272 - Coaching at Scale: Leveraging Technology for Employee Engagement and Growth with Happy Companies' James Lawrence

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. James Lawrence, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of a company called happycompanies.com. You're a serial entrepreneur with other companies going on. You've had a lot of success in life, so I'm really interested, and my audience is going to be interested in learning, um, what has made you— what makes you tick. So welcome to the show.

Hey, welcome, Doug. Excited to be here.

So you live in a beautiful part of California, almost as beautiful as where I live, which is just south of Yosemite National Park. You live down in Temecula, and for those that don't know California, Temecula is in Riverside County, southeast of Los Angeles, about probably 100 miles, and it is beautiful agricultural country, avocados, citrus, all kinds of really beautiful stuff going on down there. Tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you ended up in Temecula of all places.

What's funny is I lived in Orange County when I was last business. And at one point I wanted to build a video production studio because I was running a media agency and I literally just drove in circles with my wife until we could afford to buy a building. And we'd actually given up. We're like, we're never going to own a commercial building. And then my wife's, hey, why don't we go grab a glass of wine down in Temecula? So we pulled off into this town called Temecula and I'm like, this is great. This is where we should build our life. So it wasn't, I'd love to tell you it was really like planned out, you know, vision to come to Temecula, but it was, we love Temecula and there's about 300,000 people that live here and it's a great family community.

And so it's grown a lot and that's right. It's a big, it's a big Southern California wine producing industry too. Interesting.

I live in wine country actually now.

So tell us a little bit about— let's learn about Happy Company. What Happy Company is, in other words, your clients are going to be happy companies because they hire you to do the assessment work and help leaders develop happy companies. Did I get that right?

Who doesn't want to be happy?

Yeah, of course.

So I'll, yeah, I'll give you the quick lowdown of Happy and how it started. But it's interesting. We provide AI-enhanced coaching at scale. Through Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email, Zoom. And so we're really partly technology, partly behavioral science. And really where it came from is my own kind of leadership path. I was a young CEO, 25, 26 years old, and I found an executive coach that really transformed my leadership. And he was amazing. His name was John Delmatoff., and I needed some help. I was running a company with probably 50 employees at the time. If there was something you could do wrong, Doug, from a leadership standpoint, I can assure you I have checked that box at some point in my journey and maybe a whole bunch of them right at once. And John really helped me. He helped me first off learn on listening, right? Something you talk a lot about is effective listening. And I wasn't a great listener. I'm an average listener now. So it shows you going from a crappy listener to just average is like can 10x your effectiveness, but I got a lot of value from John. He really helped me learn how to understand other people first, understand what they needed from me. And so Happy came from— I'm 48, so that was 20 years ago almost, or 15 years ago. But I tried to take what John taught me and I tried to extend it to our entire organization between full-time employees and contractors. Probably a couple of years later, we had probably had 80 people and it was extremely difficult to do at scale., we brought in some coaches, we did seminars, we did workshops, and building people skills and getting your company to communicate and collaborate more effectively together and then to build manager effectiveness is just really hard stuff, right? It's really heavy lifting. And it was much harder than working with a one-on-one coach. And eventually years later and a couple companies later, I was blessed enough to be able to invest in a technology business and do this tech startup. And so now we use AI. To personalizing contextualized coaching at scale. So we still believe in human coaches. I, I usually like to give that as a gigantic asterisk. Leadership coaching, executive coaching, one-on-one coaching, it's still the gold standard. There are no companies that I know of, no matter how good they are, that deploy executive coaches for every single member of the organization, especially new managers.

Right.

That's one thing that companies don't invest in, and they should invest more, but But still, if you have 1,000 employees or even 100 employees, the idea that you're going to hire an executive coach or a leadership coach for every member of the organization, including your younger starting individual contributors, is not practical. Right. And so Happe uses science and technology to do that at scale and actually support the human coaches. And we work with a lot of coaches, a lot of partners, consultants that work with executive teams, leaders, VPs, managers, and then they'll bring, they'll bring Happe into the organization. To be able to support the organization at scale.

So what do you— this is an app that you're developing or you've developed?

Yeah, it's live. Yeah, we've been— we've got plenty of clients already. So yeah, so it's— so how it works is it is an app and your company signs up for it or your team, but we deliver the coaching right through the tools that you already use. I'll give you an example. Give me the name of somebody you work with, any person's name you work with, or somebody you worked with in the past.

