Promoted but Unprepared: How AI Coaching Is Helping New Leaders

SHRM All Things Work

The episode explores the challenges new leaders face when promoted into roles without adequate preparation or management experience. Alex Ma

Key takeaways

• Jamie Albers shares her experience being promoted to the C-suite at Jigsaw without prior management experience, illustrating the need for accessible coaching.
• Mento utilizes an 80/20 rule consisting of 80% inquiry-based coaching and 20% tactical mentorship based on lived experience.
• AI is used not to replace humans but to capture key insights from coaching sessions so leaders can apply them immediately to their work.
• The concept of 'ambient growth' is introduced as a way to make behavior change more natural through technological support.
• Alex Marcus warns that organizations must ensure AI acts as an amplifier for work rather than a 'Big Brother' surveillance tool that compromises confidentiality.

Main topics

• Leadership development gaps
• AI-enhanced coaching
• The 80/20 coaching and mentorship model

Notable quotes

Coaching helps you think, mentorship helps you do.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that the future of leadership lies in using A

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Juggling HR, finance, and IT is a challenge for any organization. That's why Paylocity brought them all together in one connected HCM platform. Paylocity isn't just a bundle of features. It's a seamless experience designed to support the modern workforce. With automation, AI, and flexibility built in, Paylocity helps you move forward together as one team. Cut down on busy work with automated workflows for payroll, compliance, expense management, onboarding, and more. See how Paylocity's Ignite AI and its purpose-built agents automate tasks across pay, time, recruiting, and other areas where work often gets bogged down. Get the analytics and reporting you need to see what's working and make smarter business decisions. And do it all from one unified system that offers seamless integration with the tools you already use. Get started today at Paylocity.com. Speaker 2 (1:05) Hey, it's your favorite coworker, Ann, and this is the All Things Work podcast. Getting promoted is supposed to feel exciting, right? It's a sign your hard work has paid off and your company is believing in you. But for many leaders, that excitement is quickly followed by another feeling. Now what? You've completed the leadership training. You've attended the workshops. Maybe you've even worked with a coach. Yet when you're suddenly responsible for leading people, making high stakes decisions. and driving business results, many realize you still don't feel prepared. Coaching new leaders to help them feel more prepared is a challenge many organizations face. Now AI is opening the door to a new approach, not to replace the human connection, but to enhance it. Might sound counterintuitive at first, but when done right, AI has the potential to make coaching more tailored, measurable, and ultimately more impactful than ever before. And I'm really excited to dig into that idea today with two people helping shape this shift. Alex Marcus and Jamie Albers are the co-CEOs and co-founders of Mento, an AI and human-led leadership coaching platform. Mento combines certified coaching with experienced business operators and AI-powered insights to help leaders improve performance. Today, we're diving into why traditional coaching models may no longer be enough. how AI is helping address the gap in leadership development when incorporated thoughtfully, and where organizations need to tread carefully. I'm super excited to have Alex Marcus and Jamie Albers joining us today. They both come with incredible backgrounds at the intersection of tech and leadership development with experience at companies like Disney and Google. So Alex, Jamie, welcome to All Things Work. Thank you. Thank you for having us. It's Speaker 1 (2:57) a pleasure to be here. We're big fans. Speaker 2 (3:00) I'm so happy to hear that. So I want to kick things off with you, Jamie. You have a really unique story that I would love our audience to learn more about. You were working at this company where you found yourself quickly promoted to the C-suite level, yet you said in one of your blogs that you actually felt very unprepared. for that position. Can you tell us more about your story and how it really kicked off you and Alex starting Mento? Yeah. So it Speaker 3 (3:30) was, I guess I'll aging myself here, but it was about 10 years ago. And I was working at an alphabet company. So Google's parent company out in New York was an incredible company called Jigsaw. And It was, you know, in true early tech, you know, tech day fashion. I had the opportunity to join the C-suite. They promoted me. I had actually never had even been a manager before. So suddenly I was with reports and I was around a table of very senior, very accomplished leaders. And I was most certainly in over. my head, my CEO had actually just gotten an executive coach. And growing up, I played a lot of sports. So this idea of a coach felt very natural to me. But what you learn in the world of sports is that most often your coach has played the game. And so that's what I wanted. I wanted a coach who had operated, who had been a female, a younger female, but in sort of those executive levels, someone who matched my situation. It was very, very hard to find, but I eventually found her and it completely changed my life and my work. It helped me navigate the new terrain, the frontier of management, but also the day-to-day realities of suddenly finding myself needing to operate at a much more senior level. Speaker 4 (5:01) I referred Speaker 3 (5:02) her to all of my friends. I said, oh my gosh, everyone needs this coach. She's absolutely amazing. And they said, in what world do you think that we can expense a coach like you can? And I said, that's a really good point. I happened to be in a very lucky position where I was able to do that. And it was about that time that I met Alex, who had been very influenced by. who also had played sports growing up. So the concept was similar to him as something that was very natural for him. And he had also been very much shaped by mentors in his career. So we said, hey, we need to make this more accessible. This is where the future of work is going, where we're consistently going to be finding ourselves in new terrain. And we need support from people who have been enrolled, who have been in that seat and can help us not just develop more self-awareness and think through. how you know uncover our blind spots but can also help us bridge that gap and take something tactical and immediately go have that conversation with your you know c-suite peer uh who that conversation you've been dragging your feet with for weeks or how to go have that performance conversation so that's the the origin story of mento and why we're all here today i Speaker 2 (6:17) 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 underprepared, 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? Speaker 1 (6:50) 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, you know, 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? Speaker 3 (7:29) 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 of the, 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. Speaker 3 (8:17) requires support and guidance to do that most effectively. 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 figured that out with that person. Now you're going to have to actually change entirely how you work together because... Now