Real conversations about mental health create a better and safer culture.
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I recently had the privilege to interview one of our 2026 CLC award honorees. Every year, we choose a small group of leaders to represent the hundreds of qualified individuals who are nominated and lead with love. There are three essential, evidence-based skills that these leaders work to master: self-compassion, vulnerability to others, and compassion for others. This CEO and his story are a great example of how all three can work together to create goodwill and ROI.
Three essential skills for compassionate leaders.
Compassionate Leaders Circle
Rick Milenthal is the CEO and co-founder of The Shipyard, one of the country’s fastest-growing independent advertising agencies, with about 500 employees and a client roster that spans some of the most recognized brands in America. Their guiding philosophy is “engineering brand love” — the belief that technology should amplify human feeling, not replace it. But what distinguishes Rick from most agency leaders I’ve interviewed isn’t his business model. It’s what he’s chosen to do with the power of his platform to further efforts to improve mental health outcomes.
When Grief Becomes a Mandate
Milenthal didn’t arrive at mental health advocacy through a strategic planning session. He arrived through loss.
His close business partner and co-founder lost a 17-year-old son to suicide. This was a family that had done everything right — they knew their son was struggling, they sought help, they put every resource they had toward saving him. And they still couldn’t. Six months after that tragedy, Milenthal and his partner looked at each other and said, “We have to do something about this.”
Milenthal also carried his own private grief into that conversation. His father-in-law had died by suicide in the first year of his marriage — a story he’d kept to himself for years, as so many of us do, out of a fear of burdening others. That silence, he told me, is exactly the problem.
“There was a lot of stigma,” he said. “You feel like you’re burdening people. So you keep it inside.”The decision to stop keeping it inside — personally and organizationally — became the turning point.
Building the Business Case for Compassion
What followed was a wholesale reimagining of what it means to support employees. The Shipyard introduced free access to counseling, expanded PTO, paid parental leave, and hybrid flexibility. More importantly, Milenthal worked to create a culture where talking about mental health isn’t career suicide — it’s just talking. “If you talked with our folks, they would tell you: this is a safe place to deal with my mental health,” he said.
The results surprised even him. The company’s commitment to mental health has become its single highest non-financial retention driver. Clients notice it too, and view it as a differentiator. Rick, who spent his 30s and 40s in full “damn the torpedoes” mode — traveling more than 100 days a year, laser-focused on growth — admits he didn’t anticipate what would happen when he shifted his leadership style.” I thought I’d be moving attention away from the business,” he told me. “Our business grew exponentially.”
This tracks with what I see again and again in my work with leaders through the Compassionate Leader Circle. The leaders who worry most that vulnerability will cost them authority are often the ones who discover it earns them something more durable: trust. And in the creative sector, especially, where rejection is constant, and the work is deeply personal, that trust is not a soft perk. It is a survival strategy.
A $20 Million Bet on the Future of Mental Health
Milenthal and The Shipyard didn’t stop at internal culture change. They asked a harder question: what would it take to actually move the needle on mental health in America?
The answer led them to The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and a partnership on the SOAR Study — State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience — a $20 million longitudinal study into mental illness, addiction, and resilience, modeled after the landmark Framingham Heart Study, which transformed our understanding of cardiovascular disease.
The Shipyard also supported marketing efforts for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, bringing the same creative firepower they use for national brands to one of the most underfunded communication challenges in public health.
Milenthal is under no illusion that this work will be complete in his lifetime. “Most of it, honestly, will not affect us while we’re alive,” he told me. “It takes generations.” But he’s clear on why it matters now: without longitudinal research, we can’t demonstrate outcomes. Without outcomes, insurers can’t cover treatment. Without coverage, families are left holding the weight alone — just as his partner’s family was.
“The only way heart disease got insured, the only way cancer got insured, is there was research,” he said. “They need to know: if we do this, this will result.”
Tending the Garden You Can Reach
As our conversation wound down, Rick shared a piece of wisdom he’d heard from a rabbi: tend the garden you can reach.
It struck me as the most honest distillation of compassionate leadership I’ve heard in a long time. You don’t have to fix everything. You don’t have to lead millions. You tend what’s in front of you — your team, your culture, your community — with intention and consistency.
Milenthal has his own family, colleagues, employees, and their families, and he’s chosen to tend that garden with everything he has. And in doing so, he’s quietly building something that may outlast any campaign his agency ever runs.
In a business landscape obsessed with disruption and scale, that feels like exactly the kind of leadership we need more of. You can listen to our interview here.