702: Moving Past Transactional and Towards Relational, with Jonathan Raymond

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
With all the tools and technology we have access to, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of mostly being transactional. But leadership is at its best when it elevates above the transaction and builds the broader relationship. In this episode, Jonathan Raymond returns to show us how to make that shift. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 702. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:31]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. One conversation that I’ve been having for many years now is one with Jonathan Raymond. Many of you have heard his voice on the podcast many times over the years and his wonderful work with the accountability dial. Today, a bit of a reflection on 10 years of the accountability dial and, more importantly, what’s next for us in how we lead, how we think about leadership, but probably more so than even how we think about it, how we feel about it, and what it means for the heart that so many of us bring to how we lead. I’m so glad to welcome back to the show Jonathan Raymond. He’s the founder of Refound and Ren AI. He helps leaders make work a better place one conversation at a time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:33]:
He’s the author of the book, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For, and hosts the podcast of the same name. He’s also the creator of the accountability dial used by so many in our community to support healthy accountability in their organizations. Jonathan, it is always a pleasure to have you on. Welcome back.

Jonathan Raymond [00:01:51]:
Hey, Dave. Great to be back on the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:53]:
10 years ago, you and I had a first converse. I think it was almost 10 years ago now on episode 306 about the accountability dial and the 5 steps. So many people have utilized it over the years. And you said in that conversation, “accountability doesn’t work unless there’s a context of personal caring.” And I think that that might have seemed a little edgy 10 years ago. But today, things have really shifted in a good way, haven’t they?

Jonathan Raymond [00:02:23]:
Yeah. It’s interesting. I think, you know, when I wrote that book, it came out of a really painful and challenging place in my life where I felt like I I was being held accountable in some ways, but not in a context of caring. And it was very challenging. It makes it much more difficult to grow. It makes it much more difficult to receive feedback, to work with it, to self reflect. And I think the stakes have just gotten higher and higher on that. But yeah, those words ring ever true for me every single day when I see what’s happening in the world and organizations, on teams.

Jonathan Raymond [00:02:57]:
So I’m glad it got more true and not less true over time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:01]:
Yeah, indeed. And you’ve pointed this out to me for many years that if we go back, you know, 20, 30 years ago, we worked by and large in many organizations, very much a command and control kind of a structure and a hierarchy and a way of doing work on a daily basis and giving feedback or giving orders as the case may have been. And that there’s been a pendulum shift over the years to much more of the care and honoring people and thinking about the human side of leadership. And I know one of the things you’ve said to me before is sometimes, like, we’ve shifted a little too far on that. We’ve gone too far. And I’m not sure I’m capturing the way you’ve said it exactly, but there’s a place to find the middle, the both end. How do we really find the place of accountability at the same time have the personal caring that so many of us want and need?

Jonathan Raymond [00:03:57]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s the you know, if we reflect in our own lives, the situations where we actually changed, right? Where somebody told us something or reflected something back to us or created the conditions where they held up a mirror in some form, right? Whether that’s at work or in a relationship or financially or some health goal, those conversations, when they’re really helpful, they are characterized by common features, meaning they have consequences to not changing, right? They have boundaries. They say, hey, if you don’t change this behavior, if you don’t engage differently in this situation, you’re going to keep getting this result or this worse result or this bad outcome and you don’t want that, do you? And a good leader, a good manager, a good counselor, a good therapist, a good parent is going to do that in a way that is humane, that is compassionate without losing that essential component, which is the boundaries and the consequences. That’s how we change as human beings. Let’s say there’s something that we desperately want and we’re motivated because we really want it and we don’t have it and there’s a gap between where we are and where we wanna be, or there’s a pain that we wanna avoid. Right? We’re we’re very simple creatures. Right? We are very simple creatures- we could spend 10 days in silent meditation and come away with that primary insight, which is we’re very simple creatures.

