Heather Black is the CEO of Supermums. She started out in social entrepreneurship and made the jump to being a CEO when she was 26. Eventually, this morphed into Supermums, the company she created and now runs.

In this episode, Heather and I talk about her long history with social entrepreneurship and what that term means. We also talk all about Supermums and how it runs today. Finally, Heather explains how she has created a healthy work-life balance. 

Show Highlights:

• The first business Heather started.
• What social entrepreneurship is.
• How Heather got into social entrepreneurship and moved into the role of CEO.
• What her first year as a CEO was like.
• Her journey of leaving her first company and founding Supermums.
• What they do over at Supermums and who it’s directed at helping.
• Why Heather wanted to start a podcast.
• All about the book The Unseen Wounds of Women.
• Why it’s important to be an authentic leader.

Links:

• Supermums on Twitter: https://twitter.com/supermumsglobal
• Supermums on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/supermumsglobal
• Supermums website: www.supermums.org

Episode Transcript

Heather Black:
So I did my geography degree, which was principally economic based actually, and at university I found out about social entrepreneurship, which has really carved out my career ever since.

Josh Birk:
That is Heather Black, CEO of Supermums. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast, and here on the podcast you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today we sit down and talk with Heather about her long history with social entrepreneurship. We’re going to talk about Supermums, the company that she created and how it runs, and we’re going to get into a lot of work life balance things. But we’re going to start, as we often do, with her early years, starting with her first computer.

Heather Black:
Well, computer it’s Pac-Man on an Acorn computer.

Josh Birk:
I love it.

Heather Black:
You remember the old big off computers that we had, wow. But in terms of using one from a workplace point of view, obviously we started using laptops at university and things like that, but thinking about technology as a career choice was more when I was running my first social enterprise. So I set up my non-profit called Striding Out when I was 26, and that was focused on helping young social entrepreneurs setup in business, hence the whole social entrepreneurship thing. There was lots of young people that had this passion to run a business with a social purpose or an environmental mission, and there wasn’t really any support there for them, so I set up this company and my vision was to coach young entrepreneurs.
And I ran it for a couple of years and we had a group of young people that came together that we were working with. And at that time there was a lot of interest in supporting young people into starting businesses and we were really lucky to attract a whole series of grants to us and funding streams to help give support for free, and that’s when I needed a CRM, and Salesforce fell into my lap then really if we talk about technology from that point of view. And Salesforce became the solution that helped me manage all our work with young people. And that’s when I found my techy side as a career really, because I was like, “Oh, this is interesting.” And I had to learn to manipulate a database, if we dare call it a database, to manipulate the CRM system to build it out to and manage everything we were doing, and so that was the light bulb moment of a new start in my career really.

Josh Birk:
Interesting. So you fall into the hashtag accidental admin?

Heather Black:
Yes, absolutely.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Well, let’s dig a little bit more into that. Define social entrepreneurship for me and give me an overview of how it works, because it sounds like an interesting blend of profit-oriented capitalism and non-profit oriented charity.

Heather Black:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the definition is an interesting one because it’s much debated, but in principle it’s a business model that will trade services or products, and they’ll reinvest the profit back into its core business and social aims and objectives. And quite often, as part of that model, you can have something called an intermediate labor market, and that is where you then upskill and give training to people to help them back into the workplace as well. So that really resonated with me. There are nine different legal models in the UK. Obviously in the USA there are more legal models. It’s not defined by a certain legal model, it’s defined by the way that that company works.
And I always felt like when you are doing business for social purpose, it is a social enterprise, but it always felt like you weren’t businesslike. And I think one of the points for me that really resonated with Salesforce is I felt suddenly accepted in the Salesforce ohana, because Salesforce have so many social values as part of their business model, that was like, “It’s okay to have a business and help people into work. It’s okay to have a business and to reinvest profit into social missions.” And so I didn’t feel like social enterprise was such an outside entity in the Salesforce ohana. It felt very much we played as part of the values of that Salesforce echo.

Josh Birk:
I was going to say, especially any Salesforce employee who’s had the 1-1-1 model bred into them, sans bootcamp, I would feel it lines up very much from that, from a cultural point of view.

