Scaling Leadership on a Startup Budget: How One Virtual Coach Can Support Every Leader on Your Team
Two business leaders explain how this AI-powered coach provides specific, tailored, and actionable real-world advice.
Effective business leadership informs, inspires, and enables employees to do their best work. It also creates opportunities for leadership at all levels of the company—not just from the owner or C-suite.
Managers across departments lead people, create new products and services, and help drive results. The necessary skills, vision, and ability to identify and rectify issues don’t come naturally to everyone. Even accomplished leaders rely on coaches to vet ideas, hone messaging, and much more.
One-on-one in-person leadership coaching can be time consuming and difficult to schedule, however. It also doesn’t scale when you have numerous managers across a growing organization that can benefit from proven advice. That’s where a new tool called ALEX, an AI-powered coach created by the team at Admired Leadership, comes in.
For nearly four decades, Admired Leadership has been researching what the world’s top business leaders do—specific, real-world behaviors and routines that drive growth and change. Using a leading AI engine as its foundation, ALEX pulls on that rich research to deliver exceptional advice fast, and to anyone who signs up.
Here are two leaders at two different businesses who rely on ALEX every day—as do many of their managers.
Nuance and context across job functions
If you ask Chris Harry, Chief Talent and Learning Officer at TEKsystems and a long-time Admired Leadership client, coaching can’t be one-size-fits-all solution. In his role, Harry is responsible for making sure the global business and technology services company has the right people, skills, and leadership pipeline to succeed—designing learning programs, managing succession planning, and building systems that help employees grow and advance.
“There is nuance, context and the personal journey a leader is on that defines the leadership coaching environment,” Harry says. Understanding this is especially critical as he oversees a team of more than 80,000 internal employees and consultants.
“The challenge for any company that sees coaching as a competitive advantage is scale,” Harry explains. “ALEX gives us scale and connects culturally for us. We have specific coaching cycles within our leadership academy and it’s just not possible to align hundreds of leaders with personal, internal coaches.”
Harry says he and his team immediately noticed that the years of research, coaching, mentoring experience, and communications expertise behind ALEX gave TEKsystems a vastly different experience than generic AI-powered leadership coaching tools.
“Whether I was looking for advice on how to message something to my team, role-playing with me about a one-on-one conversation with a team member, or helping me innovate, I knew I had a way to be more efficient, grow my capability and move to a quicker, higher-quality solution,” he says. “ALEX is always on, consistent in response, and as our employees get better at prompting this, will become even more tailored to their needs.”
Filling gaps and opening eyes
Like Harry, Tim Genck has leveraged the in-person expertise of Admired Leadership for several years. He also finds that ALEX helps fill the gaps between those coaching sessions.
“As I tell people, to be effective as leaders we must get out from behind our screens and make an impact,” says Genck, who left a career in music to become a McDonald’s franchisee. Today, he owns 15 restaurants in Minnesota and oversees approximately 900 employees while looking to add as many as 200 more this year. For Genck, leadership is an important investment he makes in himself and his managers.
“Having ALEX as an always-available back up for quick things and helping me clean up communication, creating a dialogue framework for me to have a listening session with my leadership team, or helping me create a blueprint for an upcoming meeting is an invaluable resource,” he says.
More than just a stopgap, Genck says he uses ALEX consistently and is starting to have other leaders within the business leverage it, too.
“I let some of my supervisors experiment with ALEX and it is fun to watch,” he says. “ALEX will point out ways that they may have misplayed a situation and tell them they need to acknowledge their role in the problem. That part really freaks them out because ALEX is right.”
Click here to learn more about how ALEX can give you the leadership edge your business needs.
To try ALEX, click here.