Jonathan Raymond [00:05:21]:
That’s essentially what the Buddha said, craving and aversion. There’s the things that we want and the things that we want to avoid. It’s pretty simple, but it’s so rare where we have a context with someone who’s trying to help us, who knows how to do both. Right? Who says, hey, you need to change, and let me help you. And does it in a way that’s actually balanced.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:41]:
When you see people and work with people who have found a bit of that balance, what is it that they’re doing that really does make a difference?

Jonathan Raymond [00:05:51]:
They’re managing their fear. The primary obstacle to holding people accountable in the way we’re describing is fear. Not the fear of the person you’re trying to hold accountable, your fear, your anxiety. And it takes a couple of very specific forms. There’s the obvious one, which is, well, I want to be liked. Who doesn’t want to be liked? Right? So we have a fear of people misinterpreting what we’re saying or getting defensive, those kinds of things. There is a fear of losing our identity. If we’re somebody who is well accomplished or we have a technical expertise and we’re really good at a certain thing, We get a lot of value in doing that thing and being able to do that thing.

Jonathan Raymond [00:06:30]:
Well, if the people around us change and get better, well, they might encroach upon our territory a little bit. That could be a little bit scary. So good leaders want that. People always say, Well, I wanna be surrounded by people that are smarter than me. But a lot of people say that, but they don’t actually want that. And when it happens, they fight and kick and scream and resist and manage around people and make it so that it doesn’t actually manifest. But in the end, those obstacles are really all about fear. It’s all about anxiety.

Jonathan Raymond [00:07:03]:
It’s all about, we don’t want the feeling of being misunderstood or not liked, or somebody’s going to say to somebody else, Oh, Dave treated me this way, or Jonathan treated me this way. And we won’t be able to defend ourselves. And this is the price of leadership that most people are not willing to pay, is you are going to be in a place of knowledge about a person, about their performance, about their behavior, about some context. And you’re going to make a decision about a consequence or a boundary, and there’s going to be a change and you’re not going to be able to defend yourself. Because especially if you work in a state like California, God bless us here in California, but it does make it challenging as an employer sometimes, but other states are not that far off, there’s much you can’t say about how you make those decisions. You have to be very careful. So if you hold people accountable as a manager or as an organization, or as a leader at any level, you’re going to find yourself in a position where you’re defenseless. Your reputation is going to take some hits and you’ve got to be able to stomach that.

Jonathan Raymond [00:08:10]:
That’s really hard for most people, right? Unless you’re a real narcissist and it just doesn’t impact you, which is very rare, that’s an uncomfortable place to be. So to me, the thing that really brings this whole conversation together is about our own fear, which is why the accountability dial and the steps are the way they are. It’s not just to have those conversations one step at a time so that they’re gradual. It’s so that we use those conversations to reflect on ourselves as leaders. So we learn about ourselves and our own barriers and our own fears and our own anxieties through the process of having relationship and being in relationship with others and trying to strike that balance.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:51]:
Is it as simple as I’m going to make the decision to start? Or is there more to it than that?

Jonathan Raymond [00:08:58]:
Ryan Caldbeck (zero zero six:fifty four): There’s a few more pieces. And some of this is a very modern pattern that we’re stuck in, especially on a remote team, but it’s really everywhere, is that technology is working against us in a very specific way. We don’t have time to think about things from a more meta perspective in the way work is typically organized. Now, if you own your own business or you’re an executive with a certain domain and certain freedom, maybe you can create conditions that are different. But for most people who work in a company of any size, you’re in a context of wall to wall meetings, oftentimes triple booked. There’s very little respect or value placed on open time on the calendar. There’s lip service paid to it, but there’s very little actual open space. I use this data point in Korn Ferry, which probably everybody knows, sort of a classic old school consulting firm.

Jonathan Raymond [00:09:56]:
And they do leadership 360s. I had saw one of my clients went through their whole process some years ago and said, Hey, you should be spending 3 out of 5 days in the week thinking strategically. And we had a good laugh about that. And it’s like, Who does that anymore? I mean, I get it. I understand. But if you translate that down to a manager, if you’re an entry level or a mid level manager, how much time should you be spending thinking strategically, including thinking about developing people? Can you spend a half a day doing that? 3 hours? It doesn’t seem like a lot, but that seems like a really impossible goal unless you start a little bit. But the bigger problem is the technology itself. In that we now have if you did an inventory, just close your eyes while you’re listening to this episode right now and do a quick inventory.

