With that, I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Rea Rotholz. I'm the Senior Director of Learning Solutions at Hone. Been with Hone for about four, almost four and a half years now, where I get to sit across all our customers.
So I'm excited today to share what I've been hearing thematically from different industries and different company sizes around super managers and AI transformation. I started my career in human capital management with Deloitte, doing change management and transformation work. And then I led the global learning and development team at Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal and some other media publications you've probably heard of. That's where I met Hone before I joined.
So really looking forward to sharing all of the things I've been learning from you all given today's topic. And with that, I am with my cohost, Tom, our CEO. I'll let him introduce himself.
Thank you, Rea. Hey, everybody. Great to be here with you today to talk about supermanagers and AI.
My name is Tom Griffiths, cofounder and CEO here at Hone. Career wise, it's been nearly a decade now with Hone working on leadership and manager development through all the eras that we've all encountered over the past few years and all the change that has come for leaders and managers. And I think it's safe to say that despite everything that happened with COVID and the economic pullback, that AI as a force for change and redesigning the workplace and the role of the manager is the biggest one of them all. So we're really leaning into this topic here at Hone.
It's a topic that's very close to my heart in a couple of ways because we've been so passionate about leadership and management for so long here at Hone. But prior to Hone, I started my career in AI, actually, twenty years ago in grad school doing a master's and PhD in machine learning. And then went on to scale a big startup into a unicorn over a decade, really learning firsthand all of the challenges of being a manager, then being an executive and doing that at Pace. So bringing all of that experience together into our new work on super managers here at home has been really exciting, and we're excited to share it here today.
And I didn't even know AI was a thing twenty years ago until I met Tom. So excited to learn more with you today, Tom. So for today's agenda, we know that AI transformation has been at the top of everyone's minds and we're going to talk about the specific role of the super manager. Their job is not just managing all of the AI transformation, it's also being a really important linchpin in the organization. So specifically, we'll talk about new research on the role of the manager in today's world, the keys to being a super manager through the need to balance being human centered and adopting the new technologies that are out there, and then how HR and L and D leaders, how you all can help build and support super managers at your organization.
So excited to dive into each of these today.
The backdrop for all of this, of course, is the AI era and the AI transformation that we're all going through.
Without AI, there would be no supermanager. The idea of supermanager at its essence is the manager in the era of AI. Actually, when you dig into what we see every day here at home and what the research shows, there really is no role that's more disrupted or more critical than the manager in endeavor of AI transformation. I think that in the first wave of AI adoption inside enterprises, a lot of tools were bought and scaled and experimented with.
But what's fascinating is that if you just look at the companies who are implementing those tools, who've rolled out AI technology, only twelve percent of the employees at those AI enabled companies say that AI AI has transformed how they work.
So they've got the technology, but it still isn't changing how they work. So there's some other force at play. And really, of course, as we all know at this point, that's the people factors, the human behavior change that needs to go into, adopting AI, and redesigning workflows. And, of course, the manager is the linchpin of all of that.
They're the role who needs to change how their team operates. They need to model what it looks like to use AI, and they need to be a conduit for the organization's AI transformation strategy. So there's a lot riding on getting the evolution of our managers right. And so whether you're a manager on this call learning how to do this yourself or someone looking to enable managers for this next era, we're gonna break down exactly what those skills look like both on the people and the AI side.
And it's crazy because despite everything you just said, Tom, managers are under attack.
That's kind of the first thing I thought of when we decided to do this webinar. You open up the news, you open up your LinkedIn feeds, and frankly we just see a lot of companies laying off people. I'm just going to say it out how it is, right? And a lot of those people are middle managers. So the expectations are increasing, while the number of people who are able to do that job are frankly decreasing. I don't know how many of you have seen the stat from Gallup, but through twenty twenty six, the estimation is that twenty percent of organizations will use AI to flatten their organizational structure and eliminate half of their management positions, which to me seems crazy.
But that is the reality that we're in and why we wanted to do this webinar. So expectations are expanding, right? Managers are, just like Tom mentioned, responsible for a lot of the transformation work and translating what senior leaders and C suite want to achieve into the reality.
