How Human-First Leaders Embrace the Power of Perspective

Jodi Innerfield is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce. While Jodi has a big job in helping ensure all of Salesforce’s product marketers have the tools and resources to launch exceptional products, Jodi embraces the power of perspective in helping her team understand the balance of working hard and achieve results with seeing the bigger picture about people, and life.?

What is your role and what motivates you to do your work each day?

My job is to connect people, products, and ideas to create impactful product launches. My team is responsible for making sure every product marketer at Salesforce has what they need to launch product successfully and create meaningful, successful lead-generation programs.?

I love working across the entire portfolio of products at Salesforce, instead of focusing on just one product, and I find it really energizing that almost every day I talk to a new team or corner of the organization I haven’t interacted with before. The thing I’m most motivated by at work every single day are the people I work with.?

What’s a life experience that has shaped your own mindset and thinking on work and your career?

Two experiences help me put work into perspective. On one of my first days of business school at Michigan, we were editing our resumes to remove the jargon and position ourselves for the roles we wanted to transition into, instead of the roles we had before business school.

We were all helping each other remove the buzzwords and dissect what it actually was we did every day. A classmate of mine who was in the military turned to me, semi-jokingly, and said “how do I remove the jargon from ‘going after the Taliban.” My jaw dropped, I think I laughed nervously, but inside I was like– “we have very different ideas of what a stressful day at work looks like.”?

The second experience isn’t one specific moment. My mom is a Radiologist, and when I talk to her after work and ask how her day is, often she’s incredibly stressed. And when I press further, sometimes she’ll reveal that she had to give a 30-year-old new mother a breast cancer diagnosis. We have very different concepts of what a “bad day” at work looks like. Because of this, I’ve learned to adopt what I call a “healthy state of apathy” for the chaos of my job.?

I’m a product marketer at a tech company–It’s just a job, no one is dying, we’re not curing cancer. 99% of the stressors in my work just aren’t that bad. That helps me get through stressful times and helps me put my work into perspective. I love my work, but it’s not life or death. This mindset makes most of the chaos I deal with just not that big of a deal.

In your own view, what does it mean to be a human-first leader?

People are a company’s greatest asset. I believe a human-first leader prioritizes what people and a team need based on their needs as humans, as individuals, and keeps that in mind even when difficult business decisions need to get made.?

What is a leadership skill that you think more leaders (formal and informal) should practice?

When I think of leaders I admire, what I appreciate are transparency and vulnerability. I think the best leaders are honest about their strengths and weaknesses, and are clear about what gaps in their own skillset they need others on the team to help fill.?

They admit they don’t have the answers, but they are there to help ask the right questions. Whether you have formal or informal leadership in an organization, sharing what you know and don’t know, and making sure people can trust you to communicate authentically and honestly, will help set you apart and foster trust.?

How can others embrace human-first leadership?

Think about all the things in your life that impact how you show up at work. Maybe you didn’t sleep well, you’re worried about your parent or spouse or child’s mystery illness, you got a speeding ticket–there are a million different things that influence how we show up at work and why we react or respond the way we do. Now, take that same perspective with your team or with anyone else you work with.?

Embracing human-first leadership to me is about giving people grace, remembering that there’s more to each person than the job they are doing, and treating people as full individuals vs just the job they are here to do.?

There are a thousand different things going on in someone’s life that influence why they used a certain tone, or got frustrated, or didn’t show up as their best self today.

Embracing human-first leadership to me is about giving people grace, remembering that there’s more to each person than the job they are doing, and treating people as full individuals vs just the job they are here to do.?

What’s something that you hope to see out of the next generation of leaders in the workplace?

I am really impressed and appreciative when someone says to me “I have to leave this meeting early because I have therapy.” It brings me such joy to a) have people embrace mental health, and b) talk about it openly at work. I hope the next generation of leaders continues to prioritize mental health first and foremost and erase any and all taboos around therapy. The world would be a better place if everyone had a therapist!?

I also love seeing multi-hyphenate people, who start businesses or non-profits “on the side.” It’s so easy to get caught up in having your full-time job be your entire identity. I think it’s great to see people building their professional identities outside their full-time roles, and it's something I’m trying to learn to prioritize.?

Who is a leader you admire who is creating a better workplace for their people, and what do they do or model that we can all learn from them?

My friend and colleague Carolyn Bathauer does such an incredible job building a power-house, diverse team of people who absolutely love their jobs and love coming to work every day.?

She’s an authentic, no-bullshit leader who expects others to show up as their own authentic selves every single day. I’ve learned from Carolyn to be a transparent leader, and to treat my team with the authenticity and honesty that I want from my leadership.

What would you like to see companies and leaders focus on in order to create a better workplace for their people?

The most impactful resource I’ve had in my transition to leadership has been a BetterUp coach. Coach Sue truly has changed my perspective on not just leadership, but also on work and life. Coaching is basically work therapy (I know coaching isn’t therapy but it’s what it feels like!).?

She’s helped me understand myself, my priorities, my purpose, and how I want to show up for my team. I think every organization that wants to create a better workplace needs to provide its leaders with the space to learn and grow, and coaching is definitely that space.?

What does career success mean to you?

The definition of career success has really changed for me over the years. It used to mean getting a promotion, being a leader, making more money. But I realized that the promotion feels good for a few days, and then the feeling of accomplishment wears off and I’m thinking “ok what’s next.”

I think right now career success for me means building something of my own that I’m proud of and that others point to as something to strive for, whether that’s a team, an initiative, or maybe one day a company. I’ve learned I like to have something tangible to point to to say “look, I did that!” So yeah, success is being proud of what I’ve created, and I’m always chasing the next success metric.