Jonathan Raymond [00:10:46]:
How many tools do you have that you log into on a day to day basis that have an inbox? Not just your email inbox, right? You probably have more than 10. You might even have more than 20 different places where you are exposed to a level of detail, a level of information that you’ve never been exposed to before, it’s really not helpful to the task that we’re trying to capture here or to tackle, because basically what it is is a recipe for micromanagement, Right? It’s all of this detail about all the information that’s flowing and all of these different How do you even extract yourself a little bit from that to say, Hey, wait a second. I need to give some feedback to this person. How do I feel about that? Right? Like, what is my sense of this situation? When your brain, with the graces of technology and all of these tools, which are wonderful in many ways, splitting up our neurobiological process into these little micro fragmented moments where we go through our day, checking all these tools, going through these various inboxes. We’re so transactional, right? The world has become so transactional, the world of work. And what we’re talking about, the domain of feedback is relational. It’s a totally different operating mode than the transactional mode that we spend our lives in, especially at work. So as you said, it’s not that simple.

Jonathan Raymond [00:12:10]:
One thing, yes, I have to overcome my fear and my anxiety, but I actually have to get into that mode in the 1st place. I can’t even play in that domain that we’re talking about if I’m literally like, I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do, I turn on my computer and then I’m just checking through transactions for 8 to 10 hours or more. Right? There’s a whole other obstacle that we have to solve for there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:33]:
I had a conversation just yesterday with one of our academy members, and she was telling me and a few of our other members that she’s found that what works for her is isolating and getting into a place where she can do deep work and really focus for an hour or 2 and both on the work itself, but also on the thinking parts of, like, the job. And she came to us because she said, I’m feeling really guilty that I’m not available to everyone during that time. And the rest of us were like, no. Like, this is great.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:10]:
You’re this is exactly what more of us should be doing. Like, yay for you. And yet, to your point, Jonathan, like, the pressures around so many of us to stay connected. I mean, not only in the workplace, but we see it in our personal lives, to text messages, social media, Instagram, whatever, like, the thing is. The pressures to kinda stay connected transactionally into every moment are so powerful today.

Jonathan Raymond [00:13:35]:
Yeah. It reminded me. I love the example that you brought. It reminded me of the book, The Circle. Did you ever read that book?

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:41]:
No, I don’t think so.

Jonathan Raymond [00:13:43]:
It’s a great one. They made it into a terrible movie, which I didn’t watch. I think Tom Hanks was in it, but it’s a great book and it addresses pretty directly the phenomenon you’re describing. So this book was probably 10, 12 years ago, Dave Eggers. It’s it’s really prophetic. Basically, it’s a social media company. It’s sort of a like a mock sort of Google Facebook, and all data is out there. And it’s this very transactional nature, and everybody ends up wearing these, like, cameras, like, recording all of their actions.

Jonathan Raymond [00:14:12]:
Like and and every and the sort of dystopian statement in the book from the sort of forces of evil is privacy is theft. Right? So if you’re keeping it to yourself, if you’re isolating, you’re actually stealing from the common understanding. Right? So everybody lived under this threat of constantly having to provide and stay connected and be part of the system. So it was, as I said, really prophetic because it’s kind of what we’re living in right now. But what your member is describing is exactly what we need to do is we need to find places of retreat. We need to find places of isolation. And it’s very difficult to do, but you do have to swim up stream. Right? You have to like Everybody’s on the highway going 90 miles an hour, and you’ve got to get off that highway and say, you know what? I’m going to go over here and be quiet for an hour and actually do some reflection.

Jonathan Raymond [00:15:05]:
I’m going to do some thinking. I’m gonna take some unstructured, non-transactional time to do something different. But it’s, as you said, there’s a guilt. It’s like from that book. Like, you feel like, or you can feel like you’re stealing. Right? Like what, you know, there’s a kind of a guilt because you’re doing something that nobody else seems to be doing. So I would just say, good for you. Keep going.

