Bambuddha Group founder Anna Sheppard on teaching CEO kindness
Raised by an abusive father before losing a mother to cancer, Anna Sheppard decided to build a global movement teaching CEOs that kindness isn’t weakness, but the future of leadership.
A candle flickers every day in Anna Sheppard’s home, a ritual that began the day her mother lost her battle with breast cancer a decade ago.
It is a daily reminder of the promise Sheppard made in one of their most intimate moments together, to forever fight for freedom and kindness for everyone.
Beth Sheppard’s breast was literally black and the cancer was already in her lymph nodes when she endured a double mastectomy as the doctors battled to save her life.
Through it all she rarely complained, even as she wept regularly from the emotional pain of enduring decades of physical and emotional abuse from her husband.
Eventually, the disease spread to her brain. Knowing the end was near, Sheppard wanted to find a way to say goodbye to her mother.
“My dad would never let my mum be on her own with me. Never. He was always in control of every dynamic,” Sheppard recalls of her late father, George.
A kind colleague at the hospice where Sheppard was working in central England suggested writing a letter. They did just that, pouring heart and soul into every word.
“You are beautiful. You have done so well in this life. You should be so proud of everything you have achieved. I am your legacy and I promise I will fight for freedom now for everyone,” it read.
In a quiet act of love, Sheppard slipped it into the backpack of Beth’s favourite teddy bear, hoping that despite being heavily medicated, she may read it.
The next day the dream came true when Beth was waiting at the end of her hospital bed when her daughter visited, eyes bright and teddy bear in hand.
“I read your letter. Do you really think those things of me?” she asked her daughter. Through tears, Sheppard simply nodded and replied softly: “Yeah, I do.”
“It put so much into perspective with regards to mortality,” Sheppard now says of what became a life-changing moment.
“It is not the big, massive gestures that matter. It is the little, regular moments of kindness and humanity that changed the game for me.”
The now 42-year-old has become a fierce champion of inclusion, kindness and the driving force behind a range of social enterprises and initiatives to improve outcomes for underrepresented communities.
Sheppard’s identity as a neurodiverse, non-binary and gay person, who prefers to use the pronoun they, has also only further sharpened her drive to fight for equality.
“I don’t feel like I’m a boy or a girl. I lean into my masculine energy and feminine energy in different ways, in different times, in different places.”
In late 2016 Sheppard founded Bambuddha Group, a social enterprise with a mission to empower leaders to “work kinder” by embedding ethical leadership practices and driving measurable social and environmental impact.
Leadership coaching
The firm, based in Sydney, provides advisory, training, and leadership coaching to some of the world’s leading brands, including Unilever, Pfizer, Westpac, Cisco and UK pharmacy chain Boots. Essentially, it teaches leaders to be kinder.
Its trademark is what it calls the Bambuddha Impact Index, informed by the rich data provided by hundreds of thought leaders globally, a comprehensive framework allowing firms to assess and enhance their performance through the lens of responsible leadership and sustainable practices. It shows that businesses embedding kindness, inclusion and sustainability into their strategies outperform competitors, delivering higher returns and lower staff absenteeism.
“To future-proof your business, leaders need to embrace empathy, adaptability and purpose-driven decisions,” Sheppard says. “It is not just about profit. It is about making a real, positive impact.”
Anna Sheppard’s journey did not begin with tragedy, but with resilience forged in hardship.
Growing up living in caravan parks on the northeast coast of England with five siblings, several of whom had physical and learning disabilities, the family moved regularly from site to site.
Their winters were so cold that sometimes they would have to move into a house just to survive.
George Sheppard was a dominating presence: aggressive, controlling and prone to violence.
Sheppard often tried to shield the family from his wild ways, even physically intervening when necessary.
Before Sheppard was born, the family lost a boy named Steven, who died before he was six months old. George never got over it.
“My dad tried so hard to have a boy, and I was the closest he ever got to one. That was something he never recovered from which probably resulted in him being such an angry human,” Sheppard says.
Eventually, the situation reached a breaking point.
One day George locked his daughter in a house in the seaside town of Scarborough with no food, furniture or heating. Sheppard’s friends eventually stepped in, offering food, work and a sense of belonging. So George returned and changed the locks to prolong his daughter’s suffering.
Sheppard eventually escaped but the trauma lingered for years.
“It was a great first step to reminding where kindness showed up again and again in my life. But I do think I had some kind of PTSD dissociation happen … just being a kid that just didn’t know what to do,” Sheppard says.
At the age of 16, Sheppard entered state care in the UK after a series of escalating incidents, including being wrongly arrested for taking action in self defence during a nightclub altercation.