They're the ones that are translating that for their teams and holding those teams accountable.
And meanwhile, the human impact is escalating as well, right? Because we're still all people at work who have, you know, who have to balance all of this, who have burnout challenges and engagement challenges, and it's the managers who take the brunt of supporting their teams and inspiring them and motivating them and all of that good stuff so they're also leading through AI slop and what this looks like for your their process flows it's just I mean you get the you get the gist it's a lot for managers to handle, but there is also a lot of opportunity for the managers who are able to be part of amazing organizations to really take the lead and step up and make a difference at these organizations.
Enter the supermanager. So the solution to what it takes to manage in this new era is a new definition of what it means to be a manager. The concept of supermanager was popularized by Josh Bersin last year in his report, People Management in the Age of AI, The Rise of the Supermanager. So I encourage you to go read that or watch or listen to Josh's podcasts on the topic. But at its essence, what the supermanager does is combine the human side of management and all of the change and transformation that needs to happen with their team with a deep understanding and use of AI to take part in that AI transformation, of their team, of themselves, and of their organisations.
So it's not just getting better as a manager individually. It's about embracing and leveraging technology for doing that. And if they can model those behaviors, enable their team to leverage AI because they're gonna have to, given what Raya was sharing about the higher the greater span of control that managers are now responsible for, leveraging that for their own workflows, for their team, and and helping with their organization, then that becomes an incredible leverage point for companies to get more from AI because of this crucial pivot point of the the manager driving that transformation.
If you just do a thought experiment of two organizations that pre AI were pretty equal in the same market with the same scale, same growth rate. One company invests in developing their managers, in leveling up the change skills that they have in order to adopt AI and then the technical skills that go along with that to drive AI transformation for themselves and their their teams. If you think about where those two companies will be in the next five years, it couldn't be more different. Is it a ten x difference?
Is it a hundred x difference? We'll see. But, clearly, there's a massive unlock by making these changes at the managerial level to connect the executive and c suite desire to embrace AI for the good of the business to the actual frontlines who need that handholding and leadership to be able to make those gains real while, you know, dealing with all of the dynamic environment that Ray described. So it really does unlock a huge new opportunity for growth for businesses by enabling managers in this way.
And it's great that we have a term now, and we'll give a definition shortly for what a supermanager actually means and what it looks like practice.
It's not surprising really that the role of a manager needs to change for this new era of work because the definition of manager has needed to evolve as work has gone through different ages in the past.
In the agrarian age, you can think of managers as the boss, just dishing out instructions of what needed to be done. In the industrial age, a hundred years ago, a lot of process was introduced for scalability, and so leadership was very process centered.
The information age of the last fifty years, let's say, has been somewhat about technology but a lot about more enlightened people management and unlocking the human capital that we have at our companies. And now as we enter the intelligence age this decade, there's a new reason to reimagine the role of a manager as super manager. Again, if you take anything from this, webinar today, it's the duality between the human skills that are just as important as they've always been paired with AI empowerment for the individual manager, the team, and playing the role in the organization.
Perfect setup for our second agenda item for the day, which is, okay, we get it. We've seen the research, and certainly we will share out all of those research articles with you so you can leverage it in your own conversations. But now, okay, I understand we need to be super managers, but what exactly does that mean and how do we build that at our organization? That's what we'll be really diving into.
So when we think about super managers, we're thinking about not just someone who can sit behind a million agents who can get a ton of different flows and data pools done, right? It's someone who can really balance the human centered piece of management with the efficiencies that come with being AI powered, right? And it is, I think, a delicate dance that we are just now learning how to do well, right? And how to unlock the potential of our teams by doing this well.
So the human side has certainly not gone away for people managers, right? If anything, like we mentioned, they're juggling more. But we'll dive a little bit deeper into those skills now. And we did hear from some of you in the beginning, for those of you joined a little bit early, what skills are mission critical for your managers.