Jonathan Raymond [00:15:28]:
We probably need hopefully, it’s not an app, but we probably need to come together as a community of people who value that and reinforce that behavior in others because, honestly, this is what I see in all of the organizations that I consult with is that there is such a sagging level of thinking. It’s like there is no crispness, CRISP, to the way people think. There’s no critical thinking. There’s no looking at a problem from multiple perspectives. There’s no really looking at learning. How do we learn from a situation? We’re so inculcated and and sort of cultified into this transactional model. And the organizations are suffering. The CEOs I talk to is, Jonathan, how do we get out of this? It’s not like nobody’s aware of the problem.

Jonathan Raymond [00:16:15]:
It’s like, how do we get out of this thing? How do we actually restore a sense of what growth is where people are thinking about the problems differently? So I hope we’re maybe at the bottom of the valley and everyone’s starting to be in enough pain where we’ll actually redesign our work in a different way and that will stick. That’s not my area of expertise in terms of the or design and the workplace design, but, people are in pain about it. I’m in pain about it. It’s it’s really difficult to see. And I think that it translates directly into our national political culture. Right? We can’t talk about an issue from a philosophical perspective. We’re not able to. It’s either right or wrong, red or blue, this or that, pro or anti.

Jonathan Raymond [00:16:56]:
Right? It’s what’s the transaction, which side am I on? And there’s no dialogue. Right? We don’t debate policy. We don’t look at these issues with any kind of maturity. And so I think as above, so below or as at work, as in life, this is where we are. We’re kind of stuck right now.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:14]:
As I think about this reality, I’m thinking about both the individual leader in an organization and also just the larger, like, culture of the organization. For the individual leader, when you see people do make this shift just a bit and get to a place where they’re able to step back to think about the bigger picture to think about the relationship to lean in a bit more on the personal caring piece what is it- what is the first or second step that they do that starts to nudge them in that direction

Jonathan Raymond [00:17:48]:
I would say there’s a 2 part process. Obviously, I’m a I’m a fan of the accountability dial for part 1, but people need nudges from the outside. We need somebody from outside of ourself. If it’s something important, right? Some behavior that we actually want to change, we need at least 1 person and ideally more than 1 to reflect back to us a mention, an invitation, hey, here’s what I’m seeing, those kinds of things. But that’s the piece that comes from the outside. But what I see as really the fundamental step that people make when they’re actually changing, it’s really embraced by this idea of not letting the perfect get in the way of the good. What a lot of people do who don’t change is they set it up as a binary. Well, either be great at this or I’m not going to try.

Jonathan Raymond [00:18:33]:
Right? Well, I’ll never be X, so what’s the point? And I had just had this happen with a colleague of mine, somebody senior in our organization over at Ren. And he was stuck in that sort of binary. And, you know, I was doing my part as best as I could using the accountability dial and saying, hey, you know, I think I think you’re not looking at this the right way. But he did the hard work, which was to be a little bit introspective and say, hey, you know what? I’m letting the perfect get in the way of the good. I don’t have to be all the way to this thing that I’m not so sure is possible or feasible. I can be incrementally there. And so the awareness that he had, and I think this happens for most, if not all people, is when we’re confronted with the prospect of change, we hamstring ourselves by making the journey too big. We say, Oh, well, oh my God, wow, I have to be that? Like, well, I’ll never get there, Right? Well, I’m not going to try.

Jonathan Raymond [00:19:28]:
And we would never let our kids get away with that. Right? With our kids, we would say, no, no, it’s practice. It’s about consistency. It’s about incrementally moving towards the thing that you want to go. But we don’t do that with ourselves. Right? We don’t give ourselves that grace. So I would say the people who are successful, it’s that those 2 parts.

