Sunny Ellis

Stubbornness. That's the honest answer. If you want a nicer framing, call it persistence and tenacity - but anyone who has worked with me will tell you the real word. I don't walk away from problems, I don't pretend a hard conversation isn't a hard conversation, and I don't stop until the thing is fixed. That's not glamorous and it's not always comfortable to be around, but it's the reason a team of five became a team of forty-eight, and it's the reason I can now vibe-code internal tools for a support team when I started my career answering phones.

The other half of it is that I genuinely want things to be better for other people. It hasn't mattered what job I was in - piano teacher, vocal coach, in-home caregiver, small-town office worker, Director of Support. The through-line is always the same: make this person's experience better than I found it. When you combine stubbornness with a real desire to improve someone else's day, you end up building a lot of things that didn't exist before you showed up.

"Be who you are." It sounds almost too simple to be advice, but I got it recently, from the right person at the right moment, and it was the most freeing thing anyone has ever said to me at work. I'm a direct communicator. I say the thing everyone in the room is thinking but no one wants to verbalize. I approach conflict as a task that has to get done, even though I hate it. For a long time I treated those traits as something I was supposed to soften, file down, or apologize for.

Being told I didn't have to - that my style is an asset, not a liability - rewired something. I know not everyone gets that permission, and I don't take it for granted. But the minute I stopped trying to shape myself into something I wasn't, I started doing better work and building better relationships. Turns out the thing I was trying to hide was the thing that made me most valuable as a leader.

You can be you. That sounds almost too simple, but it took me a long time to actually believe it, and it's the single most important thing I'd want a younger woman to hear from someone further down the road. Whatever makes you you - your directness, your quietness, your creativity, your curiosity, your way of seeing things - is not something you need to file down to fit in somewhere. The right rooms will make space for who you actually are, and those are the rooms worth being in.

Find people who see you clearly and invest in those relationships. Build your own voice. Build your own network. Don't wait for permission to step into rooms you've earned the right to be in - and when you get there, bring your whole self with you, not af filtered-down version of her. The world has plenty of people trying to be someone else. What it needs is more of you, exactly as you are.

The single biggest thing happening in support right now is the tightrope between AI and humans, and how companies choose to walk it. AI isn't going anywhere - I use it every day, I build with it, I train my team on it, and I love it. But AI without human wisdom on top of it is a liability, especially in an industry like mine where a single wrong answer at the wrong moment can cost a nonprofit real money or real trust with their donors. The tool itself is neutral. The question is always who's holding it and whether they've been taught to use it well.

The opportunity is open for the companies that get this balance right. That means investing in your people alongside the technology, not instead of them. It means teaching your team how to use AI as a co-pilot and when to override it. It means treating your support org as a strategic function instead of a cost center. The companies that figure this out in the next two years are going to have a massive, durable advantage.

Honesty, full stop. I would rather have ten uncomfortable, honest conversations than one polite sync that never solves anything. I'm not interested in being harsh or creating conflict. It's actually a deep commitment to solving conflict at the root cause. Problems don't get smaller when you don't name them. In my work, that shows up as being willing to surface the thing nobody else wants to say. In my personal life, it shows up as a pretty curated circle of people I trust to handle that level of directness without turning it into something it's not.

The other value I keep coming back to is stewardship - of people, of time, of energy. I've learned to edit my environment, both at home and at work, because I only have so much of me to give and I want to give it to the people and the projects that matter. I co-lead Butterminds, our internal mindfulness and wellness group at Givebutter, partly because I needed that space myself and partly because I want the women coming up behind me to take care of themselves earlier than I did. Being good at this job for a long time requires knowing when to pour out and when to refill. I'm still learning that one, but I'm learning it out loud - on purpose, so other people can learn it with me.