But now we would like to hear from you in the chat. So go ahead, open up your chat box. What human centered leadership skills are you prioritizing for your manager right now? If you are on an HR or leadership development team, what are you prioritizing and how you're supporting managers?
And then if you are a manager going through this and you want to unlock your super manager ness, right? What are you prioritizing for your own development or making sure you're showing up in a certain way? We wanna hear from the managers as well.
Amazing. I see them all coming in.
Okay, let's see, what themes do you see, Tom?
Emotional Yeah, change management, feedback and coaching, judgment is a good one, critical thinking and some thinking skills.
There's a whole thread on thinking skills, decision making, strategic thinking. Thanks, Catherine.
I mean, violently agree with all of this.
In fact, we made a slide on it.
The the skills that we see out in the workplace in the human side of this super manager duality line up pretty closely with with what folks are sharing in the chat. So just to enumerate a few of the top ones. Coaching forever as a manager is crucial. Right? You're unlocking people's potential. You're not doing the work. You're having them agree an outcome and coaching them towards that, more important than ever as they navigate new environments and expectations.
Feedback, the classic. It is the number one skill on hone that we see companies embrace for their managers and managers embrace themselves. But if we're trying to have a high performance organisation that's figuring out as we go what works and what doesn't and whether people are meeting the moment in terms of their AI adoption, obviously, managers need to have great feedback skills.
Trust, always important. Business moves at the speed of trust, as they say, but trust takes on a new importance in this AI transformation era because of all the fear that is out there about AI replacing jobs. And so organizations broadly and managers in particular need to be able to have a high trust environment with their team so that team members know that if they're innovating with AI and finding new workflows that make perhaps some of their work redundant, that's not gonna make their role redundant. It's gonna mean that they, team members, get to move on to higher order, higher leverage work, and so managers need to engender that trust.
And then finally, related to that, managers have always had to have career conversations is often one of the things that gets left by the wayside in the busyness of the workplace. But in order to retain the best employees right now and not have a fear based exodus, then managers need to be able to have these career conversations to help people understand. Even as the organization transforms and their role and their workflows transform, there's still a role for them here, and it's better to be on the journey and embrace AI to revolutionize their skill set at this role or a future one than shy away from it or be a detractor in the change process because that's gonna hurt their career as well.
So that's what we see in the work that we do with tens of thousands of of managers every year.
But we also brought in some research from folks like the World Economic Forum. I think we saw this in the chat a moment ago, but analytical thinking has been growing in importance for years and never has it been more important than now where everyone, particularly managers, needs to be thinking critically about how they leverage all these new tools. The there's new stuff every week. It feels like there's a new flavor of the week on social media or in the news, and so you need to be thinking critically about which tools you can actually embrace in a safe way, in a productive way for your team, and then breaking down in a systems way what workflows are actually inside my team that could benefit from this and which parts need to stay human, and how could we repurpose certain people's skill sets. So just like a lot of analysis and analytical thinking as a manager.
And again, the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report agrees.
Adaptability. I think we saw that in the chat as well. McKinsey and others naturally identify that as C suite and organizations think change, frontline employees and managers need adaptability to be a good player in that change. And, again, not only are we going through a huge wave of transformation, there's new things every week, and the pace of change is increasing.
Right? As AI models become recursively self improving and AI helps us write more code and more tools, things aren't slowing down. They're gonna get faster. And so managers need to be adaptable permanently because there's gonna be no status quo ever again.
Right? There's always gonna be constant change.
The other side of that, of course, is managing that change. You know, pick your researcher, but Gartner, of course, identifies this as a critical manager skill. And managing change isn't just the kind of project management of organizing what happens when. It's the human side of how we address people's fears. How do we pick up the, you know, the the subtle cues that someone's a detractor, and how do we turn them around with storytelling so that they can be a promoter of a particular change?
How do we interface with other teams laterally at the company that are undergoing change to share best practices? There's a bunch of skills that roll into the capability of of managing change that we need to ensure that our managers have.