Jonathan Raymond [00:19:44]:
One is they have people outside of them who reflect back in a consistent way. Hey. I don’t think the way you’re showing up is the way that you really want to. I don’t think this is your best self. Right? Hopefully, you do that kindly, and and you’ve got tools to be able to do that. That’s part 1. And then the other part is to not approach it in that binary way and say, okay, I’m gonna go one step at a time. I’m going to and there’s some amazing tools, that are available now to move incrementally towards our own personal growth.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:11]:
Well and it’s the spirit of the accountability dial and what by the way we’ll refer back to it for people who are not familiar with the model but the start is make a mention right make mentions regularly I can’t tell you how many times your name comes up every day in our interactions in the academy Jonathan because often our invitation is when folks are handling tough situations or someone’s not performing in the way they want to to or they need to give feedback as we start with, like, make a daily mention. Mention something that happened that worked well or didn’t work well each day and it’s the beginning of that process of taking that one step at a time and it’s so interesting to me I I’ve seen the exact same thing with our members when we’re working together the biggest single thing that I’m doing consistently, Jonathan, with our members is trying to get people to do less. The people who show up for our academy are high achieving people who want to do wonderful work in the world and are and they have had great success in their careers by and large. And they wanna make a shift, and they have set their self up for a plan that’s gonna take 10 hours this week to start to make that shift. And I’m usually the person jumping in, like, no. Yeah. You might do that in week 1. Like, you might actually have enough motivation and energy to get 10 hours of work done, but it’s not sustainable.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:37]:
And the real sustainability comes from, like, 5 minutes today. Let me take an action that, like, starts this process in the accountability die. I make the mention today, and I make a mention tomorrow. And I do that the next day. And I start to take on a new identity that doesn’t seem so fearful and scary because so much of it comes back on just, like, how much fear we set up in ourselves.

Jonathan Raymond [00:21:56]:
Yeah. I’ll give you a recent example. I was talking with CTO of a company and he was trying to help one of his leaders, a director in the organization. And when I asked him, I said, you know, what’s the challenge? And I know the person a little bit. And he said, well, you know, I just I don’t know if he really wants to lead at that next level. He’s good at the execution. He’s talented. He’s smart.

Jonathan Raymond [00:22:20]:
But, you know, there’s this gap. And and I don’t know that he actually really wants that. He says he does, but I don’t but I don’t really want and I need this is the result that I need. Right? And the way the CTO, the way the executive had set it up in his mind was, well, he I’m gonna hold him accountable for delivering on this result or not. And I said, well, no. No. No. No.

Jonathan Raymond [00:22:40]:
No. You gotta make it smaller. It’s exactly to your point. It’s not about whether or not he’s going to hit the results or not. That’s actually out of your control. But what’s within your control and what you can give him feedback about is is he showing up in small ways that demonstrates what he says is real, that he wants to lead at that next level? That’s what you hold him accountable for. Mhmm. The result will be or won’t be based on his performance.

Jonathan Raymond [00:23:06]:
But what you can help him with, the human thing that you can do, the honest thing you can do, the kind thing you can do, the relational thing that you can do is to step out of the transaction and say, Hey, here’s how I can help. You say that you want to lead at that next level. I trust you. I believe you. I’m a little bit, you know, some days I feel like you do, some days I feel like you don’t. I’m not sure. But I’m going to hold you accountable for that. So that’s what I’m looking for in meetings.

Jonathan Raymond [00:23:30]:
Does this person take on the leadership role in these ways? Are they listening in the ways that we expect of our leaders? I’m going to give you feedback based on the qualities of leadership, not the transactional outcomes. And that’s how you make it smaller. And that’s a lot of the flaw that I think people sometimes use the accountability dial is they try to use the accountability dial, but they’re still focused on the outcome instead of on the behavior. And that’s the thing that moves people is you focus on the behavior, you make it about them so then they feel seen. That’s what unlocks human motivation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:01]:
I’ve heard you say recently that this moment we are going through with AI and technology that it may be the end of the dominance of the mind and the beginning of the dominance of the heart. And I’m thinking about that in the context of what you just said of let’s take the accountability dollars as an example of helping hold someone more accountable. Like, the mind part of that is knowing the dial. Right? Knowing the 5 steps, knowing what’s the starting point. The hard part of it is the willingness to do it. The care that shows up, the behavior change piece of it, the willingness to support someone else and to see that as so critical in how we lead. And I think of, like, both are really important, but the one that I end up having so many more conversations with the people I’m working with is is the heart piece, the behavior change, the how do I how do I get there, like, emotionally and in my own in my own mind to to actually do the steps that are the ones I wanna take?

