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On this week’s show, Chris and Julia meet Claudia Plen McCormack and Mia Serra to discuss their newly formed leadership training company, Surface Deep, and their approach to “deep inclusive leadership.” Both late-diagnosed with ADHD, Claudia and Mia draw on their experiences of burnout and masking in corporate environments to help organizations move beyond superficial diversity initiatives and tick-box wellness programs. They introduce the distinction between “surface action”—where people mask their true selves and say the right things—and “deep action,” which embraces authenticity and vulnerability to build genuine psychological safety.

The conversation explores how their methodology combines leadership theory with neuroscience and embodied movement practices to create real-time insights. Through simple but powerful movement exercises—like following and leading activities—participants discover their behavioral patterns and tendencies without needing to intellectualise everything. Claudia and Mia challenge the prevailing corporate culture where constant productivity leaves no room for reflection, and where wellbeing initiatives often backfire by missing what employees actually need.

They argue that creating environments where people can truly be themselves doesn’t just improve wellbeing—it unlocks the productivity, creativity, and innovation that organisations desperately need, with research showing diverse teams are 60% more productive when they can work authentically. As burnout reaches crisis levels globally, they offer a different path forward: building psychological flexibility and safety into the very DNA of organisations.

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The full transcript, generated by Descript (so there are probably errors)…

Chris: Hello and welcome to WB 40 Podcast, the weekly podcast with me, Julia Bellis, Claudie Plen McCormack, and Mia Serra.

Everybody here we are again, WB40 and very good. It is to be here too. Julia, you’re gonna tell us what you’ve been up to this week, please?

Julia: I recently got back from holiday and that was a bit of a shock I have to admit because being at work is very different being on holiday, but I think I’ve got used to the discipline and rigor and routine again now, so I’m feeling a bit more at ease with it, and I always look for an excuse to talk about tooting bet Lido on this podcast.

And I did get the opportunity to go to the Lido at the weekend without instantly jumping into ice cold water. And I did a bit of a watercolor workshop, which was really fun actually. And I’m always a bit scared of painting ’cause I don’t know what I want to do. So it was quite nice to be with a group of people where it didn’t really matter and we could try out different ideas and things.

So yeah, that was lovely. How about you, Chris? What have you been up to?

Chris: Well, it’s been a, it’s been a busy week. I’ve been in London and I’ve been up and down the country. I think I went to Chester last week. That was that was a bit like a bit of a drive up to, up to the northwest, to the British Computer Society meeting up there where I was their guest, guest speaker.

I’m assuming I got let down by a number of different people and therefore why was the last resort? And I’ve got a bit of a thing I’m talking about in the moment around software. You know, how BI versus Bill just changed and all of those kind of cool, cool things. So yeah, that was good fun. So yeah, it’s been a busy weekend.

And then the weekend, it was my, my kids, they were twins. It was their, both their birthdays. ’cause that’s kind of traditionally how twins are. Unless you got right on the midnight, you know, you have one, one on each side. And also my wedding anniversary on the same day, which was you know, kind of coincidental.

So that, and so. Very rarely do we get to do anything really. It’s always been the kids have, have dominated that day, but they’re getting old in now, so I can be a little bit less.

Julia: So you have to share your wedding anniversary with your twin’s birthday? I

Chris: do. I do. It’s like all eggs in my basket. I must never forget that day.

Julia: Yeah, that is bad. Do Well, what

Chris: can I say? I, you know. The gods with me.

Julia: And what about, what about you, our guests? Claudia, what have you been up to in the last week? So I,

Claudie: I have to say that I’m just really, really aware of the encroaching darkness at the moment. So what I’m finding is that every time I see a little bit of sunlight, like there’s been a couple of days with blue skies and I go running outside just get a little bit of nature.

So walking in trees and.

Julia: You know, brilliant tactic actually, and I think we should all try to copy at the moment. Grab the sunshine when you can.

Mia: Absolutely.

Julia: And how about you Mia?

Mia: That’s true actually because I, on, on Saturday, I walk, I walk a lot with my dog. And I walked across the heath from Kenwood to Parliament Hill and they have a little farmer’s market there.

And I go and buy tomatoes, really good tomatoes from the farmer’s market, from the isle of White. Highly recommended. And it’s just a really nice walk across the heath ’cause you just get to see exactly what’s going on with the leaves and the trees and where we are in the season and, and feel, you know, what the weather’s really like.

And the dog just runs and runs and runs and runs. So it’s just really nice check in with nature and the weather and the same as Claud said, get a little bit of sun. So that’s really been lovely.

Julia: The way to do that right now I think is early in the morning, isn’t it? There’s no light slot after work.

Claudie: Definitely. Yeah. True. You can get yourself out there. That’s first thing. That’s the way to do it.

Mia: Yeah. This’s. Quite late. Sunset. Actually, I have to wait for the sun to rise to walk the dog. So

Julia: the image, the

Mia: image

Julia: popped into my head when you were talking about walking across Hamster Heath was the latest Bridget Janes movie.

And she lives on the edge of hamster teeth, doesn’t she? And it features quite a lot.

Mia: Yeah. Well, I didn’t see any park rangers, any Hanson Park rangers. None to be had on my way to Parliament Hill. What, next time? What a

Chris: Well, Barry Norman, well done for bringing the film element into this. So thank you Julia.

Let’s track on and we’ll talk about surface deep.

Julia: Claudia m are here today. To talk about their recently formed leadership training company, I believe. Can you tell us a bit about what this company is and why you’ve decided to form it?

Mia: Well, that’s a very good question. I think it’s, it’s something that came together very organically. We were brought together by a friend of mine who said, both of you’re talking very much about the same thing you should really meet. And, and we’ve found out that we’d had very similar experiences in the corporate world.

And we’d got to a very similar point in sort of realizing that we were not working at our best in a, in a sort of average corporate environment with the kind of management and the kind of culture and the the the way things work. But we. We know and we were aware that a lot of people, for example, who are neurodiverse or are slightly different in other ways or would also be struggling or have been struggling with sort of your typical environment corporate environment. And so I think it was, that was sort of one of the starting points of understanding how we’d both experience burnout. We both experienced less than optimal environments where, and we have a lot to give.

And it was, it was. This idea that we really want to help people to be able to work and sustainably and to be you know, instead of feeling like they’re burning out or they’re constantly exhausted or they’re masking their behaviors to try and fit in. You know, what about, you know, if you could actually truly be yourself, if you could actually be a, you know, all your talents could be expressed and everything that you, you, you can do.

Could contribute to that company and that team and, and that has an effect on the bottom line as well. We know that diverse teams, teams that have many different types of people, and that can be neurodiverse as well, are 60% more productive than teams that are not diverse. And that’s an, that’s an HBR stat.

So we know that there is a benefit to having. Many different types of people and styles in an organization and inside teams. The question is how to do it.

Julia: What types of behavior had you observed as contributing to what did you call it, the sort of average corporate culture and what led you to want to change those?

Claudie: You know, one of the things that brought Mia and I t