Sunny Dhadley, addiction to leadership

Sunny Dhadley FRSA is a consultant, coach and motivational speaker. For 10 years he was programme lead for the Wolverhampton Service User Involvement Team, in connection with which he was shortlisted for Public Servant of the Year 2018.

Sunny was initially brought up in a multicultural area until he was six or seven. Then he moved to a predominantly white council estate. Nonetheless he felt at home there. It wasn’t until he won a scholarship to a local grammar school that he felt alienated and became involved in gangs, street violence and illicit drugs. This led to him using and then becoming addicted to heroin and crack cocaine.

He came to a point where he realised that he had to change or end up in prison or dead. He carried out his own detox programme at his parent’s house. Three days after he finished he got married and went to Bali for his honeymoon. When he came back he volunteered for the Wolverhampton Service User Involvement Team. 

Wolvehampton Service User Involvement Team (SUIT) was established by the Council to vet and critique their services from a user standpoint. Sunny progressed from volunteer to project worker to leader within a five month period, and then went on to lead that organisation for over 10 years. By the time he left it had become a service in its own right, mentoring and supporting addicts and former addicts, and had been cited twice as a European Model of Best Practice. 

One the ways Sunny coped with his meteoric rise to leadership was by staying curious. He was prepared to admit what he didn’t know and keen to probe issue in depth.

He left in the middle of the organisation’s success to practice what he preached. He had always tried to promote a mindset of learning and growth among SUIT’s clients and now he wanted to initiate a further phase of growth in his own life. He left his successor with seven years of funding to continue the work of SUIT.

Since leaving SUIT, Sunny has been able to spend more time with his children and has started to grow a business around consultancy and speaking. He has given a TEDx talk and has been an ambassador for a political party. He has supported the development of the Lived Experience Movement, providing a voice to people who have experienced social harms in their lives.

His Wolverhampton TEDx talk touches on the deep-rooted societal factors behind drug addiction, and the main reason for the success of SUIT was a perspective that embraced the whole of the addict’s experience, including healthcare, housing, justice, education, and social networks. Fundamentally the service was based on compassion.

Sunny believes that current UK drug policy causes more harm than good. The “War on Drugs” turned into a war on people that used drugs, disproportionately affecting the poor and traumatized. Sunny believes that the Government should legalise, tax and regulate the drugs market. Additionally, any enlightened drugs policy needs to consider the livelihood of the people who currently deal in drugs as a way of making a living.

Sunny has written about the ‘Lived Experience’ of people suffering from hardships for both NHS Digital and the Conservative Drug Reform Group. He believes that the involvement of people with lived experience in the design of services and the development of policy is often tokenistic and that a deeper commitment to lived experience would greatly enhance the quality of the solutions that we devise to societal problems.

He’s recently qualified as an Agile Project Manager. He believes that Agile approaches could help bring more efficiency to the public sector.

Sunny is an Independent Ambassador for the Labour Party. In 2018 he completed a parliamentary shadowing programme. He would “never say never” to a career in politics, but in the meantime he is dedicated to helping the world in whatever way he can.

Sunny’s leadership philosophy follows from his philosophy of life, in that he believes everyone is of equal worth. He approaches leadership with the attitude of a servant. The humility he brings to leadership stems from the fact that he started at the very bottom. And he believes that respect is earnt by the content of ones character, rather than demanded by status.

He cites parenthood and the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service 2014 as his proudest achievements. People that have inspired him include Dr Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who have shown that change is possible, while bringing humility, love, and compassion to their leadership.

His self-care regime includes daily exercise, a gratitude list, prayer, and good food. The spiritual side of live is “massively important” to him. He is currently reading “Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet (as also recommended by Adrian Brown in episode 3). In general Sunny would encourage people to “keep learning, and keep connecting with things that inspire you.”

His advice to his 20-year old self would be “Don’t get caught up in having to have all the answers.” He would say “Don’t be too harsh on yourself. Things will work out … It’s important that you are in tune with the things that make you happy.”