Parker: Great. And this is a perfect segue. I'm going to welcome Anna to the stage. Anna is the Chair of the Human Capital Management program at NYU. Anna has literally written the book on the future of digital coaching. We're going to talk a little bit about some provocations around, you know, first, sort of why coaching is so important and then what are some areas that we can look to to potentially get a glimpse of what coaching in the workplace might look like. 

So, welcome. Thank you Anna.

Anna: Thank you so much. You know, I want to build on and maybe challenge a little bit of what Brent said here before, and that was about the future. So, you know, not to go to a cliche saying that some of that future is already in the ecosystem and might not be sitting in organizations. And that's the topic of, you know, he was in my discussion, is where do we see this coaching and technology, you know, blend, in combination already working in setting some precedent for what we could be looking for in our organization. What are the patterns that have been already tried and proven that are working? And that was kind of the idea that I had when I was researching my book, and I want to share it with you. 

Parker: Wonderful. I want to get to that analogy, but tell us a little bit about you and why it was coaching–and the blend and intersection of coaching and technology–why is that so important to you?

Anna: You know, I rebounded into academia. I was an academic, I left and I spent 15 years in business, both in technology and financial services. And that's where I realized, you know, how important it was. I worked in Europe. I worked here, I was in charge as a head of global talent development, etc, and it always felt that coaching fell short as a tool, as a method. It was very effective with some and even with all of the investments that we were making at the top of the organization.  I don't think it was optimized, that investment, because it was a little bit too little too late. The challenge has always been, how do we make that available and accessible to different levels in the organization.

The other thing is, as most of the people in the audience know, it was primarily applied as a corrective tool. Coaching, you know, got a bad reputation. If you tell senior executives on Wall Street, where I worked, that they need to get a coach, that was like a curse. That means that next will be a performance improvement plan or something along those lines.

So I don't think that coaching got the impact that it was intended to make in organizations. And, obviously when technology became available to us first through the platforms, you know, can we connect? But I remember in 2019, as I was doing my research about coaching and technology, the kind of the roots of it, discussions, whole conferences around whether coaching would be effective on Skype. Remember that technology? Or on the phone. Remember, could coaching be done through the phone? No way. There was a lot of resistance to that. And so that desire to really optimize what this particular method of learning could do, that we know goes back to the Greeks, as probably, you know, historically, the effective method, tutoring.

Parker: So we know it works. We know that spreading it, sharing it more widely, democratizing it would be helpful. We're also looking at the future. So where do you look to to get a sense of where the future of coaching in the workplace might be? 

Anna: Yes. So as I was looking around, sports. Specifically professional sports was where I was starting to do research. It started with data. I remember, Moneyball came out. And then when I looked at athletic performance, even the latest Olympics, there's no way those humans could get to where they got without coaching. There's no question and it's interesting that we have this conversation here about trying to prove to our organizations that coaching works, but no one questions the effectiveness of coaching when it comes to sports. You know, even in little leagues, your basic soccer camp for your three year olds, no one is challenging the fact that all of those kids deserve to have a coach. So that barrier is down and has already been established. You need a coach to get to any level of performance in sports. So the next generation of coaching, how do you get from, you know, the basic training where your parents are doing the coaching, to even mid-level, school-level coaching.

And that's where technology has started to come in a long time ago. From the videos, basic feedback on, the speed of your swing and getting those types of feedback, data points to athletes early on. It doesn't mean that you take away the human coach, the pro in your golf game. But technology was accepted from the get go as soon as those tools became available. And the significant amount of investment that's been put into developing the whole ecosystem of startups. In fact, some of the clubs, some of the professional associations, groups started creating their own technology ecosystems to encourage innovation in those types of technologies that can accelerate coaching for professional athletes.

Parker: I think one of the words you used there was feedback.

Anna: Yes.

Parker: And so one of the things that's incredible about the technology is that it can codify that feedback, deliver it well, and if it's technology it can do that at scale. Where does that analogy sort of have a strong parallel with work and where is work a little different potentially than the sports world?

Anna: Everyone here on the stage who was talking about how they apply these tools talk about performance and productivity performance, etc, etc. And that's where the Venn diagram is between athletic performance and performance on the job. At least in the broader definitions of performance, that's what it is.

