Jim Barnett, CEO, Wisq, and Marc Maloy, President-GTM, Wisq, recently were guests on the "You Should Know" podcast in an episode focused on Wisq’s AI coach and copilot.
Watch the full podcast episode, hosted by William Tincup and Ryan Leary. Read highlights from the conversation below, including:
- the importance of managerial support and why many managers don't have the coaching and guidance they need to succeed
- the promise of generative AI applied to manager coaching and more broadly, employee coaching
- what matters most to CHROs in conversations about Wisq and AI in HR tech
The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity.
The vision for Wisq: a personalized AI coach and copilot
Wiliam: Let's go into Wisq. What's the vision?
Jim: We're trying to help people be more successful and happy at work. That's our mission as a company, to guide people to success and happiness at work. And what we found is that we can use generative AI to do that. Wisq is an AI guide and coach, initially, for managers, and it provides coaching and guidance and expert advice that's highly personalized and does it 24/7.
William: What type of coaching are we talking about?
Jim: End to end. You can ask Wisq about anything. So many managers get promoted because they're terrific individual contributors, right? And they struggle in those early years with a lot of decisions that they have made to make a lot of skills they need to acquire. So, we're all about helping managers learn and grow and be better versions of themselves.
William: This happens a lot in sales. [They’re] cracking it out of the park, and then all of a sudden, someone says, “Oh yeah, Sandy, you're doing a great job. You're killing quota. Now go be the regional manager of so and so.”
Marc: It happens all the time. And managers have such a disproportionate impact.
If we all close our eyes and think about it and think about the most fantastic, wonderful manager you've ever had—what did he or she do? And then conversely, think about the lousy managers that you've had. What did he or she do?
The impact is so wildly different on your happiness, your effectiveness, your ability to thrive as a human being. There are great solutions within companies for the super high-performing individuals, and then with employee assistance programs (EAPs) for folks that are unfortunately suffering—whether it's PTSD, depression, or anxiety—you get your Spring Health, Modern Health, Lyra. There's a great solution for them.
There's nothing great for this massive middle of individuals. And we thought, how can we bring something to market that would have an incredible impact for them and help them reach their full potential? And that was really what the genesis of Wisq is.
Tackling the core problem: managers without adequate support
William: We talked about in the pre-show that it's really easy to talk bad about managers… Looking at the tools and resources that we've given managers to be successful.
When you asked me to close my eyes and think about the good and the bad, the good came down to a specific person who was taught vulnerability, but also taught getting buy-in. And the bad manager, when I closed my eyes, it was about, they didn't know me.
I remember doing a performance review, and this person just didn't know me at all. Like, all the things that they went left on, I was right, all the things that went right on, I was left. Maybe they just didn't have the tools and resources to be successful.
Jim: Totally. And your point about the tools or learning the analogy.
It's sort of like if you send Coco Gauff to tennis camp for a week, and then we basically say, good luck winning the US Open. That's not how it works. I mean, she works with a variety of coaches for decades to be at the top of her game.
Now, I'm not saying being a manager is the same as winning the US Open, but what I'm saying is it's a very complex, challenging job that has a lot of dimensions to it, and sending managers through a one-week training course or asking them to watch a video once a year is is not giving them the tools that they need to be great
So, we thought to ourselves, like, what if we could embed a real-time 24/7 coach and guide and mentor to help managers really be the best versions of themselves. You're right. A lot of people could be much better managers. They just don't have the tools or the training or guidance to become that better manager.
Ryan: As you told us to close our eyes, I'm still thinking, who is my good manager?
It's been a while since I've had a manager. There have been managers that I've liked, but none that I would look back and say, “You've really impacted my career.” I just don't know that I have that… So I think my question is, how do you embed this, 24 hours a day? How does this feel to a manager, and how do they engage with this? How do they interact with it?
Jim: They can engage with it at any time. But that's not the same as something being there for you. 24/7 or seven were available for you.They can use Wisq via their mobile app, their desktop app browser, and they can talk to the coach about anything they want to talk to the coach about.