And then finally, judgment. I love that this came up in the chat. And it's not one that we've seen on lists of top skills, let's say, a few years ago or prior, but the reason judgment is so important right now is that it is so easy to produce work product, whether that's code or graphics or written work or presentations or spreadsheets with AI that you can do in a couple of minutes what it used to take hours or days to do. But judgment as a human, knowing what good looks like in a particular role or for a particular piece of work, is still crucially important. And I think we've seen kind of the bad version of that with AI slop, where, yes, it's easy to create, but you're pushing the burden onto the recipient if you're creating five pages when, you know, one would have done. So it's really important to continue to train and nurture judgment even with the superpowers that we have as creators right now.
Can I tell you the example I was thinking of with judgment?
Sure.
So like many of you, I'm sure you use AI in your personal lives to make things easier. So mine helps with meal prepping, especially my kids lunches. And so it'll come up with really cute lunches that I could put together, but then I certainly have to use my judgment to decide if my kid will actually eat whatever the AI is recommending.
I think it's just a good example of AI can give us so many ideas, but then you know your organizational context, you know the culture, right? You know what's gonna fly and what's not gonna fly and what your team members might, how they might react, right? And AI can't really duplicate that. So I always like think of that example whenever I'm reviewing work or thinking about how I can use AI and it helps me to remember how important judgment is. I also was, Tom, I was reflecting on this list and thinking about what everyone put in the chat.
A lot of these things except for judgment aren't new, right? We've been talking about coaching and feedback and adaptability for at least the past ten years since I've been doing this, and I'm sure you feel the same, but the context really has changed over the past few years. So the way you were coaching before might not be exactly the same way you're coaching now because the expectations have changed and the way of working has changed and so much has changed. So I was just reflecting on it's been important and it's still important, but we need to keep paying attention to it because everything around it has changed.
Yeah. Great point, Rayo. Great example. So the human side of the super manager skills coin are the eternal skills of human leadership and management, but how they get used in the circumstances that they're necessary have evolved for sure.
Let's flip over the coin and look at the AI side of the skills, spectrum for for super managers.
And the way that we break this down is the same way that we break down leadership development programs in general, which is leaders need to be able to lead themselves, lead their team, and lead their business or the organization.
By analogy, managers or supermanagers need to be embracing AI themselves for their team and as part of the business wide transformation.
What does that look like?
At the individual level, management can be so much more effective and scalable as it needs to be than it has been in the past. I know that I am a better manager because of some of my AI workflows that I use for productivity or just my management practices. So for example, I use Granola on many of my one on ones and meetings with my team. I use Slack.
I use email, obviously. And I'm a big fan of Claude Cowork that has connectors to all of those platforms. So with a million, meetings a week, I sometimes worry that I've forgotten commitments that I've made to people that I manage or even commitments that they've made to me that I need to hold them accountable for. So I have a skill that I've built in Claude Cowork that I run every week that goes and looks at all my transcripts from my meetings, all my emails, my Slacks and build two lists.
One, the commitments I made to other people, and two, the commitments that they made to me. And then I can process that into the right system and the right lists for future meetings so that I'm following up and that I'm holding my accountability, holding my team accountable for those things as well as a manager. So better management personally because of AI.
At the team level, this is where the manager is in such a privileged position. They need to model, of course, what they're doing personally so that it inspires their team to also adapt these tools personally. But as the manager, you have the right and the opportunity to create space for people to be more experimental. And that's really where the rubber hits the road here. We can't just expect people to suddenly become AI geniuses overnight. We need to give them the space, whether that's a deep dive day or, you know, a week long sprint to play with the tools and see what comes out of it, fail if they need to, because eventually they'll figure it out. And as a manager, you have the privilege and opportunity to do that.
One way that we've seen out there, this described is by a friend of Hone, a real thought leader and consultant in the AI transformation space, doctor Marcus Bernhardt, where he talks about two waves of AI transformation. There's the surface wave where there's a bunch of hype and new tools, but as we saw earlier, only some companies are getting leverage from that. Really, what you need to do as a manager and as a leader is at this undercurrent of where the real work is of re architecting your team of your workflows and and how work gets done at your company. And so it's actually much deeper than you you might think when it comes to tool adoption because it's about redesigning work.