Jonathan Raymond [00:25:10]:
Yeah. I love you brought in AI to the conversation because this is where this is where my mind went. Maybe my mind’s a little warped, but, you know, a year and a half ago, obviously, AI has been around for much longer. But when we saw this emergence of kind of conversational or generative AI, that’s when I had this idea of, oh, maybe we’re coming to the end of the dominance of the mind for a very specific reason because this thing is smarter than us. Right? And so we have identified there’s a lot of people, Yuval Hariri, I think is one. Many other thinkers who have been talking for the last couple of years trying to open us up to this prospect of like, maybe we’ve met our match, but maybe that’s a good thing. Right? Maybe all of the ways that we’ve been operating, which are very mind based, very mental, very transactional, very all the information that we move, all the reporting that we do, all the data, right? What if we’ve been working in the bowels of the machine in the way we shouldn’t? And actually AI could be in that way our salvation. I don’t wanna sound crazy about it.

Jonathan Raymond [00:26:09]:
There’s definitely downsides. There’s ethical considerations. And there is existential risk, right? There is, right? You talk to AI ethicists and I’m very aware of the potential challenges, but there is really an amazing opportunity for us to accept that we’ve met our match and to say, hey, you know what? I’m actually going to let the AI do what the AI can do better than I can, faster than I can, more efficiently than I can. And so we might finally get the space we’ve all been hungry for. You’ve been talking on this show for years. I’ve been talking for years. Well, we actually have to have the heart. We actually have to lean into those parts of us, which is the underdeveloped muscle.

Jonathan Raymond [00:26:48]:
We have this overdeveloped brain and this underdeveloped heart. Most people, especially people who are high ambition, high technical knowledge, That’s just the reality of it. Like, we’ve used that muscle a lot since 1st grade. We’ve been working it out hard. Lots of reps. Right? Lots of rewards. Lots of incentives.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:07]:
Yeah. We’ve all been rewarded for it a lot, haven’t we?

Jonathan Raymond [00:27:10]:
Yeah. And I think you’re seeing it. Right? I think there’s cracks in the armor where my prediction is 5 years from now, it’s going to be completely normal, maybe faster, completely normal for leaders, public leaders, people in government, people running large institutions to be talking about these topics and the types of vulnerability and transparency that folks like you have been craving for years. We’ve been saying, Hey, this is so obvious. Just be a little transparent. Just be a little vulnerable. Just show us your heart a little bit. Just be just be a frigging human.

Jonathan Raymond [00:27:42]:
People have been saying it for a decade or more, and I think we’re gonna start to see it. And I think it’s paradoxically, counterintuitively a result of what AI is doing to supplant us, to knock us off our mind mediated pedestal.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:59]:
I’ve had a couple of people reach out to me and say, hey, Jonathan Raymond’s doing something with Ren and AI. Like, what’s up with that? Are you gonna do an episode with them? And so, here we are, like, having this conversation about this new technology. What have you done? And, like, how are you utilizing that tool and sharing it with others? And and we’ll give people an invitation to to try it out if they want to, of course.

Jonathan Raymond [00:28:22]:
The long and short of it is we have the same problem that all learning organizations, all teaching organizations have, which is one thing to teach the ideas. You get really good ideas. Obviously, I think the accountability dial is a really good idea, but there’s a lot of good ideas out there. And the challenge with them is all the same, which is the implementation, because knowing is not doing, especially for adults. We’ve known this, no pun intended, for decades, all the adult learning theory models. So what we did was we trained an AI called Ren on our methodology, on the accountability data, on the concept of more yoda less superhero, on the soul of the role. To give managers, no matter where you are in the organization, and employees direct reports, even if you’re not a manager and you never want to be a manager, a tool to actually self reflect, to actually lean into the conversations in the workplace, the fuzzy, weird, I don’t know what to say, they might get defensive, to actually give a place to practice, to learn about ourselves in a way that historically you’d have to pay 1,000 of dollars for a coach to help you do that over many months. And we’re shrinking and shortening the time to value essentially.