“My dad came to bail me out from the police station. When I got outside, he slapped me around the head, not for getting arrested but for getting caught.”
With grit and determination, Sheppard eventually completed a degree in performing arts and a master’s degree in events management while pursuing community development projects across Europe, Africa and Asia.
While George Sheppard never quite said sorry to his daughter, he and Beth did attend Anna’s university graduation. It was the first time Sheppard had seen him for many years.
“It was very hard for him, but he was trying. There was also another moment where he did try, when I was at dance school and he brought me some dance shoes. So that was when we connected.”
Sheppard has been through hundreds of hours of therapy to deal with the trauma of a tumultuous childhood, but still believes the best form of therapy is a single word: laughter.
“You meet a lot of funny people in this world and a lot of the funny people, they deal with the world by finding the humour in things.
“They use it as a tool to disarm others, making them feel comfortable and bring them back to a state of equilibrium.”
Life out of balance
Sheppard eventually found the “why” in life working as an entertainer on the Spanish island of Ibiza, falling in love with a Mediterranean restaurant there called Bambuddha.
“The name pays homage to the first time when I realised that life is about balance,” they say of the genesis of the business name.
Having moved to Australia to work for various charities, Sheppard eight years ago set up Bambuddha to be “a good shepherd”, connecting people and joining dots between social impact, environmental impact and business outcomes.
The firm’s “Good for Business” program now guides companies through integrating kindness and ESG principles into their operations, aiming for measurable and accountable outcomes.
It has released a “Responsible Leadership 2035” white paper outlining a vision for workplaces that thrive on flexibility, collaboration and ESG-driven leadership.
“We join the dots between doing the right thing and actual business impact and outputs, for people, for planet and for profit,” Sheppard says.
Bambuddha has already contributed $1m in impact through its program delivery exchange and uses profits generated from training and advisory work to fund social impact projects, including girls’ education in Sierra Leone and supporting LGBT refugees in Kenya.
The firm is now raising $500,000 to fund a dashboard and learning suite for the Bambuddha Impact Index that can be rolled out globally – as Sheppard puts it, to “catalyse a global shift to responsible leadership by 2035”.
While recent corporate cutbacks and the global backlash against wokeism have put pressure on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives, Sheppard argues that businesses tempted to deprioritise ethical leadership do so at their peril. “Even if your investors are changing their minds about where they are putting their money based on ESG, it still doesn’t stop the other fundamental factors which drive your success.
“People will form their opinions on you as customers, stakeholders, partners and employees.
“The world is moving on at 1000 miles an hour. We are not in a place now where we can go back to 1980’s Wolf of Wall Street rhetoric.”
Beth Sheppard spent her final days living on a canal boat near the town of Rugby in the English county of Warwickshire, the final stage of her ever-transient existence.
Anna and her father had a generator installed on the vessel to power the ventilators needed for Beth to breathe, fulfilling her last wish not to die in a hospital. Despite all the pain he had caused her, George wanted to do his best to help his wife in her dying days.
Sheppard recalls holding Beth’s hand through what would be the last night spent together.
“She was so smacked out of her face on all the medicine. But just before I left, she turned around, looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m gonna go home.’ She said, ‘I’ll see you soon, won’t I?’ That was my last memory of her before she passed away.”
George Sheppard died on March 25 this year, also in Rugby. Anna saw him for the final time at Christmas in 2023.
He bought everyone in the room a present but he and they sat together in near silence for two hours. “My disabled sister, Sharon, who has cerebral palsy, was sitting there too. He was screaming at her about whether she should hold a sandwich in a left hand or a right hand. I had to protect her from that,” Sheppard says.
But in his final days, George did try to reconcile with his children, remembering that love is the most important legacy of all.
Ahead of his funeral held early last month, Anna agreed to assemble a slide show of his life.
“I kept on thinking ‘How am I supposed to build a narrative of this man in a way where I can turn his darkness into light?’ Because that’s my gift. We talk about responsible leadership, system change and all of that. My gift is about lightness.
“But I managed to build a journey of his life where I showed the light that came out of it.”
George Sheppard never told his daughter of his pride in Bambuddha, even though he expressed his joy at his daughter’s creation to everybody else. Now four months after his death, I ask if knowing that gives her some satisfaction?
“It depends on which lens you look through,” they answer bluntly, musing whether his positive commentary was just a crude boost for his own ego.
“But if it is genuinely somebody who can’t find their words to communicate how they really feel due to their pre-existing biases and their own feelings of success or failure, then yes it gives me some warmth in my heart to think that my dad would be proud of me.”
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