Stop Blaming AI; Your Leadership Team Needs to Change First with Jaime Taets

Yeah, so, uh, on your journey, uh, what, what were some of the things that stood out or to get you in, into that space or, or the really just the, the realization that, man, businesses really need help a- and, and I can help them with this? Like, what, what were some of those moments that jumped out at you?

It was just the, the realization, and I have this now, also being on the other side, right, as a business owner, scale the business, is you're really close to it, and you're emotionally invested in a different way, and it's hard for you to see the gaps for what they actually are, for how they're impacting the business, because they're tied to people, and they're oftentimes tied to people that have been loyal to you from the beginning, right? Or they, they do have a place, but maybe you've outgrown them.

And I think this is what AI is forcing a lot of organizations.

They're not ad- quite admitting it yet, but they're starting to outgrow some of their leaders, and that's where I started to see that, is, is leaders have been under-invested in since the beginning of time, and now it's catching up to us.

COVID was the beginning of it, when we had to manage through a pandemic and leaders didn't have the skills to manage mental health and, right, everything that was happening with their people, and now you add AI to it, and I know more leaders that are like, "I don't even know..." Right? They're, they're at the ends of their careers and they're like, "I don't even wanna be a leader anymore.

Like, this isn't fun anymore," because they don't have the tools that they need to lead at this new environment.

So that's the thing that I think really has impacted me so much, is seeing leaders fall further and further behind.

And not because they're not smart, not because they aren't capable.

It's because we aren't giving them the space to learn and kinda catch up all the skills they need.

It's, it's a new, it's a new world.

It is.

And yeah, they need some help.

Tell us kinda how, how do clients typically engage with, with your firm, and what are some of those things that you guys do to help them through that process? And, you know, I say typically, but then, you know, also today and, and, you know, kinda leading into how AI is, is changing even what you do.

But, but first let's start with, yeah, like, what is that typical engagement and where do you help organizations?

So there's a lot of different ways.

There's no necessarily, like, typical how they come in, but there's usually some common pain points, right? It's, it's assessing, do we have the right leaders, right? We feel like we're falling behind, right? What used to be easy is not easy anymore, right? Whether that's closing work or doing so- it just feels harder in business.

Yeah.

And so they're coming to us to say, "Why does it feel harder? What, how do we have to shift as a business?" Um-

Yeah

... a lot of them are coming to us saying, "We feel like we're not getting our fair share," meaning market share, right? Like, we're f- again, we're falling behind, or we're not winning the way we used to win and we need to think about the business differently and what does winning look like in the future.

So we're having a lot of those conversations.

And what we typically do is, is the symptoms that they're coming to us with are not the actual root problems, and they know that as we're talking through it.

We don't necessarily always know what the root is, but we know it's not the symptom of the illness.

And so we have what we call a Keystone Gr- Growth Index.

It's an assessment that we do at the top two layers of the organization to help us pinpoint where are some of those breakdowns happening, where are some of the gaps actually Kind of creating themselves and getting broader, and that's usually where the pain is coming from.