I don't know. Most of my work is confidential, so I really— give me anything. Jason Gruben.

Jason. Okay, so let's say you and I and Jason work together, and let's call it Doug Inc. Okay, we work at Doug Inc. and you're the CEO, and we're all in Happe. We've all got Happe profiles, so we go in and take a brief assessment in the Happe app, and everybody in Doug Inc. is in there. And let's say you and I have a meeting tomorrow. And Jason's got in the meeting too, and we wanna have an effective meeting with you. Let's say our organization uses Microsoft Teams. So at 9 o'clock in the morning tomorrow before our meeting, I get a message that says, here's some tips for your meeting with Doug. Here's 3 actionable tips for your meeting. And Jason gets an email that says, hey, here, you're gonna meet with Doug. Here's a couple tips for your meeting. And it, and Happe knows you, but it also knows Jason and knows me. So the advice it gives Jason and I is different because we're different. And so it uses our behavioral style and yours to make actionable recommendations and insights and coaching. And it does this to the entire organization at scale. So everybody gets a piece of daily coaching at 9 or 10 in the morning, but it also has on-demand coaching. So you can go into, you can do it through Slack or Teams, but you can also go into the app and you can say, hey, I need to resolve a conflict. I need to pitch someone an idea. I need to give someone employment review. I need to have a more effective meeting. I need to run a more effective meeting. There's self-improvement side. There's a conflict resolution side. And I'm not saying this is the thing I would say again for the abundance of caution. If you're working with a CEO and you're working through a sensitive long-term issue, a human's more valuable and more contextually relevant than a piece of technology giving you a piece of advice. Right. But if you're a 30-year-old manager and you have 3 or 4 employees you're working with every day and you've got some conflict you're sorting through and you don't have access to an executive coach or a leadership coach, Happey's like a great resource for you to use that is based on behavioral science. And we work with a lot of coaches that look up their clients and their clients' fellow employees and vice versa to get some context on their guidance. As a coach, It's hard to coach someone if you don't understand the people that they're working with. And of course you ask them, tell me about Jason. The problem is you're getting a little bit of a biased view, right? Because now you're looking through the lens of somebody else and you're coaching through some, through some lenses, which is okay. But so Happy, so that's what Happy is. It's been an awesome project.

That sounds like a really cool project.

Yeah, you get a lot of things, Doug. It's interesting that you wouldn't think you might have a lot of assumptions, for example, like why would a CEO need something like this? The CEO has access to their they're, say, there are 8 executives. They don't realize a CEO has to deal with maybe 100 employees. If there's 100 employees, they probably have to interact with 50 to 60 people. Right. So it's actually extremely useful to be able to look up anybody you're gonna meet with and just quickly understand how to work best with them. And a good CEO cares about that.

Yeah. And, and what it looks like now that I understand it, what it looks like is you've taken the DiSC profile concept and you retooled it. People take the assessment and then they're, they see where, where their strengths are and what kind of, where they fit into a group dynamic. And that, that provides a foundation for understanding how to work with people.

Yeah, sure. So we are built on the DiSC methodology. We made a, um, we built our own science, so it is modeled on DiSC. Right. Um, but there's with some minor changes and one of them is we built, um, this thing called linguistic preference technology. It's pretty simple actually. What it is, is that simply the technology learns the words and sentences that you like to use to describe yourself., and it tends to, it uses those when it describes you and, and they're all scientifically accurate. But when you have some agency in how you're described, you tend to reject your assessment less. And, but I, this is what I like to say about assessments. Assessments are like religions, right? You've been doing this long enough, whether it's StrengthsFinder or 16 Types or Myers-Briggs or DiSC or there's Hogan, there's like a bunch of different assessments and they're probably all personally, probably all reasonably valid. And they probably all have relatively solid science behind them and some maybe have more more history than others. But, but the reality is that I could give the best assessment to a shitty coach and they're going to find some way to fumble it up no matter how great the assessment is. And then I could give a terrible assessment to a great coach and they're probably going to get— navigate it and facilitate it and still going to have a great experience. And so I think it's personally more about either the quality of the leader or the way you're using the assessment than one assessment being slightly better than another, right? Although I will admit I think there are different quality of assessments, but I think your outcomes are more related to how applicable, how you apply it, how you work with a person, right?