To give you a quick example on what redesigning work could look like, I saw one team that was client facing who had a data scientist to pull data from multiple sources for a client, an account manager who would put that into a presentation, and then a designer who would make the presentation look great before it went over to the client. The manager of that team could see, hey, we could be much more efficient here with AI, so they got the data scientist to connect the data sources that they were using into Claude Cowork. They got the designer to make a template that Claude could use, and then the account manager can now themselves use Claude co work to pull in data, populate the template, and have a presentation ready for the client in a fraction of the time that it would have taken the full three person workflow to to go through in the past.
So a really nice use of the same people on the team, but in different ways by redesigning the workflow and a better result for the company and the client.
It's quite hard to give general advice on exactly how to transform manager workflows and team workflows with AI because everyone and every team is so unique. But the great news is, of course, that we can use AI for that as well. And so what we've got here and we can share afterwards are a couple of prompts where it's a bit of a trick or a hack, but you can ask AI giving a context on your manager workflows and your team how you could embrace AI and use more or different ways of working with AI. And it can help to create the prompts. It can help to create the skills, any supporting context files. Like, AI can do this for you. So, like, leverage the tools to actually uplevel your skill level as a manager, and, also, here's a prompt that you can use to uplevel the workflows in your team to be able to, you know, identify ways that you might not see right now, but AI can can help you with.
Finally, at the business transformation level, there are best practices emerging in how companies do AI transformation.
And then the role of the super manager within that would be just being a good actor within that transformation process. There was a really cool case study that came out this week from Ramp around their Glass product. And so it feels like the conversation is moving on around AI transformation from, you know, the governance stuff that we used to talk about that I think is kind of figured out now to the tooling build versus buy discussions that are still ongoing to now focusing on the harness. Like, what is the harness across your organization that can help to centralize best practices so that it's not individual AI progress, but it's more institutionalized AI progress?
And what I mean by that is rather than everybody having their own tools and their own prompts, how can we have a repository like the Ramp Glass product that has, I think, three hundred and fifty different skills that they've centralized so that every time someone figures out a new skill or workflow, that gets available to everybody inside of Ramp so that they don't have to figure it out. It's now shared. So you move from kind of individual experimentation to an organizational capability that gets better as everybody improves. And so the role of the supermanager in that, of course, is modeling the best behaviors of pushing your team to leverage the harness that the company is creating and the best practices from other teams, and then, of course, contributing back to centralized repositories, skills or workflows or techniques or prompts that they've built themselves within the team so that you can be a good organizational actor and help the company overall make this leap to the next wave of AI transformation.
It's been really fun hearing and learning the different skills that even people at home have created and shared across the company. And we wanted to share just some practical tips from our customers that we hear chatting with you all about what you're doing in your organization and what's working well. So the first one is if you're just beginning on this journey as maybe you're a people manager and you're looking to do this more on your team is starting with a real pain point. Like what is something legitimate that AI can help with?
And maybe it's small, right? Maybe it's helping with meeting agendas or automating a Slack post that gets posted every week or whatever that might be. But start small, but start with something real, actually a real problem. Modeling the behavior, Tom mentioned the importance of this, right?
As a super manager and as a leader, people look to you to see how you're spending your time, right? And that's sort of the signal that you're giving as a leader as to what's important. So role modeling usage and actively sharing, giving experimental time to teams.
The number one thing we hear is just our managers and our employees are so busy. Everyone has so much that they need to accomplish that it's hard to have the brain space to sit down and try and learn a new skill and experiment. So we've seen some of our customers blocking time like company wide even to allow for that experimentation.
And then sharing that back, For those of you who are on L and D teams, we've seen a few customers who are hosting AI transformation days where different teams can showcase use cases with each other and learn from each other. Now you can share those skills like Tom mentioned, which is even better. But we've seen that as a popular way for organizations to bake in that time and share successes, which is the next one. Share successes, but also share failures.
