Why coaching is more needed than ever, and why AI can’t replace the real (human) deal
A conversation with Shannon Minifie, Box of Crayons
A couple of years ago, Josh Bersin confidently proclaimed: “Online Coaching Is So Hot It’s Now Disrupting Leadership Development.” As a firm that plays a bit in the coaching space, we at Box of Crayons have been keeping an eye on venture-backed companies like BetterUp, who have the cash to capture the attention of any prospective buyer looking for coaching services and resources, and whose scalable coaching platform many of our own clients have come to love for their senior leaders.
And now the coaching industry has another seemingly more scalable and cost-efficient alternative to contend with: generative AI.
Early this year, I caught up with Leah Parkhill-Reilly, VP of Programs at The Roundtable, and we chatted about the power of group coaching, and what makes this experience unique and resilient in the face of disruption.
SM: The Roundtable website says you’re a “Jill of all trades,” Leah. Tell our friends at ISA-The Association of Learning Providers a bit about how you came to be working with The Roundtable.
LPR: In short, I’m a recovering corporate high achiever. I did an MBA, and started my career in systems and technology at Bell before moving into an internal strategic planning group. From there, I got pulled into HR, and that was the first time I started to do work associated with People & Culture. This allowed me to dip my toe into talent and learning, and OD. That was the early 2000s. From there, I joined a global insurance firm and dove deeper into the world of talent, L&D—always from a strategy and program management perspective.
I liked the work that I did, but felt a gap, and eventually realized that what was missing for me was the connection to the individual. I had very little sightline to our clients, and didn’t get to enjoy seeing the results and impact of the work I was doing. So I high-tailed it out of corporate and became an independent consultant, and got into the world of coaching on my own.
I wasn’t intending to take a role in another organization—I was happily an independent consultant—but I saw the Roundtable posting and the values just resonated: Dream Big. Make an Impact. Get Shit Done. Have Fun. This was such a 180 from the corporate values I was used to (I honestly can’t even remember what they were). Like, I came from such a mundane, uniform world that what counted as “dressing down” was wearing light blue suits instead of dark blue suits. So “Get Shit Done” caught my attention for sure, and then once I met Glain [Roberts-McCabe], that was it.
SM: Ha! Yes, I can see that. A nice respite from stuffy corporate blah. And Glain: gold.
LPR: Yes, exactly. And I could see that my personal values were still there with “Make An Impact”—but no stuffy suits. So I started as Director of Programs, doing program design, but my role has evolved since as the needs of the company have changed. These days, I work with the team on programs as well as the coach network and coach recruiting, and I do business development.
SM: Very cool. So, I’m a member of a couple different leadership groups/support networks—peer groups formed to support leaders and their growth and growth of their business. And I’ve always been intrigued by The Roundtable’s focus on group coaching in particular. Can you tell me a bit more about how you do this with your clients?
LPR: So, we actually do offer exec coaching as well, and team coaching—but the real bread and butter of our business is group coaching, and it’s usually offered as part of leadership development for high potentials, or leaders who have just had a meaningful change in role or scope. Unlike team coaching – where everyone is coached on the same goal or outcome – with group coaching everyone has individual goals, but reaching them through the process is more scalable that executive (1:1) coaching. From a design perspective, group coaching is a sort of Venn diagram of executive coaching (helping people isolate and develop specific leadership behaviours), leadership training, and the facilitative mastery needed to manage the dynamics of a group.
SM: I remember reading Josh Bersin a couple years ago on how the democratization of coaching through platforms like BetterUp and Ezra were going to totally disrupt leadership development programs. And that basically no matter how inventive and experiential vendors got with their program design, the core need underneath all the bells and whistles is the same: leadership is lonely, and sometimes hard, and need a place to go to reflect and gut-check and think about how to be better, how to change.
So, if BetterUp made executive coaching accessible to everyone, AI bots that can provide personalized coaching with the right prompt engineering are probably an appealing and affordable solution for some buyers looking to provide this kind of high-touch interaction and facilitation of insights.
Have you found these coaching platforms, or generative AI, to be disruptive to your business?
LPR: BetterUp and other platforms or AI-driven coaching solutions haven’t been a disruptor yet, probably because we’re diversified with group coaching (executive coaching is more of an ancillary on-sell for us). And the value prop of group coaching isn’t “just” the learning and goal progression: it’s the peer group, the accountability (to a human, which is probably stronger than it is to a bot, in the case of AI solutions). Plus, the benefits are valent and can’t be predicted or programmed: one person brings a challenge that actually helps someone else who is just listening and didn’t even have the challenge themselves (or didn’t think they did). The diversity of thinking that the group coaching generates is different from what AI generates.
Plus, the benefits are more and bigger than just facilitating insights or being asked good questions. Participants in a Roundtable group coaching program benefit from the networking support, relationship-building, and psychological safety that comes from the culture of the group that goes on this year-long journey of growth together. I’d have LOVED to have had a community like that when I was in corporate, a pocket of safety in which I could develop and grow as a leader through this shared experience.
So, no. No disruption yet.
SM: It really does sound like the leadership behaviours are almost secondary to—or at least come necessarily through the process of—this shared human experience that your programs facilitate. If one of the outcomes of gen AI is not just to replace human work, but to isolate that work which is uniquely human, then the work of connection that takes place in a Roundtable program might just be one of these vestiges of human work.