tell personal stories and experiences. Top experts and thought leaders also deliver strategies, tips and techniques they have found useful in navigating a diverse range of challenges, difficulties and dilemmas.

Both podcasts have notched up over 100,000 impressions since their launch. Tesse says she thinks Tony would be proud of what the podcasts have achieved. “He was always so proud of me. He would be saying ‘that’s my sister’. I think he valued me more than I value myself,” she says. She adds: “What I want is to find a way of keeping him in my life, knowing that I had the best relationship with him.”

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