Jonathan Raymond [00:29:32]:
So that’s the whole idea of AI, at least our use case that we’ve put it to use for, is to give you a resource that understands you like a coach would, that has context on your challenges, like a good coach would, that has curriculum, like a good training company would, that understands your company values, right, like a good consultant would. And actually takes all of that data. Right? Because what is AI good at? Really good at taking a massive dataset, consolidating it down, and spitting out information or advice that has all of that context baked into it. So we’re doing that at the organizational team dynamic cultural level. But so all the way back to the beginning, down to the conversation. It’s about the conversations we have. And we’ve never had a tool before that we could give to our clients, anyone who wants to use it to say, hey, you don’t need to actually talking to a coach is wonderful. Having a consultant come on-site and do a workshop, that’s incredible.

Jonathan Raymond [00:30:29]:
Super expensive, logistically complicated, and has all kinds of downsides because it usually only goes to the people at the top of the org chart. They’re the ones that usually benefit. So we can democratize leadership development in this way. So we’re very early. It’s super exciting. There’s so much to learn, but that to me is the promise. And it’s not to get rid of coaching or to get rid of leadership. It’s to free it up so that coaches can be smarter, so they can have so much more context, so that managers can know so much more about a situation and give advice and use the accountability dial so much more effectively.

Jonathan Raymond [00:31:02]:
So as you can tell from my voice, I’m really excited about it because I’ve been in this industry for the last 15 years, and I’ve been I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but this is what I was waiting for.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:12]:
Yeah. And you utilize the technology to do what the technology can do better than any of us can do individually. And to your point, you then free up the space to do the care, the heart, the behavior change piece that the technology’s not as good at. Right? And that, like, we as human beings should be taking our time to do. And what a great what a great resource to do that. So we’re gonna put a link in the episode notes to Rent Coach and how to request a demo. You’ve got a a resource available for folks to try it out with their team for 30 days if they’d like to try it out for free, get a sense of it. By the way, we’ve had several members who have gone in and utilized Ren, and it’s been really powerful.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:56]:
And they found it to be a great resource to get them faster along to, like, overcoming it, then you can have the conversation about the the fear piece and the, okay, how do I get moving on this, and how am I thinking about it, and how do I feel supported, and how do I actually shift? Those are the things we talk about in our academy all the time. It’s not so much the model itself. It’s the alright. I got the model. Now how do I actually move and shift? And what a great tool to help people to do that.

Jonathan Raymond [00:32:20]:
Let me just add one more piece before we move on because I think this is not about Ren. It’s about AI. It was real just surprising, which was surprising to me, which is we’ve seen that people are far more at ease and comfortable opening up and speaking at length to an AI than they are to a coach. Which is fascinating to me, but it makes sense. Right? There’s an anonymity to it. And people don’t feel like they’re wasting Ren’s time. Right? They don’t feel like, oh, I only have this one hour with my coach, and I better make the it’s like they can just vent. They could just spew it out and just download this information, which is actually what a coach really needs, but there’s not enough time in a coaching session to do that.

Jonathan Raymond [00:33:03]:
And so there’s this contraction that happens in most coaching in the sort of agreement between coach and coachee that AI is is super interesting to observe. And there’s just value. You know, people say, like, oh, venting is not healthy. Venting is amazing. Right? Venting is one of the most amazing things that you can do. Now venting forever, not so much. Right? But venting to get it out of your head, what’s on your mind, raw thoughts, it’s like Mark Twain at least attributed, like, you know, write drunk, edit sober. Right? It’s like, just let it out, sort it out later.