So you strike me as being really excited about this project. There— I'm— you have a lot of enthusiasm and passion for what you're doing. What is it that gets you up in the morning to give you this passion and enthusiasm in this project?

Doug, first off, I just like building things. So building stuff is really fun, right? And so I like creating and building, but I, this is my 5th company and I am really passionate about the future of work and I'm really passionate about creating great organizational cultures. And look, I'll distill it down to you something simple is, and I think you know this from all of your years of coaching and your years as an attorney. The relationship between a leader and the person that works for them, or the manager, individual contributor, it's the most important relationship in an organization by far. And when it's wrong, it doesn't matter what else is right. People just have a hard time being happy. And so they either get disengaged or they leave, or it usually, you don't get good outcomes, right? And if we all had great outcomes, you maybe you wouldn't even need to be here and I wouldn't need to be here, right? But there's, unfortunately humans are messy. And I think the opportunity to improve those relationships is what gets me excited. I, I have a little joke I sell sometimes, which is, I guarantee you, I don't know if you ever played baseball when you were a kid, but you've gotten more coaching on how and when you were, when you played T-ball, when you were 6, you probably got more coaching than you did in your first job as a manager on how to hit a wiffle ball.

Yeah, absolutely.

So people, young managers don't get trained. And great CEOs realize that how they train people has a huge impact, long-term impact on the company's performance. But a lot of CEOs, especially in the world of private equity and immediate results, training new managers is a low priority to them. We're trying to get results for this quarter. And the problem is that there's no great sustainable businesses that are built quarter by quarter.

Yeah, no, I totally get it. And if you look around at most MBA programs, very little leadership. Ah, they have a couple of courses here and there on leadership, but no heavy emphasis on leadership. It's all about marketing or quantitative analysis or finance or stuff like that. All the hard stuff that professors can get published on. They can't, unless you're a Bennis, Warren Bennis, you can't get published in leadership, right?

You're right. And what's most interesting to me, and I work with a lot of great CEOs and what I would say is that, and I've said this before on a couple of podcasts and it's, I've gotten my own little hate mail on LinkedIn from this, and maybe I deserve this, but a good leader thinks about their business results and delivers every quarter, right? A good leader. A great leader realizes that people are the way that he or she got there.

I will tell you that I— you're— we're up in the upper— this is podcast number 240, I think, for me, somewhere in that range. Every single successful leader that I've interviewed on this show says exactly the same thing. The most important thing you have are your people. The most important thing you can do as a startup founder is make sure your first 4 hires are perfect. Don't—

there's no room for error.

There is no room for error. And he's— the only way you'll ever be able to scale is by making sure that the first people you hire are exactly right for the job.

And you goof it up, you got to fix it quickly.

That's right.

You don't have time and runway and bandwidth and all that.

That's right.

You can't sit and, and, and that's tough too, because there's some great people, but they're just, that aren't great for your startup.

Exactly. Exactly. So you're in good company. It's not a, it's not a scientific sampling, but I can tell you that the vast majority of people I've interviewed all say the same thing. Your people are the most important thing you have. Hire, hire correctly, treat them right, and train them, coach them. You as a leader have an obligation as a coach to be working 2 levels below you, training the people below you to take over your job. If you're not doing that, you're not a leader. You're doing something else and you're probably screwing yourself and your company.

Yeah, it's interesting. We talk, I like to talk a lot about, it's, I, I'll tell you a joke first off about Happys. You know what it's like to run a startup. I'm sure you've interacted with a lot of founders.

Mm-hmm.

And it's probably about a year ago, we're looking around at each other going, man, this is really a bad idea to call this company Happy because we were stressed out, man. We're like, this is so hard. Are we happy right now? We're trying to build something. Like nobody could be happy when you're running a tech company. Year 1, it's a high threshold, right? When you really start thinking about what it takes to build—

it's hard.

Yeah, it's hard. It's just hard, right?

I'm the VP of a startup and a major investor. We've been struggling for 14 years to get a product to market fit. We have an amazing product. It's revolutionary. It's hard.

It is. And, and the thing is that in some, it doesn't matter how smart you are. It's, it's a bit of luck. It's a bit of timing. It's a bit, there's just a lot of things that need to fall in place.

Exactly.