Heather Black:
Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
And I was going to ask how’d the role of a CEO, how did you go down that path? But it sounds like a natural progression of you understanding how this particular business model works and then wanting to execute it.

Heather Black:
Yeah. When I came out of university, I did a master’s in economic development and did my master’s dissertation on support strategies for social enterprises enough to see how they could be supported and how they would grow, and just explore that world a lot more. And then I went into a consulting role where I would go and travel across the UK and help different public sector bodies set up and evaluate economic development programs that could be anything from employment creation programs, business startup programs, social enterprise development programs. And so that was fascinating because I got to see all the ways that supporting people to grow businesses, start businesses, get back into work, what was working and what wasn’t.
And that led me at that point to want to create something for young social entrepreneurs, because I felt something was missing, and even though I was researching and learning a lot, I wasn’t really getting the impact satisfaction from doing that research research, because I wasn’t able to make a difference. I was learning but I wasn’t making a difference to people. And that’s where I found that was missing for me in terms of a value that I needed to have. So that’s when I decided to start my own social enterprise, at 26 take that role of I’m going to run a company and I’m going to employ people. And I’ve learned so much on that journey.

Josh Birk:
So you kept finding more and more about the problem, and then you decided you really wanted to become more of the solution?

Heather Black:
Yeah, exactly.

Josh Birk:
What was it like being 26 and deciding you’re going to be a CEO?

Heather Black:
Scary, because I quit my job. And I was like, “I’ve got to pay my rent.” And it was interesting actually. It did create a massive shift for me emotionally and in mindset, and not necessarily a good one, and it’s taken me a good 10 years or maybe even longer to reshift out of this survival mode, because when you suddenly don’t have a salary, your priorities change. So I used to be the person that would work my hours, I would work overtime if needed, but generally work my hours and then I’d always go to the gym and exercise, and have fun in the evenings. And when I quit my job it was like, “Oh my God, I got to make my salary.” And there was always so much to do because you weren’t just doing a job, you were building a business, you were selling, you were marketing, you were delivering.
And I quickly found myself on this adrenaline drive because it was all very exciting and learning new, but all of a sudden I didn’t go to the gym anymore, and I was on this treadmill of needing to make sure I could sell to make money. What the outcome was though of that year is that I did quite a bit of market research, I didn’t just quit my job and ad lib and go, “I’ll be fine.” I took a week off work and I met 40 people during that week who I tested the idea with and assessed if there was potential work and everything else, and it was a very big networked week, but I tell you what, all those meetings were the things that gave me confidence to quit my job and it’s where work came from. And incidentally, the employer who I had been working with where they wouldn’t increase my salary, they kept sticking me on 24 grand a year and wouldn’t increase me, then hired me back on £450 a day.
So when I went from a salary of 27 grand, my first year of being self-employed, I brought in £58,000 running a business. And a lot of that was reinvested into the business to build the website and other things that go… All the legals and everything else that you need set up a business. But I was running and learning, and things changed quite a lot, but it was an interesting time.

Josh Birk:
So it sounds like that initial year or so required that level of jumping in and maybe throwing a little bit of the work life balance out the window. How long did that last and when did you start telling yourself it’s okay to pull back and we have a model for success, we don’t have to be driving ourselves into burnout?

Heather Black:
So that’s the interesting thing of wanting to build a business and grow your team, so we went from, I did 56 in first two years, and then we did 100K, and then we went to 1.4 million and I had 40 staff in a year.

Josh Birk:
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Walk me back through that. How do you go 10 times? I’m not sure I’m doing that math correctly in my head.