But there’s more than that. Over time, the coach does a few things. First, it gets to know you, starts to understand your history, your patterns, understands your company's content, and if you've chosen to take some assessments, knows even more about you. If you've chosen to use Wisq’s feedback features, then you've gotten feedback from your team. So the Wisq platform takes all this content and coaches the individual using that content.
So one of the ways that it's guiding you all the time is with nudges and reminders. It understands over time that you've got these issues that you're dealing with. Let's use an example: you've got an underperforming person on your team, and you've been avoiding the hard conversation, right? So it now starts to understand that this is an issue for you, and that you came to Wisq to ask, you know, how do I have that conversation with this individual? And then it also starts to understand, do you avoid challenging conversations in general? Do I need to coach this user on something bigger? Coach the person as opposed to the problem. Those are some of the ways that the coach becomes embedded in your life and helps you on a more continuous basis.
Tailored coaching, nudges, and company integration
William: I'm really interested in your take on what you see in all that anonymized data? Looking at that and seeing, okay, here's what we got going on with managers in general.
Marc:I think the overall arc, starting at the beginning, is to have a guide that knows you and a guide that knows your team.
How do you really do that? Well, you do it through assessments. We're not going to be overly dogmatic about the assessment type. We believe that we should support a whole bunch of different types of assessments, ranging from Big Five, Enneagram, DISC predictive index and so forth.
And that begins to teach Wisq about you as a human, your personality, and so forth and so on. The second thing is, as Jim mentioned, all the CHROs I talk with think it's really important too, is the ingestion of their created content and the ingestion of their licensed third-party content.
So now, as you're interacting with the coach, if your company has a point of view on a performance improvement plan template, you can serve that. Or if your company has a point of view on a framework for career development conversation, you can serve that up.
We've got humanity's knowledge at our fingertips. How are we going to leverage that to deliver an exceptional experience to these managers? Whereas what we've done over all these years, we've literally just given them learning management systems, right? LXPs. Learning starts at the beginning, it ends at the end and right when it's over. The forgetting curve has a ton of gravity, and it's much more powerful than the learning curve.
William: We've given them extranets and intranets, and case management software as well. You have a question. Go over here to [Wisq] and ask the question, which is much easier to do than emailing the CHRO.
Those are most of the basic questions that you get as a team member and as a manager. If someone's just moved to Indiana and they’re like, “I don't know what my vision insurance is.” It's stuff like that; it’s the simple stuff like that that impacts their experience.
Ultimately, you want alignment of your managers, your team and the company's values, and so on so that you know what those things are. [Wisq] has got to be able to know those things so that it doesn't give advice that's outside of the ethical or moral boundaries.
Jim: That's a really important point, and one of the things we built is these really cool guardrails, a series of algorithms that detect those topics, and then we don't coach on those and refer the person to the proper channel.
Defining managerial impact in the age of AI
William: How will [customers] know that they have reached their goal with Wisq?
Jim: There are some ways we can measure our progress. Managers take assessments before they start coaching, and they take assessments after they start coaching. We can measure the progress, but I think you're asking a bigger question, like, as humanity, how will we know, what's the impact of generative AI coaching on humanity?
William: Is it productivity? Is it yield, in the sense of, like, farmers look at crops, is it getting more out of less?
Jim: I think that's how companies think about it. You know, ultimately, they're buying software to improve the results of their business, right?
William: As they should.
Jim: We can help managers be the best versions of themselves, help them be more successful, help them be more engaged, and be happier at work. That will influence their teams and that will lead to these really positive business outcomes.
William: I think it shows up there… I think it shows up in regrettable turnover. So if we can keep that manager that is doing an exceptional job and now doing a more exceptional job, and we can keep that team that's now more cohesive and doing a better job.
Turnover, in and of itself, isn't bad, like there's trees that die in a forest, that's actually a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It's the regrettable turnover. So people that you want to keep, but you couldn't keep, think if we can move the needle on that and keep those people, and keep them engaged, to keep them productive, and all that other stuff, keep them happy, whatever, then I think that that would be an outcome that I'd want to measure.