Jonathan Raymond [00:33:36]:
And AI is great for that. Right? So whether you use Ren or some other tool, this tool this technology and as I like what Sam Altman said, it’s a tool, not a creature. Even though it sometimes feels like a creature, it’s a tool. This tool is incredibly well suited for that to, like, just get it out of whatever it is, get it out, and then you’ll clean it up later.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:57]:
Jonathan Raymond is the founder of Refound and Ren AI, and, of course, the creator of the accountability dial. Jonathan, thank you so much as always for your inspiration.

Jonathan Raymond [00:34:07]:
Thanks, Dave. Always great to be on the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:15]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, 3 related episodes I’d recommend. The first one is episode 306, 5 steps to hold people accountable. Jonathan joined me for that conversation to walk through the steps of the accountability dial. Such a useful framework on how to do better at accountability. Yes. Caring personally about people, but also being able to bring accountability into conversations. How to do that, especially that first step that mentioned we talk in detail in episode 306, a great compliment to this conversation. Another helpful compliment, episode 583, how to give feedback.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:54]:
Russ Laraway was my guest on that episode, and we talked about, well, exactly that. How do you give feedback? That’s a skill a lot of us have. Maybe we’ve read about. We’ve tried a little bit before, but a lot of us never really got a lot of training on the actual steps to do it when you do need to give feedback and you need to have that conversation. How do you start it? What are the key elements? Russ in that episode walks through it, makes it very straightforward. It’s not easy, but simple on the steps to begin with to start to have those more difficult conversations. Episode 583, a helpful starting point for you. And then finally, episode 670, I also recommend how to connect with people better.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:35]:
Charles Duhigg was my guest on that episode. He’s done extraordinary work on, thinking about people and habits and communication. His recent book, super communicators, are such a helpful way to think about the conversation beyond what Jonathan and I talked about today, moving past transactional and to relational, how to even connect better. Charles in that conversation talks about some of the ways and the mindsets we can take on that’ll help us to really support that so beautifully in our work professionally, but also, of course, personally too. Episode 670 for that. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website, and I’m inviting you to set up your free membership at coaching for leaders dot com. When you do, you’re gonna have access to the entire library of episodes that I’ve aired since 2011. Most importantly, those searchable by topic.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:26]:
So if you are looking for episodes that will help you to give feedback better, one of the places we’re gonna be filing this episode is under the feedback section. But there are many other conversations I’ve had over the years with guest experts that complement this conversation. It’s a great starting point to find what’s most relevant to you right now, whether it’s feedback or management skills or something else. Set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com. You’ll have full access to the episode library, plus tons more inside of the free membership. And if you have been using the free membership for a bit, I would encourage you to discover Coaching for Leaders Plus. One of the key benefits inside of coaching for leaders plus is my weekly journal entry. I am doing thinking every single week in the context of the conversations I’m having with leaders and our guest experts and how my perspective might be helpful to you, more of my thinking on what you might do to take the next step in moving forward.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:26]:
And just today, I received an email from a listener who said, the feedback sandwich is something I learned for years and did lots of training programs, and lot of us have learned it over the years. It’s it’s, this model of you say something nice about someone, and then you tell them the constructive thing that you really needed to say, and then you kinda finish it off with something nice. And that’s why it’s called the feedback sandwich. There’s other names for it too, which aren’t so professional. It is not a good model to not use that model. Instead, it’s so helpful to have a much more just direct in human conversation rather than trying to just put something negative in between two positive things. As the person who emailed me mentioned, I know I’m not supposed to do the feedback scene, which I learned not to a while back, but I don’t know what to replace it with. That was the topic of one of my recent journal entries.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:22]:
I talked about the mistake I made in the feedback sandwich and what I found worked so much better to replace it with a simple principle and the focus of one of my recent journal entries. If you’d like to get access to my thinking each week in your inbox, go over to coachingforleaders.plus. You’ll find all the details there about the journal, plus so many more of the benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Maha Abu Elanain to the show. She is going to be showing us how your reputation is your currency. Join me for that conversation with Maha, and I’ll see you back on Monday.