Heather Black:
It was no jokes. Salesforce helped us grow. So we won one contract. I was literally at the tipping point, I’d used all my money, what we’ve been running, and I had a team of four, and I was literally down to… I actually asked my ex, who I was obviously with at the time, “Can you lend me five grand because I’ve just got to cover some cash flow? And I do truly believe that we’re going to get there and we’re going to grow.” And that 5K gave me enough mileage to secure this 210,000 pound contract to deliver for two and a half years. And that’s when I got the system and everything needed to be in place. On the back of getting that one, we then had a roll on effect of then winning a load other ones, because once somebody believed in you and demonstrated, so we literally went from a 100K to 1.4 million in one year, hired all these staff, and then you’re running on a different steam, and all during that year I had to set up Salesforce to manage all our outcomes and delivery.
So I think when you are in your 20s you have, I was desperate to make it work, I had that ambition, I didn’t have any responsibilities, so I would work the hours, and it didn’t really matter because I didn’t have any responsibilities that stopped me working, if you like. And there was a lot of networking. Because it was with other young people and we were working with young entrepreneurs, it was lots of networking event with 20 year olds. So I got a lot of friendships and met some amazing people during that time who I still obviously see and see what they’re doing now and have a level of contact engagement with. And so that was fantastic, but that reached a peak in that a lot of the funding we got was tied to the labor government in the UK, and when the conservative government came in, all those funding streams dried up, and all of a sudden my business model and the way of working pretty much went dry, and got very competitive.
A lot of the nonprofits went to the wall because of the change in funding. That’s when I really realized actually I can’t do this anymore, because I can’t find a way of making it work. I tried for a couple of years and it was incredibly hard. It was so competitive that even nonprofits were almost being nasty to each other and companies were being nasty, and I’m like, “This doesn’t feel right. We’re all in the game to make a difference to people.” And so I handed the business over to somebody else and I said to myself at that point, “I am never going to work more than 40 hours a week again. And if I need to work more than 40 hours a week again, something is not working in my business model and I have to change it.”

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Heather Black:
And I have to [inaudible 00:12:45] that, particularly, and now I’ve got kids, that is so more true than ever. It’s like, “Well, why am I going to work all these hours if something doesn’t work?” And that was my big learning curve from that really.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. So tell me the time that starts to evolve into Supermums, and then give me the elevator pitch for Supermums.

Heather Black:
So with Striding Out and the work I’d been doing for those 10 years, it was all about helping young people into employment and starting up businesses. It ended up being more wider than just helping young people into business. We helped young people get jobs within social enterprises. So we were doing the whole 360 model, it was fantastic, and we helped social enterprises grow in that way. So I’ve always had that desire to help people back into work. Now, when Striding Out hit the wall and I then had to pivot and go, “What am I going to do now?” Because I’d found Salesforce so powerful for my company in tracking the work we’d been doing at Striding Out, and being able to report on our impact and track our sales and our fundraising and everything like that, I thought actually I did really enjoy building Salesforce and manipulating it, I’ll go and do this now for the nonprofits.
And so that’s when I decided I would become a Salesforce consultant and use my business coaching skills, which I’d had where I was coaching young entrepreneurs, and do that with other nonprofits and help them implement Salesforce to support their fundraising, their impact measurement, and their delivery and everything else. And whilst I was on that journey of doing that for the first two years as a freelancer, I was earning 60K a year, working three days a week, and I was like, “I can do this all from home. It’s flexible, we’re earning well. Why aren’t other mums doing this too?” And that’s where the light bulb moment for Supermums came, because I missed helping people back into work. I was helping charities and you have an impact there, but I’m very socially driven and I miss that direct impact, if you like, so I had the idea for Supermums.
Originally we tried to get some funding to develop model and to run the courses for free, but I didn’t manage to do that. Me and my team had tried and we got rejected five times, but we thought, well, okay, we’ll just launch the idea and charge for the training a reasonable price. And so the whole concept of Supermums was built around what I learned about what employment support programs should have in them based on all my previous research and background that I had. I talk about nine pillars, I’m not sure I’ll remember all the nine off of my top of my head now, but the key pillars are live training, so people turn up, creating an accountability framework for them to learn and get things done so they’ve got the motivation to complete the training. Work experience, having a one-to-one mentor there to hold your hand and check that you understand things properly, and you go through it. Career coaching to get rid of that imposter syndrome and to build your own confidence and self-esteem.
Having a peer group around you, so it’s other people on the same journey as you that you can connect with and, again, build those friendships with. And they’re all things that I put in the Supermums program because we wanted to make sure that we got somebody from A to Z. And we’ve also got the recruitment side as well, so once they’ve gone through all the training and everything and the work experience, well, then sift their CV and then place them into jobs through our recruitment company where we can. We obviously encourage them to go out to other recruiters and apply to jobs directly, because Supermums doesn’t have all the jobs in the ecosystem, but we will inevitably do our best where we do have jobs suitable for them. And so that’s where Supermums was born, was creating this sophisticated program that included all the elements that I’d learnt were important to help people relaunch their career successfully.

