Throughout my career, I’ve been energized by working in service of others. I’ve spent the past three decades providing software solutions to help people learn, grow and engage. Now, with Wisq, I’m bringing these three elements together.
Helping others find their ‘why’
I always wanted to work in service of others. For me, helping people thrive, grow, and be more successful is what it’s all about.
One of my proudest accomplishments has been helping others become better managers. And many of those I helped train are now leading huge teams or leading entire companies. As a manager myself, I wanted to help employees find their “spark,” their desire to bring out the best in other people.
In my experience, once you start doing a great job for your team, you want to do more in service of them. You find your flow state. You develop a burning desire to get better and help your people get better. It then becomes a virtuous cycle, where the manager works in service of their team, and in turn, each member of the team works in service of each other, their customers, and the company. That’s when the team dynamic really hums.
Serving others helps employees find their personal “why,” the reason they come to work every day. For some, their reason could be providing for their family or getting a promotion. Whatever the case, you can create a high-performing organization when you link the individual sense of purpose to the company's purpose and mission.
As a manager, your job is to understand your team, how you can help them be successful in the job they’re in and navigate to the job they want in the future. This is no easy task. To do it right, managers need cognitive agility, organizational wherewithal, deep listening skills, emotional intelligence, feedback, recognition, and maturity, among many other soft skills.
At the highest level, that’s what great managers do: they understand purpose.
A future of work where people learn and grow
Throughout my career, I saw how powerful it could be to share the fundamental management concepts that served my career with the next generation of leaders. I realized I didn’t have to be directly involved in creating the “spark” in others; I could help coach and train other leaders on how to bring out the best in their people.
Now, through technology, we can scale these concepts further, helping everyone become a better manager. That was the genesis of Wisq: Jim Barnett, the team and I asked ourselves, “How can we bring the benefits of coaching to all employees, at any hour of the day?” We knew that one-to-one coaching can vastly improve people’s behaviors and mindsets, but it’s costly to scale those benefits across an entire organization and quality is often mixed.
We founded Wisq to change that, to bring the benefits of world-class, quality coaching to everyone at a lower cost. And we founded Wisq to help people learn the way they want to learn.
Employees want direct access to information, and they want to engage in concepts and be active participants in their coaching journeys. Traditional learning platforms make it difficult for people to retain concepts and practice new skills; learning begins at the beginning of a video and ends at the end, or often much sooner. Through the Wisq AI guide, people stay in the flow of learning, asking questions as they come up and working through solutions over time, like they would with a human coach.
As a leader, I’m as committed as ever to helping people find their management “spark.” Now, through Wisq, we can fan the flame with bellows and turn it into a burning fire.
And everyone can benefit from that fire. Effective management creates a halo effect on entire companies. That’s what I'm after: helping people get to their flow state and offering them the agency to be better managers.
This is the start of a new era for helping people be successful and happy at work. I’m proud to bring this platform to managers, and bring together my commitment to serving organizations through learning, engagement, and coaching.