What did you try that didn't work? What happened that maybe you learned something about how you prompted an AI tool and you can share that with the companies so they know it's okay to not get it right the first time, right? You're all learning together and then finally and this of course we have to mention and remains important you have to know your own company's AI policies, right? Some of our customers are really deep into AI transformation, others are just now getting approval.
We see you. Right? So know what, you know, what your company's policies are and how many tokens you have that you can use on Claude.
Yep. Yep. We're definitely seeing some folks maxed out there, and we love that And we step home because there's so much goodness happening. Thank you, Raya. That really grounds it in what people can do.
And so we've come to the third part of our webinar today, where the first part was around what is a supermanager and why are they important. Part two was what are the skills of a supermanager, both on the human side and the AI side, those three levels of self, team, and organization. Now many of the folks on the call here are responsible for building existing managers into super managers. And so how do you go through that transformation whether you are leading talent or people at an organization or l and d or if you're an individual manager here on the call as well, I know we've a bunch of those, how can you invest in yourself to make the leap?
One thing I will say is that we've seen over the years at home, really the reason we started the company, was that the old ways of developing managers and leadership don't work anymore. If you think about pre AI era leadership or manager capability models, those are now redundant or at least partly redundant because there's a whole new side of the skill set that managers need around AI. Even the old human skills that we saw ever present need to be redefined or redeployed for the AI era.
The one off training models that often are the the ways that companies do this, of course, never really worked fantastically. They were great kind of kickoffs and ways to network, but learning needs to be sustained and always has. But given the pace that AI is moving, we need to refresh the mental models of our leaders way more frequently than one off training or annual off sites can do.
And then finally, the scale problem is real. Right? So for companies with more than a handful of managers, which is most companies, then we need to be able to do this in that kind of modern, continuous way at scale, and that's just a lot, especially when HR and L and D teams have been yeah. The yeah. Suffered cuts when budgets have been managed down in the kind of people area. So real challenge when it comes to how the old models are no longer relevant.
I think we have a poll now. Would love to hear from you all.
What is your biggest manager development challenge?
So go ahead and pick an option. I think we're forcing you to only pick one, sorry, pick the most important, or the one you're feeling the most, and we can kind of see from each other. So we have making learning relevant to day to day work, scaling development across all managers, personalizing learning to actual skill gaps, reinforcing learning after training, And the final one, managers don't have time to learn.
What do you think? Go ahead and put in your thoughts, and then we will publish the poll. And then of course, feel free to chime in your context and additional color in the chat as well. Yes, they're totally overwhelmed for all the reasons we've discussed.
Okay, go ahead, put in the chat or put in the poll, excuse me, what your thoughts are, and then we'll be able to see the results. Here we go.
Unsurprisingly, the last one, managers don't have time to learn, right? We talked about you have to give time explicitly, otherwise we are all overwhelmed.
Perfect, so thank you all for chiming in. We are going to talk now about building super managers at your organization, so if this is something that falls within your purview, this section is for you.
When it comes to enabling managers to become super managers at your organization, we've broke it down into sort of three key things to think about. The first, which we've harped on is the need to combine human connection and AI transformation and reinforcement. Continuous and embedded, someone in the Q and A asked about when the hype of AI wears off, like how do you make sure people continue using it and continue their own development? And then personalized, we are in the age of everything can be extremely personalized in a new way than it has ever been before.
So that's the third one here, And we'll start with the human connection and AI reinforcement. So we talked a little bit already about some of the skills that managers really need to build, right, and need to show the trust and the coaching and the feedback, etcetera, And part of the judgment in a manager's day to day is figuring out where can I leverage AI and where do I really need to show up as a human, Right, and so that's what we really wanted to show in this slide, right? It's important to not outsource your one on ones, your empathy, your ability to understand where your direct report is coming from to AI right that's very human centered.