Josh Birk:
And I think you just touched on that just right there, but tell me a little bit more about the moms and Supermums. Who are you directing this to, and what are some of the specific challenges there?

Heather Black:
We’ve got three different target groups, I would say, or maybe more than that. We’ve had moms come on the program, but we’ve also attracted dads and people who are carers or non-carers, because they love our model and everything that we do. So because we charge for the course, we don’t have any restrictions around who can do the course. And what’s nice is that if people join it, they feel very included. They don’t go, “I’m not a mum,” and shy away. Everybody accepts them and they feel very much part of it, but they very much support our mission in essence, which is fantastic. So in terms of the mission and the three issues that Superman wants to tackle as an organization is helping people back into work when they’ve had time out, looking after kids, tackling the gender equality piece and making sure we get more women into tech, and educating them about technology as a career choice. And then the third is making sure they’re paid well and appropriately, have equal pay to men where their skill sets are at the same, and supporting them to increase their financial independence.
So we’ve attracted mothers who’ve been off work for up to 13, 11 years, for example, in some cases looking after kids. And you know what’s amazing is they got their first jobs on the first interview. And I love those stories. It’s fantastic. It’s actually awesome because people are so impressed with the training they’ve had and the work experience, and everything else, and how they present themselves. We have seen ultimate success for people who’ve been out of work that long, which is just fantastic. And then we’ve got mums who’ve been on maternity leave and really don’t want to go back to their job that they were in before because it wasn’t very flexible. And then we also have mothers that are in jobs that are completely inflexible, and are not conducive to a family lifestyle for them because they’re working long hours or late hours, or in sociable hours, or whatever it is that doesn’t work for them, and so they use Supermums as the platform to transition into a new career choice.

Josh Birk:
That’s just really awesome stuff to hear. Now, I’ve been accused many times of asking somebody to pick the favorite of their children, but do you have a particular success story that you really like?

Heather Black:
Oh, gosh, that’s a hard one, isn’t it?There’s so many. Who would I choose? I think the fact that somebody like Hindi, who she’s based in Israel but she’s from the USA, and she was out of work for 13 years with three kids, didn’t have any sort of technology background, she did some teaching and helping her husband with some admin on his travel business, seeing her go through the program during lockdown as well, so bearing in mind the kids were all at home, she’s got five kids, and then she landed her first job at an investment company in Israel. And I just think that’s awesome. It makes you go, “If she can do it, anybody can do it.” You don’t have to have a certain background. You can be anywhere in the world. You can transition. You can have the kids at home, maybe they look after each other when they’re five. I don’t know. But it just makes you realize it is possible if you want to put your mind to it.

Josh Birk:
13 years in the tech ecosystem, that’s an eon. It doesn’t even matter at that point if you were previously in the tech system or not. You’ve moved into a new paradigm shift I would think.

Heather Black:
Yeah, true.

Josh Birk:
Now tell me a little bit about the podcast and what’s the origin story there, why did you want to start a podcast?

Heather Black:
So Mums on Cloud Nine we launched just two years ago and we ran it for a year, and then we had a break because I had a lot of stuff going on in my life. And then we relaunched it again recently about three months ago. And I’m very much into coaching and inspiring people, and when we launched Supermums, we did the six month course and that was the only thing that we did. And then we didn’t offer anything else. It’s like, “Right, you’re off now, off into the ecosystem.” We didn’t have an alumni program, we didn’t have additional training at that point. We had a Facebook group that people can stay connected with. But I’m really passionate about continuing to inspire people afterwards, because having had a few conversations when I caught up with them, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, no…” People were getting a bit stuck or were not necessarily progressing, or accelerating in their career.
And so I wanted to embed more into Supermums where we maintained a relationship with people who’ve been through our programs where we continued to educate them and inspire them, and keep informing them, and we do that through recording the podcast, and then we turn the podcast into a blog and then we send that out in a weekly newsletter, and then we do a weekly live around it. And so we continue a narrative every week focusing on a topic that then is available to our audience, and our audience is built up. We now have over seven and a half thousand on our mailing list.

