How Robots Are Helping Manage Managers

Digital natives often prefer receiving advice digitally rather than in person or by Powerpoint.

And microbursts of guidance delivered throughout the day may be more effective than sitting in class - or even in front of a computer.

The question is whether the overall learning impact will be as ephemeral as the nudges - or longer lasting. Well-led companies recognize that a mix of approaches is likely to achieve the optimal results across a range of personalities and learning types.JL


Sue Shellenbarger reports in the Wall Street Journal:

As more millennials move into management, many are finding they lack basic training in such supervisory skills as delivering feedback and delegating work. New crop AI-driven coaching apps and platforms fill the gap. Grounded in research showing periodic repetition and reminders are good ways to learn new material, the platforms suit a generation of digital natives who prefer checking an app over sitting through a PowerPoint class.All reflect a trend toward injecting training into the workday as needed, a pattern experts describe as microlearning or learning in the flow of work. 49% of employees prefer taking their training on the job.
Raquel Collings often has morning coffee with her management coach. She reviews her goals in her new job as a corporate manager and ponders whether she’s spending her time wisely.
The coaching topics are the only part of the sessions that is conventional.

Ms. Collings’s coach is a bot—a manager-training app powered by the artificial intelligence of IBM ’s Watson. The app, Coach Amanda, serves up tips on her phone in five- to 10-minute videos and texts that Ms. Collings consumes during spare moments in her workday.
When she recently texted the bot that she doubted her ability to review a colleague’s performance, it chided her for being too hard on herself, based on a personality test in the app showing she was highly conscientious. “I thought, ‘Wow, she called me out on this,’ ” says Ms. Collings, a marketing manager for First United Bank, a Durant, Okla., financial-services company.
As more millennials move into management jobs, many are finding they lack basic training in such supervisory skills as delivering feedback and delegating work. A new crop of AI-driven coaching apps and platforms are aiming to fill the gap, including Butterfly, Qstream and LEADx, the Philadelphia-based maker of Coach Amanda.
Grounded in research showing periodic repetition and reminders are good ways to learn new material, the platforms suit a generation of digital natives who prefer checking an app over sitting through a PowerPoint class. The apps’ text and email nudges are easy to ignore, however. And it can be jarring or downright weird when a bot gets too personal.“It’s definitely possible to overhype nudges,” says J.P. Gownder, a principal analyst with Forrester Research . He compares the platforms to fitness apps that chide users to stand up if they’ve been sitting too long at a desk. “Your reaction might be, ‘It’s because I’m working!’ ” he says.
Ken Ryzner says Coach Amanda helped him run richer brainstorming sessions with colleagues by suggesting he ask more questions. He cringed, however, at the app’s response when he reported he had finished one of its assigned tasks.
“She came back with, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ It’s weird to me when a chatbot has kind of fake emotions. I was like, ‘That’s creepy. That’s weird.’ ” says Mr. Ryzner, a 49-year-old instructional designer at Red Nucleus, a Yardley, Pa., provider of custom learning applications.
Coach Amanda isn’t as good as a human coach, says Kevin Kruse, LEADx’s founder. “If you can afford $250 to $500 an hour, go get a human,” he says. “But AI is democratizing leadership training.” The cost is far less—$30 a month for individual buyers, and $20 a month for employees (or less for larger employers). Several employers and about 600 individuals are using the platform, and several consulting and accounting firms are testing it.
Another coaching app, Butterfly, was born of the pain its three co-founders felt after they were thrust into management jobs in their 20s without any training. The app tracks feedback from users’ employees and uses machine learning to serve up curated tips and articles, says David Mendlewicz, co-founder and CEO of the New York-based company. Among its users is Social.Lab, a social media agency with offices in New York.
Qstream uses a teaching method designed at Harvard Medical School to train medical professionals in safety and diagnostic procedures. Its teaching approachhas been demonstrated in peer-reviewed studies to increase learning. Many companies use the platform for sales training, and about 95 clients have expanded it to training managers in such skills as building teams and giving feedback, says Rich Lanchantin, CEO of the Burlington, Mass., company.
The coaching programs use AI in various ways, typically by factoring a user’s responses over time into the selection and timing of coaching tips. A user who has almost mastered material might be nudged to recall it less often than one who is being exposed to it for the first time. Some apps tailor content to what users want to learn.
All reflect a trend toward injecting training into the workday as needed—a pattern experts describe as microlearning, learning snacks or learning in the flow of work. Some 49% of employees prefer taking their training on the job, right when they need it, rather than in formal classes, according to a 2018 LinkedIn survey of more than 4,000 participants.
Another platform, Humu, aims to improve employers’ corporate culture. It analyzes a sea of demographic and company data and employee-survey responses and identifies changes needed to improve employees’ happiness and retention. Then the platform delivers nudges by email or text, urging users to change their behavior.
About 40% to 80% of customers’ employees participate, says Laszlo Bock, CEO and co-founder of the Mountain View, Calif., company and author of “Work Rules!” a best-selling book on workplace culture. At Fidelity Investments in Boston, executives say Humu is helping employees and managers give and receive feedback more easily.
If Humu identifies a morale problem, such as a feeling among employees that their boss is making questionable decisions or being too secretive, the platform might nudge the manager to explain his decisions more clearly, Mr. Bock says. Employees might get nudges at the same time aimed at restoring trust in the manager, by suggesting he or she has good intentions and is just really busy, or wants to avoid distracting them.
The great thing about the nudges is that they’re constantly front-of-mind,” says Sian Keane, chief people officer for Farfetch, a London-based online marketplace for luxury fashion and a Humu client. She receives the nudges about twice a month—just enough to keep them fresh, she says. Among the employee desires Humu surfaced at Farfetch was a wish for more open communication across its 13 international offices.
The finding helped spark a change in Ms. Keane’s nine-member team’s usual meeting activities. When they gathered recently in Portugal for a planning session, one employee suggested they bypass their usual restaurant meal and eat at a team member’s home. “We bought food and cooked together,” Ms. Keane says. “We tried to put together different dishes that meant something to people on the team.”
Beyond the interesting tapas dishes, she says it led to an immediate uptick in team members’ day-to-day solidarity and sense of belonging.