Mr. Bronx’s executive producer Zach Fortin shares what Melanie Wickham taught him about empathy, creative courage, and why being in the room still matters
Long before Melanie Wickham started Preymaker, she taught me something I have carried into every room since: empathy is the foundation of creative problem-solving, not its soft part.
Melanie can sit with a client, hear what they are asking for, and also hear what they need underneath it: the pressure they may not be naming, the ambition they are reaching toward, the part of the idea that is not yet fully formed. Then she starts putting the right people around the problem.
I first worked with Melanie at The Mill, and later she took me to Preymaker. In both places, she surrounded herself with some of the smartest and most creative people I have known. Some had decades of experience. Some were just getting started. She never seemed particularly interested in protecting a hierarchy from a good idea. That matters more than it sounds.
A defining part of my relationship with Melanie was that she pushed me into leadership roles before I thought I was ready. Maybe before I actually was ready. There was no ceremonial moment when I suddenly felt qualified. She saw something, handed me real responsibility, and expected me to grow into it.
It was uncomfortable. It was also exactly what I needed.
Mentorship is often described as advice: a wise person offers guidance, and a younger person takes notes. That was never the most important part of it for me. Melanie gave me proximity to the work. She let me see how decisions were made, how trust was built with clients, and how a team could move through uncertainty without pretending the uncertainty was not there. Then she let me try.
What I saw changed how I understood leadership. Melanie did not lead by needing to be the smartest person in the room. She built a room full of smart people. The job was to understand what the work required, find the right mix of minds, and create enough trust for those people to challenge one another. Watching that helped me build better teams of my own. It also made me more fearless.
This was especially true with abstract and experimental work; the kind where there is no obvious answer at the start and, for a while, you may not even be sure you are asking the right question. That work can be intimidating if you think leadership means personally knowing the way out. It becomes exciting when you trust the people around you to find a way through together.
The fear does not disappear. You just stop treating it as proof that you should turn back.
Melanie brought the same instinct to her clients. She understood that people do not always arrive with a cleanly articulated creative problem. Sometimes they arrive with a reference. Or a deadline. Or a solution they have already talked themselves into, even though something about it still feels wrong.
Empathy gives you a way in. Not empathy as politeness, but empathy as rigor: listening closely enough to understand what is really at stake. Once you understand that, the work can move. The relationship shifts, too. You are no longer simply filling an order. You are solving something together.
The next generation needs more mentors who work this way. People who can recognise potential before it has the right title, who are secure enough to invite strong voices into the room, and who know that leadership is partly the act of making other people more capable.
But there is a problem we need to be more honest about. Increasingly, there is no room.
Remote work gave our industry real flexibility. We should keep that. There are days when working from home makes sense, and moments in life when it makes work possible at all. But somewhere along the way, a useful option started becoming the default culture. For a creative industry, I think that has cost us more than we are willing to admit. We need a return-to-work moment. The office should be the norm again, with working from home there when people need it, not the other way around.
I do not mean a return to surveillance, compulsory face time or the old belief that sitting at a desk is the same as doing good work. I mean a return to proximity: overhearing the difficult client call, watching an idea change shape between two people at a table, or asking a question before you have enough time to decide it might sound stupid. To being pulled into a room because you happen to be nearby and someone thinks, actually, you should hear this. Those moments look small, but they build careers.
They are also very difficult to schedule. A video call can transmit information, but it rarely reproduces the texture of a working creative environment. On a call, people tend to see the version of you they already know. In a shared space, they can notice how you think when you are not presenting. They can watch you solve something. They can begin to imagine you doing more.
That is how Melanie saw me. She was close enough to notice, and then she took the risk of giving me a chance.
Of course, younger employees cannot be the only ones asked to return. An office full of junior talent attending video calls with senior leaders at home is a commute to Zoom. If experienced leaders believe in the value of mentorship, they have to be available, visible, and willing to let other people learn from how they actually work.
The next generation does not need an attendance policy dressed up as culture. It needs access. It needs leaders worth coming in to learn from, and the unplanned exposure through which a job slowly becomes a craft.
Melanie’s influence on me did not end when we stopped working together. Her knowledge still shows up in how I build teams, how I listen to clients, and how I try to give people responsibility before they can produce a perfect argument for why they deserve it. Sometimes I hear myself encouraging someone toward a role they are not sure they are ready for, and I know exactly where that instinct came from.
That may be the real measure of a mentor – not only what they make possible for you, but what you become willing to make possible for someone else.
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