Promoted but Unprepared: How AI Coaching Is Helping New Leaders

love it i love it and so this is a question for both of you years later like you said that was 10 years ago and we're still seeing that in a lot of professionals where they're put in manager or even senior leadership positions but they feel like i have no idea what i'm talking about or i don't know how to tackle this i'm sitting at a table of leaders like you were and i'm feeling so under prepared even if they maybe went through some form of training.

So this is for both of you.

Why do we think this gap still exists today? What are the key factors here?

You know, training and coaching is something that has existed for a long time.

It's not something that we created, but as we started the company and learned more about the space and reflected on our own personal experiences, it became clear that people easily grow tired of traditional coaching and training and want more out of it.

You know, we saw that coaches very often don't have backgrounds in the fields of the people who they're coaching and therefore are not able to help people go and try their performance in their role and get tactical in a coaching session.

Yeah, I love that question, Ann, because I think about that every day.

I'm like, wait, why haven't we figured this out yet, right? Like, you know, work has been going on for many decades.

Like, why haven't we figured out how to help people perform their best? And the thing that I always come back to at the end of the day is that work is really about people and trying to get people to accomplish a certain task, a goal, an initiative, whatever it might be.

And at the reality, at the end of the day, is that people are complicated.

We all have different wants and needs and desires, communication styles, histories, perspectives, skills, and bringing a group of people together consistently, right? To achieve an objective goals, whatever it is for the business and for themselves requires support and guidance to do that most effectively, right? Now the urgency around the problem has just increased because we're also dealing with the challenges that come with this AI transformation.

So we're just like, we love to make things more complicated, right? We're like, all right, you think that you figure that out with that person, now you're going to have to actually change entirely how you work together because now you have new AI workflows and new ways of working.

But at the end of the day, we have the technology, but it's like, how do you get people together to use that technology most effectively?

Exactly.

And I love that you hit the nail right on the head with that.

We are seeing just so many advancements, not just in AI, but we're seeing major shifts.

And upskilling and reskilling is just the topic of the past few years.

So that's why we are here talking about it today.

So Alex, I want to turn it to you.

You and Jamie have created the 80-20 rule for coaching.

Can you walk us through what that is and why it has proven to be effective?

Yeah, so the 80-20 rule stands for 80% coaching, 20% mentorship.

It's the concept and the framework that we train all of our coaches in, through which we encourage them not just to use their learn skills as certified coaches, but also to use their lived experiences to support their clients and to help them develop in their roles.

So the Mento coach, you know, roughly is coaching 80% of the time.

However, you know, that means they're using inquiry-based questions.