Josh Birk:
Oh, wow.

Heather Black:
And they’re people that have come through either our paid training programs, which include admin, marketing, cloud, and consultancy skills course, and we’ve got a coaching program as well, or it’s people that have come on our free educational events that we’ve run, free educational training activities. So everybody has joined us because they like what we provide in terms of our resource, and now they all get access to that as well and we push that on our social channels. We have about 40,000 people across all our social media channels that can obviously get visibility of our content too.

Josh Birk:
Nice. And so the format is extending the content that you have in your six month program and you’re releasing that weekly?

Heather Black:
Yeah. Say, for example, if I give examples of a few of our recent campaigns, we did a parents flex up campaign for six weeks, which is all about helping parents understand what a Salesforce career was, and we’d take them through a series of articles which talked about the job roles, what you could do, the industries, et cetera. And we had over 1,400 people register interest in that and get involved in the five day challenge, and learn more about it. And so people could obviously listen to podcast, read the blog, and sign up for the five day challenge.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Heather Black:
And then we just ran the next one, which was about how to be a number one Salesforce consultant, how to go from admin to consultant and to talk through all the key skills of a consultant, and how you would add value. So that’s then encouraged some of our audience and other people to come on our consultancy skills course, and we’re educating them more around business analysis, agile project management, change management, and everything there. But the podcast gives them an example about those skills, why they’re important, what they do, giving insight into how they play out in practice, and inspire them to go, “Actually I really want to do that.” Because what was happening, again, when I talk to people I go, “Right, I need to do something about this,” is people get scared from moving to an admin consultant. They don’t know how to do it. And so I create a educational series, which is our podcast and our blog, about educating them about how it’s possible, what’s possible, and trying to keep, I suppose, inspiring people to move forward.

Josh Birk:
Got it. I love it. Okay, moving to slightly different topic. Tell me a little bit in general about the book, The Unseen Wounds of Women.

Heather Black:
So Unseen Wounds of Women, I have been part of a mastermind group. I love being part of coaching mastermind groups and learning from people. So they teach me how to be better at business related stuff like marketing and sales and everything like that. But equally, these mastermind groups I’m part of also help shape you as a leader and as a woman as well, and help you really reflect on your strengths, your weaknesses, your emotions. And the last nine years for me, running a business and being around some negative relationships in my life and things that have been going on, it’s hard, it’s tough when you have the kids there as well. And I was finding that it’s a tough few years, and I paid actually during that time for some leadership coaching, which was £9,000 with a lady called Kathleen [inaudible 00:25:38] in the USA she was based, but she focused on helping corporate leaders pivot to find happiness.
Because I was like, “I’m not hitting that point. I love everything we’re doing with Supermums, blah blah blah, but why am I not feeling happy?” And that wasn’t just about business, it was other things. And so I pivoted a lot with her course. And part of coming out of that cycle was I had an element of stuff in my body, that emotional trauma that had built up from having a work life balance and relationships that weren’t working for me. And so with The Unseen Wounds of Women, I was a co-author on that book and wrote a chapter about those what had gone on during those nine years in essence, and the strategies that I put into place to help me get a better balance in my life and to help me focus on what I really love, and to make sure that I’m performing and my team are performing, and I’m happy with my kids and everything is solid.
And I think being a vulnerable leader and being authentic about it and really listening to you and your body and your mind is so important because we’re in control of our destiny, we’re in control of our life, nobody else is, and sometimes you can feel like everybody else is and you’re trying to please everybody else. And so this whole book, each chapter is telling a story about stop people pleasing, stop trying to tame the shame, stop trying to be in your cage. Different women have shared their stories about how they’ve taken control of their life to shape it in a way that they want to shape it, that’s going to help them live out better life themselves. So I was really excited to be part of this book opportunity and to help other parents think about how they could change their life for the better, particularly with my angle of balancing career, life, motherhood, et cetera.