Jim: You were asking this bigger, broader question: how do you monitor today's progress, or the quality of our coaching? We actually employ a combination of both technology solutions to monitor the quality of coaching as well as human solutions.
William: It's a continuous calibration that people talk about… It's like, you're always going to be tweaking and calibrating. I love the human part, and I love the machine part as well.
Jim: The opportunity is so staggeringly incredible.
When you think about the future where we're all going to have digital human companions that help make our lives better every day, it’s going to be really thrilling. The voice interactions that you can have with products like Wisq... But you know, we're going to see progress over the next five years that’s going to blow people away. The ability to help us lead more successful and happier lives is going to be truly outstanding.
The future of AI and workplace happiness
Ryan: How do you both define workplace happiness?
Marc: I'll preface this: Jim has actually studied happiness as a hobby for the last 20 odd years. So one of the reasons that I'm here is because he's a fantastic leader and manager, a fantastic human being, and I learned just so much so fast in working with him.
Ryan: In the 2010, 2011 timeframe, there's a psychologist that's at University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman. He gave a talk on emotional happiness and understanding what gets you there.
And it was just one of those things that, like, I would never listen to this stuff. It doesn't do it for me. But that one clicked… It just has always stuck with me. So when William and I started talking about WRKdefined, it reminded me of that. And I never went back to it. But you had said something earlier that made it click in my hand. I'm just curious to get your take on this.
Jim: Back to the question of happiness first. I think there's a difference between personal happiness and sort of an operational definition of organizational happiness, right? If you spend time reading the great leaders in happiness, fundamentally personal happiness is about loving what is being in the present moment, being awake.
And you know, if you try to sell that to companies, they're gonna go, “I don't wanna love what is. I wanna do 10% more. I don’t pay them to sit there and meditate all day.” So I don't think that definition works really well in an HR and organizational setting.
William: That creates a disconnect because you got organizational like, if you talk to a COO and say, define happiness. Happiness for them is stability. It's understanding that staffing is stable. The product is stable. Their happiness is rooted in different things. When you talk to a line manager, you talk to an employee in the same environment, you say, define happiness. Happiness is having breaks on time, the coffee machine is filled up, or stuff like that.
It's micro. It's macro. It's highly personalized. And I think that's also what creates a disconnect between, if we say leadership, and employ employees, because they have different ways of it's almost like vistas… And that's how I think about happiness. That person at that particular moment is looking off in a vista, and they're getting one way. Two steps later, it's a completely different view. So I don't know if there's ever going to be some kind of universal agreement on work happiness.
Marc: People have resting happiness levels. And it turns out that you know, your resting happiness level might be a six out of 10. Someone else's, who you know is constantly cranky, they might be a three out of 10.
And what we've learned, which is scientifically proven, is that there's certain practices that can actually increase your baseline happy happiness level… Practices like meditation, practices like doing things in service of others, we talked about oxytocin earlier, like petting a dog. Like these things literally make us feel better. And what Martin Seligman pointed out in his book, “Positive Psychology” is that you can map or bridge someone's individual ‘why’ to the company ‘why’ and make that incredibly non-opaque, or make it incredibly transparent. Here's how your work is contributing to a broader vision, broader mission, broader plan, and you happen to really care about that plan.
If I'm a manager and Jim's my teammate, I'm going to really understand who Jim is, what's important to him, both inside and outside of work, and then I'm going to try to build a bridge between his personal why and the company why. And that bridge, brick by brick, is laid with soft skills, right? And the tragic thing is, is that most learning management platforms, LXPs, they train us in hard skills.
And that bridge is literally paved with these soft skills, and that's one of the kind of the number one things that great leaders do is they help you along your journey. They've walked in your shoes before. Some of it borderlines on mentorship. Some of it's guiding and nurturing along that same path, but they're helping you reach your personal goals and build a direct bridge to company goals.
William: Well, thank you all so much. I know we've run up on time, but thank you all so much for coming on the show. We appreciate you and congratulations on your new journey.
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