We still need to be having those conversations around career growth, development, coaching with our direct reports. Where AI can support and really create efficiencies and productivity is having on demand knowledge right we don't need to go search in an internet site anymore right things are at your fingertips often you can just type it into a chat and find it right we have a new way to practice hard skills before we have to do it with a direct report. So whether that's a role play or leveraging an AI coach, that's really exciting opportunity for organizations now. And then real time feedback, I really like that one too.
There's a lot of tools that can now say, hey, Tom gave the example of like, here's everything you need to do today, right? And AI is helping in that real time, like, hey, I'm gonna help you prioritize your day, and I'm going to give you feedback on that immediately. So the judgment really comes in and figuring out where the human side needs to lead and where the AI can really support.
Yeah. Thanks, Rhea.
As you're saying there, this duality in the definition of supermanagers with their human skills and their AI skills is mirrored in the the duality of the best way to develop supermanagers is partly with human led experiences and partly with AI led development experiences. And so here at Hone, on our platform, we do both. We have a rich suite of live classes with human instructors teaching small groups really interactively and conversationally around topics like AI adoption or coaching or feedback, both on the human and the AI skills side of the spectrum. But then we also have some of those cutting edge AI experiences you mentioned around voice based role play.
If you've gotta go and give a feedback piece of difficult feedback or have a coaching conversation with someone on your team, you probably wanna practice that a few times before you go do it for real because the stakes are so high. And being able to do that with a voice based AI and get personalized feedback on the things you did well and the things you should do differently next time and then have a chance to do it next time and get even better is a really powerful real time way to work to learn and change and up level with AI. And so we have all of that on the platform so that you can create journeys for learners between live coach based experiences, both group and one on one, and then AI based experiences like role plays and ongoing coaching so that we get that blended learning journey for the maximum impact and most effective, behavior change, at scale.
The second pillar of what makes effective learning in this day and age, particularly for super managers, is the ability to be upskilling continuously. We already said that managers are busy. They don't have time for two day off sites for training. And the world is moving so quickly both in terms of what is possible with AI and what your businesses will be doing, so we need continuous upskilling to keep pace.
Again, an example from the home platform is that we really try to weave this development into the flow of work so that whether it's a live experience or an AI based experience, we're connecting it to the things you actually have to do day to day as a manager. So imagine a manager, Mike, who gets assigned a class to improve their feedback skills. This is, again, the most popular skill on hone, usually part of a first time manager program or an onboarding program or a refresher program. But they'll get the notification in Teams or in Slack or wherever they're working.
During the class, Mike will make a commitment, like people do in a home class, into the platform to say, I'm actually giving feedback to someone who's coming up.
Our AI coach will hear that and know that it needs to remind Mike ahead of the one on one that's coming up in fifteen minutes later in his week with the script that they worked on together in the class. So it's taking a training and making it relevant to the moment that it matters.
The coach can then also follow-up with Mike to ask how did the conversation go afterwards.
Then it went well sorry. Mike is receiving the feedback. Julia is giving the feedback. Then the Julia is asking the AI coach, can we have a quick follow-up? And so the coach is obviously trained on all of the frameworks at home and is able to have a real time conversation based on that context, whether that's following up on feedback or learning a new skill around presentations.
And then if it's if the coach deems it's necessary from this interaction in Slack or Teams, it can link Julia out to a deeper learning experience, whether that's a role play with voice AI or a live session that we're running on a particular topic. So, again, trying to weave the best of human and AI manager development into the flow of work so that busy managers really do get the benefit of this development, and it's happening in real time.
Yep. And the third item here now more than ever and it makes me so excited that we can do this training and opportunities to upskill and to practice can be super personalized to that individual, right? So gone are the days of like one size fits all for every single person at an organization. You might have some of that if you want shared language, values, mission, of course, but when it comes to more specific upskilling, we now have the opportunity to think about people's individual strengths. So I know at home, we've identified fifty skills that are really important to get work done together.
So whether you want to call those hard skills or soft skills, whatever, the idea is some people are naturally going to have strengths in some areas and others aren't, right? And so it's important to make sure that each individual based on their level, based on their role, based on their personal strengths and areas of opportunity can upskill and practice in those areas. And I do want to answer, Kelsey put a question in the question box. Thank you, Kelsey.