Josh Birk:
When it comes to the people pleasing and hiding the unseen wounds, and I think there’s a lot of talk these days about how we have trauma that we either don’t realize is trauma, don’t acknowledge as trauma, or we try to hide it from people. How much do you feel the general tech culture makes all of that even harder for someone who is a woman in tech? Is there even more pressure to make sure that nobody sees that maybe you’re cracking a little bit?

Heather Black:
It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think a lot of this is come to the forefront a lot around the pandemic and lockdown and everything that we had, because there was so many emotional journeys that people were on during that stage, so women in tech challenges are different now to what they were then. I think previously to that, yes, we’d work from home, but there was some skepticism about are they really working from home or are they doing their washing, or do they have kids, and are they really doing their stuff? And then flexible hours, well, how do we know when they’re working? Are they really working? And how do we track that? And there was a lot of concern. And I certainly had some interesting conversations with some employers in the Salesforce ecosystem who were like, “No, we can’t hire mums. Or no, we need them in the office full time.”
And almost had the secret giggle to myself when the pandemic happened, because I was like, “Well, you’re going to have to do it now. This will be a change for you.” And instantly enough, the companies have had to shift because people don’t want to come back to the office full time, and they’ve had to change the way that they work. And even some of those leaders of those companies don’t necessarily want to go back into the office all the time. It’s been fascinating seeing some of the maybe positive things come out of that in that there’s more flexibility to be able to work from home and not so you have to commute in every day. It’s made jobs more accessible to mothers in tech and dads that perhaps wouldn’t have been. I think part of the problem from another emotional level, and I certainly feel this to now actually, and I’m just trying to rebalance myself on it, is before the pandemic I would go into London two or three days a week.
Occasionally I’d known about the three of the two, but I liked going to London and having that buzz, and seeing people, and walking about and not being sat at the one desk all the time. What I’ve struggled with during the pandemic and now really is that we don’t have an office in London anymore. And I am sat at the same desk every single day, sat on the computer, and by 04:00, 04:30 I struggle. So what I tend to do is then go for exercise at that point, get up and do something, and then come back and do some more work in the evening, or I’ll even do some work at the weekends to make up the hours. And I went out, I was like, “Yes. That was right. I don’t have meetings.” I block out my calendar now so I don’t have meetings on a Monday and Wednesday mornings, and that’s when I do content creation, and get my head down and do things.And I said to myself, “I don’t really need to be on my office when I do that. Why don’t I go out to a coffee shop or something, and do something different? Because I need to not be in the house all the time short of doing the school run.” And I think that’s the challenge that women have, you can get stuck sat on the computer. Yes, you might still be on the computer, but you’re not necessarily interacting with people. And I know there is a desire for some people to have hybrid working, there is a desire to be able to work and not feel bad about going to work at a cafe in the morning if you can, because you’re not on a meeting. I think it’s very hard… Well, I personally find it hard to just sit at the same day every day, all day for five days a week, and sit on Zoom.
And so I think, yes, it’s great working remotely and from home, but that will impact different people as well. And taking this to the next level then is the other key challenge is when I was running the consultancy business, which we haven’t touched on too much, but I was running that alongside Supermums for a while, is that we had an office and we had a virtual team. And trying to create a work culture that is inclusive of everybody who is virtual and in the office is incredibly hard to do. And trying to have meetings obviously include everybody, you have to have quite sophisticated video and conference facilities. And so there is a lot of challenges for companies making everybody feel included, making feel everybody’s eligible, equally considered for promotions, equally has access to the same job opportunities or project opportunities, it is incredibly hard to do and I think it’s the key mission a lot of businesses are finding themselves on right now is how to manage a hybrid environment.

