Toyin Seth-Ogungbemi: More Than One Way to Make an Impact

For Toyin Seth-Ogungbemi, there has never been just one way to make an impact. Her professional life has moved through banking, operations, Human Resources, organisational culture and leadership. Alongside that career, she has written books, worked in drama, mentored young people, moderated conversations and spent more than a decade counselling couples. She has worked with executives and employees, teenagers and young people, husbands and wives. And somehow, none of these chapters feels accidental.

Toyin has built a life that gives her room to do many of the things she is naturally drawn to: understand people, develop them, tell stories, facilitate difficult conversations and create spaces where others can grow. Today, she is the Culture, Team and Values Manager at the School of International Futures (SOIF), where she helps shape organisational culture and values and manages the human resources function. She brings more than 14 years of experience building diverse teams and working across people management, employee engagement, change management and strategic planning.

But the woman behind that professional title did not begin her career in Human Resources. Toyin started out at Zenith Bank as a Cash and Teller Officer. She was good at the job, but soon realised she wanted more. After NYSC, she moved into an operations role, where she discovered that she enjoyed improving processes and bringing structure to the way things worked.

At the time, HR was not part of the plan. That changed when she joined GRID Consulting as a Contracting Officer. For the first time, a quality that had always been part of her personality began to find a place in her professional life. Toyin had always been empathetic and a good listener, using those qualities largely in her religious and social circles. At GRID, she began to see that helping and connecting with people could itself be meaningful work.

People around her noticed it too. A senior colleague, a friend and her spouse encouraged her to explore Human Resources as a career. She did, and that decision set her on a path that would eventually span talent management, learning and development, leadership, organisational culture, workforce motivation and capacity building.

More than a decade later, Toyin is still doing work that sits at the intersection of people and possibility. Her professional portfolio describes her as a Talent and Culture professional, moderator and author, but also captures the range of her interests in four simple words: “iWrite… iTeach… iLead… iPerform.” Those words are not just a tagline. They describe the different ways Toyin has chosen to express herself.

In her corporate work, Toyin has spent years helping organisations get better at working with their most important resource: people. Her experience includes resource and talent management, leadership development, learning and development, culture development, workforce motivation and process management. She has also developed a reputation for looking beyond conventional approaches to people management.

Her portfolio describes her as someone who provides tailored interventions for organisations seeking to optimise performance and build scalable ecosystems, while also working with individuals through coaching and counselling. It is work that has given her a front-row seat to the realities of leadership: what makes teams work, what gets in their way, how culture shapes behaviour and how much of organisational performance ultimately comes back to people.

But Toyin’s work with people doesn’t stop when the workday ends.

For more than ten years, she has also been walking with couples. Toyin is a certified SYMBIS facilitator, relationship counsellor and marriage mentor. Her counselling portfolio records more than a decade of experience and more than 40 couples supported across different stages of their relationships.

Her work with couples covers the subjects that often determine whether a marriage thrives or struggles: communication, personality and temperament, conflict, expectations, finances, intimacy, boundaries, extended family, spirituality and the responsibilities of building a home. For couples experiencing serious conflict, she also provides reconciliation support, creating room for difficult conversations, emotional healing, truth-telling, accountability and rebuilding trust.

It is a very different environment from an office. But it requires many of the qualities that have shaped her professional career: listening carefully, understanding people, communicating clearly and helping people navigate difficult situations.

Toyin describes her broader mission as “midwifing possibilities” and “nurturing the human soul.” Her counselling practice may be one of the clearest places to see that philosophy in action.

There is another part of Toyin’s life that is easy to miss when looking only at her professional career: the time she gives to young people. She has worked with teenagers and youth, including serving as a coach at the Doxa Summer Camp, where children and teenagers were given opportunities to explore their gifts, develop practical and creative skills and grow in godly values.

It is another expression of something that seems to matter deeply to her: helping young people recognise possibilities in themselves before those possibilities become buried under uncertainty or circumstance. Her work with young people also connects to her long-standing interest in teaching and mentoring, which she lists among the services she offers individuals.

Toyin’s creative side is not new. She is the co-author, with her father Stephen Makun, of Chip Off the Old Block, a collection of short stories published in 2017. The book explores fear, pain, vengeance, gender, family and courage through a series of fictional stories and characters.

Her professional portfolio also describes her interests in scriptwriting and directing, alongside writing, teaching, leadership and performance. For Toyin, storytelling is another space where she can explore people. It allows her to look at their choices, relationships, fears and ambitions from a different angle.

And perhaps that creative instinct explains part of her ability to move comfortably between very different kinds of work. She can sit in a boardroom discussing organisational culture. She can sit with a couple working through conflict. She can stand before teenagers encouraging them to explore their gifts. She can moderate a conversation. She can write a story.

These are different settings, but they all allow her to do something she clearly values: engage with people and help create movement.

It would be tempting to describe Toyin as simply “multifaceted.” But that word does not quite capture what is interesting about her. She has not merely accumulated unrelated skills. She has continued to develop the different parts of herself that she finds meaningful.

The banker became an HR professional. The HR professional became a culture and leadership specialist. The creative writer became an author. The mentor became a relationship counsellor. The professional who works with organisational teams also makes time for young people. And through all of it, she has continued to write, teach, lead and perform.

In a 2023 interview with The Guardian, Toyin spoke about wanting to “die empty” and leave a legacy that outlives her. She also spoke about the importance of building and maintaining relationships and of understanding the people with whom we work.

Perhaps that explains why her career has not followed a narrow path. She seems less interested in fitting herself into one professional identity than in making use of the different gifts, experiences and interests she has been given.

There is a line in her portfolio that perhaps captures this best. She describes her approach as creating an environment where possibilities flourish and personal and collective growth become possible.

For Toyin Seth-Ogungbemi, that environment might be a workplace. It might be a counselling room. It might be a summer camp. It might be a stage. It might even be the pages of a book.

The setting keeps changing.

Toyin keeps showing up.

And perhaps that is the most revealing thing about her story: she has never allowed one version of herself to become the limit of what she could contribute.