Feel free to add more questions. But her question was, do you have any suggestions on pushing past the we need training barrier that some people push as the reason to not adopt it into regular practice? I understand the desire for training, but it's really trial and error tool and generic training won't get anyone any further. And I think you're talking about like using AI in this example, correct me if I'm wrong.
But that's something we think is really important. Any skill requires sure, learning how to do it, having a role model, understanding the basics, but then the only way you get better at that skill is practicing it.
Whether that's a soft skill like giving feedback to use Tom's example, or a hard skill like using AI. So some of the tips before around like explicitly giving time, explicitly talking about successes and failures, making sure people have the opportunity to practice is just as important as hosting the training, right? So I know I feel really passionate about this. I don't know, Tom, if you have anything else you'd like to add to that question.
Yeah. I mean, I was gonna say that the training shouldn't be sit down and listen to a lecture about how to use AI. I think part of Kelsey's point is they need to be hands on and using it to really understand how it works, and training can be a catalyst for that. Know, workshops that are part theory but a lot of hands on experience with your favorite AI tool can be a great way to kick start someone's AI usage and get over the initial kind of unfamiliarity barrier so that when they go back to the workplace, they'll be more likely to experiment if they've kind of unboxed it together with someone on that quote unquote training experience that's really a hands on workshop. That's certainly the approach that we take with our AI skills workshops.
There is another question from someone anonymous. How do you recommend that managers can keep AI usage momentum going with their teams after the initial excitement wears off? Rhea.
Yeah, I think that goes back to are you solving real pain?
Because I think when people experience themselves how AI is transforming their ability to work and giving them so many more opportunities, more time back, whatever that might be, when people really experience the benefit of something, they're more likely to do it. So if it's top down, we have to use more AI, we're gonna track your AI usage, that's less helpful than let's help you identify a pain point, show you how AI can transform that pain point, and then you really see the benefits, right? I feel like that's the case for most skills.
You need to make sure people are using it and see the why.
Yeah. And then as we've said a few times, share that back with your team so that others get inspired by your actual examples and the fact that now you're not spending time scraping websites for email addresses or filling out spreadsheets from multiple data sources, you're now much more strategic or focused on customer relationships than you know, in getting AI to do those lower level tasks for you. Can be really inspiring to see someone's role transform through AI usage, and then, you know, that can that can inspire others in the team.
Alright. One last use of AI that we believe strongly helps to develop folks is on the assessment and analytics front. So we talked about how AI can be a role play partner or a coach in the flow of work, but we've also built out a suite that analyzes skills from those experiences and interactions, like the role plays or the coaching conversations, but over time also the real world performance in meetings or presentations to help build a skills profile of a manager and understand where are they strong. Are they a great coach but not great at holding people accountable?
Are they good at giving feedback but don't delegate enough? We are building that analytics picture in the home platform so that the the individual, first and foremost, can understand where they're at, and go on a personalized journey. But then also the organization can see where their management capability stands across different teams in the organizations and different levels to deploy the right kinds of personalized interventions that can help close those gaps, whether it's on the human side of the supermanager spectrum or the AI side.
So that brings us to the end of our supermanager presentation. I hope that it's been useful. What we went through again was the role of the supermanager and why it matters right now, what skills make up a supermanager across the human skills and the AI skills at the individual team and lead organizational level, and then how you can actually go about building supermanagers, whether it's internal or with a tool like Home. So if you're interested in learning more about any of that, we're always here to chat. But also, we'd love to welcome you to try Hone and Hone AI that can do so much of this lifting for you in terms of developing and analyzing the right kinds of skills. So if you're interested in that conversation, then we're also here for it. And you can get a two week trial by going to the URL on the screen or snapping that QR code and following up there.
Hold on. Let me go get my phone.
There you go.
I want my free trial.
Yeah. Yep. Love it. Well, thank you everybody for being with us today. We wish you the best of luck being a super manager or growing super managers in your organization and and look forward to future conversations as well.
Thank you. Thank you all.