Josh Birk:
You are making me reminisce about my own consultancy days, and one of the great sins back then that we would commit way more often than I would like to admit to was to have the client on the conference call, but it’s not just a client call, it’s a status call or something like that, and then everybody just leaves the room, and then a few minutes later realize the client’s still on the phone.

Heather Black:
Brilliant.

Josh Birk:
So it’s like you say, you have to have that presence, which I think has gotten better with video technology and stuff like that. I want to go back a little bit, because you touched on it and I just want to dig into it a little bit more, I want to flip the previous question around a little bit, because when you were talking about working with people who might be having this kind of hidden trauma, you were saying that you had gotten some pivoting with leadership about having a more, I believe the exact words you [inaudible 00:33:50] were being a more authentic leader. Can you tell me a little more about that and why is that important if I’m a people manager and I’m maybe managing people who are facing these kind of challenges, so maybe they are returning to the tech place?

Heather Black:
So with authentic leadership, well, there’s two angles you’ve got there really is people reentering the workplace and where that would position. Authentic leadership, we’ve seen, again, a lot of that in the pandemic where suddenly kids coming onto the screen is fine. We used to be terrified of our kids running in, in a middle of a meeting, whereas actually now you’re seeing all these leaders where their kids come onto the webcam and videos, and it’s accepted because it was during the pandemic, and you’re seeing people being people rather than just work. You’re seeing all of their lives and talking more about what’s going on in their life and their social things more, because we’ve not had to open up, but it’s just been more like, “Well, who are you beyond your job?”
And think the pandemic opened a lot of that up because we had to share our challenges that we’re dealing with and we had to be honest about it, and we went through a massive emotional rollercoaster. And as a leader, there’s a lot of things I can’t share openly with the team because of various things, things that are going on with different employees or financials, and things like that, senior management level there’s loads of stuff that you maintain at a certain level that you can’t share with the team on that level.
But at the same time, I think the thing about being authentic is, look, this is what we’re trying to do and why, this is me and what I’m doing. So when I went out yesterday, when I went to the cafe, I shared that with the team. I said, “Look, just working at home five days a week, it’s driving me nutty. I’m going to go and work at the cafe.” And what was so nice is that two of my team met up in Peterborough today because I put that out there.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Heather Black:
And they went and met each other. I was like, “Oh, that’s brilliant.” So telling them that you’re struggling or wanting to do things differently can inspire them to go, “You know what? That’s the same for me. Should we meet tomorrow and work together?” And encouraging them to think and act differently, and feel like they can talk about it is really important.

Josh Birk:
I’ve also referred to that as seeing the human behind the employee, and I think you’re 100% right. I think the distance has caused the pandemic to make it. We have to work a little harder in order to actually make that happen, and we don’t have those incidental water cooler moments and things like that anymore. Also, I got to quote my friend, Mike Herold, who has repeatedly told people, “No, we want to see your pets. You should not only not be ashamed of the fact that your dog just jumped on camera, please go ahead and put them back on camera. We would love to see more dogs, or kids, or cats, or whatever. It’s a positive, not a negative.” All right. Two final questions. One, where can people go learn more about Supermums?

Heather Black:
So our website is supermums.org, so you can head over to the website and find out more there. We also have social media handles on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok as well, and they’re all under Supermums Global. So we are truly global, we went accidentally global, and we have trainees and volunteers, and we have volunteer mentors all over the world, which is absolutely incredible. So Supermums Global seemed the appropriate term.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, before we go, I did ask after Heather’s favorite non-technical hobby.

Heather Black:
My non-technical hobby. Well, I love exercising during the week now, so I do running, I’ve got my Peloton, which I love because the instructors are really motivational, and swimming. And I live by the sea now, so I go running up the cliffs. And I just really enjoy getting that exercise in every day because it energizes me. And for so long as part of this nine years that I talked about earlier, I wasn’t exercising, I wasn’t getting fit, and doing anything, and now I’m really back into it and love it. And that sets me up really for everything that I do. So it is exercising, and spending times with the kids, obviously outside of that, because they just made me laugh and that’s really important.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Heather for the great conversation and information, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again everybody, and I’ll talk to you next week.