So I think there is a lot of similarity in what we expect from either an athlete or an employee. And, you know, I've written and I've done a ton of research on performance management and one of the main headaches and failures of the current performance management systems is inability to provide ongoing feedback.So, in fact, you know, if you look at the athlete, if you look at an employee, it's the frequency of the conversation with a manager around feedback on performance, just in time, in the flow of work, that makes a difference in the ultimate output of that particular employee. And that's where organizations started to kind of manually mandate managers to have frequent conversations. We moved from once a year to quarterly. And there was a whole renaming revolution about, you know, check-ins and other types of language. Imagine that, just like with an athlete, you can provide feedback pretty much on a daily basis. Obviously, there's no human capacity from the manager perspective. A lot of research that has been done on managers, and the role of managers, and the importance of managers, and the conflict in the design of the role of the manager. The manager has to produce and give feedback. So it was really a catch-22 situation in companies around performance management.

So, imagine that you would have some way of providing that daily feedback that could be incremental and building up to the final performance appraisal, or whatever it's called in your organization, so it's actually built on pretty much almost daily feedback. And I think that that is the guarantee that, just like with any athlete, their performance is going to improve. 

Parker: I think one of the interesting things, as we explore the idea of AI, is that sports professionals can get feedback as they practice, so they'll do a lot of practice before they actually perform. Whereas managers and leaders, I mean, it's sort of constantly on the job and AI coaching can actually give them that feedback in an extraordinarily safe way in a practice environment so that they might feel the confidence and have the skills to put it in practice in the real world. 

Anna: And I really want to emphasize that, because we've done some research on using these feedback AI tools, people feel a lot more comfortable and psychologically safe in the environment where AI is providing this very basic feedback vis-a-vis your manager. Because there's a status difference and, you know, and not necessarily always the best, including the fact that managers are not available in their capacity to do that. But, it's a much safer situation when you can get objective feedback on how you are performing from an AI system.

Parker: There's a  quick story that I often share with CHROs. Maybe I'll do it here in this room. People say, well, maybe the manager should be the coach and so, you know, you should just be able to ask your manager. So let me ask a quick question. Quick poll here, how many people here have had a manager at some point in their career that they've had trouble working with? Hands up if that's the case. I can't see, but I can imagine. Okay, how many people here now have someone on their team who's having trouble working with their manager? It's a bit of a trick question. But yes, we all have, we don't have a perfectly safe environment and so this AI coaching is actually in some ways way safer for a lot of people to be able to have their first draft of things.

You and I have talked about a couple of provocative ideas and I know that that's really interesting for people to sort of chew on. One of them is around skills. And you're not necessarily–I don't want to put words in your mouth–but the current path of skills might not be the one that you think is accurate. Can you share a little more about that? 

Anna: I think we all agree that skill is just a very basic, foundational sort of element, a building block of what performance really represents. And those of us working in organizations, I think we've heard a lot about the context, you know, psychological safety, the team dynamics, there are so many elements that contribute to that ultimate performance. Because skill doesn't guarantee performance. There are so many different elements that need to contribute to that perfect outcome that we're looking for. But the ability for us to measure what that ambient context is, oftentimes, has been very limited. Speaking about data. 

Skills, yes, we can infer based on how fast you type. That's where it all started, et cetera. So I think we're going to graduate from skills, with the help of AI, and we'll be able to contextualize, you know, performance. And maybe we need new language.  I think “skills” has its own baggage because we've been using it for so long. If we're able to have all of that wraparound context in addition to, you know, identifying a very specific granular scale, we're going to get closer to actually identifying what it takes–if performance is our goal, which it is– to actually perform at the level of excellence and competency that is required of a job.

Parker: I just think that's such an important insight because skills could be too one-dimensional. And as you say, a skill in one environment might produce a performance outcome and that same skill in a second environment might not produce a performance outcome. If we're in a world where we can understand that context, that is a second dimension to the single dimension of skills that is just so important to try to track. 

Anna: I want to bring the sports analogy, again. All of those Olympic athletes that we admire, they are not thinking about their skills when they are competing for the gold or the silver. They're thinking about mental acuity, they're thinking about visualization. There are so many different elements that they worry about that skill is just automated by that point through the practice, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that’s the same thing we are going to see in the workplace, where we're going to learn a lot of skills are going to be automated through AI and delivered to us. So what will be required is this higher-level, working at the top of the license. Working at the top of your human ability is where we will need to compete. 

Parker: I just love that because I think that ability to sort of move up that, you know, that scale and being able to bring the best parts of who we are  in the world of transformation that we're all going to experience, that's so important. 

So, really appreciate the provocations for the audience and thank you for joining us today, Anna.