But I, I, there's this really interesting theory, which is you talk about like, how do you find those first people, right? When you're, whether it's Happys technology or any other, like how do you find the right people? And so there's a billion leadership books and I've got my own little theory I'm gonna share with you cuz I really love. The energy you bring to this idea, like how do you create this kind of positive energy from the very beginning? And I don't care how competent you are, how skilled, how experienced. I don't care any of that. If you're not highly motivated, you are not the right hire.

Right.

For me, because highly motivated means you're going to acquire the skills capability. You're going to build all that. If you're not highly motivated, it doesn't really matter about the rest. Right. Especially in a startup.

Right.

And so partly being highly motivated is having positive energy. Right. And so those are the kind of things I had somebody ask me a couple of weeks ago, talk to me about what you can do to change a culture, like culture. We have a problem in our organization and they, they, it was a CEO and they were like, they wanted, they're really interested and happy and they want to understand what can I expect? And I said, look, like this is a multiple this is not something that's just gonna be solved by one piece of software. Like there's a lot that goes into it and you have to have the right people in the organization. And that means you're gonna probably have to go through some pain to get that. 'Cause some people, it's not that I'm taking away from some people, it's just, if you're not positive, if you're like a very negative person, if you have a very negative employee and it's not something the company did, but they walked in the door, that is a really hard thing to change. We can't bring in a suite of psychologists to take somebody that's really unhappy and make them happy. And so you really have to start thinking about, like, how important is energy, positive energy, to the culture of the organization?

Critical. And we got this thing called emotional contagion that we all, all mammals have this, and we can pick up cues, emotional cues, from other people all unconsciously. And we pick these cues up fast. The perfect example is the antelope. You see a herd of antelope, one animal looks, picks up, two animals look up, three pick up, and boom, they're gone. How do they communicate? And this is something that mammals have evolved over millions of years to, to survive. And humans are no different. You get one negative person in an organization and you don't take care of it, that emotional contagion is going to spread throughout the organization, whether you— and there's no way you can stop it.

Yeah, and I agree with you. And I would say, I'm not saying that every— look, I've been negative at times. I've been down at times. I think everybody has gone through— we're all human.

But I'm saying we're really talking about chronic. Everybody.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that's the thing. And sometimes it's the organization's fault. Sometimes the organization has muffed something. But I just think it's like one of those things where you have to be— there has to be a high degree of intentionality behind your hiring. And there's— the thing is, most people that are probably in that bucket of being unhappy, chronically unhappy, some of that could be they just haven't pursued the passion or something they're really passionate about. So it's in the right organization, they might— that might— organization might bring them a lot of joy. Yeah. So you have to really think about that.

It also strikes me that if you're high up in leadership position, CEO or high C-level, you've got to develop yourself. You got to be self-aware and you've got to be able to emotionally self-regulate. You've got to be able to have leadership empathy and read your people and understand what they're experiencing and feeling. Because without those skills, you're like a blind person and all this stuff is going on that you're not even aware of that is profoundly affecting how the organization performs as, as a unit.

That, and that's one of the things that we One of the biggest blessings that I've really just come to enjoy about the gig at Happy has been being able to spend so many times with so many kind of transformative leaders and think, how do they think and understand how they think and process it? And it's really different. I would think that most, you'd say all, they're very accomplished business people, but the idea of really wanting to care about developing your people as part of their experience or employee experience, like that to me is some, is somebody that is really spent a lot of time thinking through the type of company they want to run. Because look, happy and coaching what you do, in many ways, there are a lot of CEOs that think that's just a vitamin or a lot of leaders. And the question I like to ask is make an inventory of the things you do for your people and really think about it. And it's experience that an employee gets from working for you is a lot more than just the paycheck that they get, that gets deposited every 2 weeks. That's right. Not that it happens overnight either. I think, you know, it takes some time.

And I mean, you're shifting, you're shifting the attitude of 50 or 100 or 200 or 1,000 people. That is a, that's a monu— as you said earlier, that's a monumental effort. But it starts at the top. I've been called into plenty of organizations where there's been messiness and they want me to come in and help sort it all out. And it's usually HR that approaches me and I say, have you talked to your CEO about this? No. May I speak to your COO and CFO and find out from them how they see the world? No. Thank you, but no thank you. I will not do this engagement without support from the top. And that happens a lot. It doesn't happen a lot, but it's happened before. And if the top leadership's not willing to listen and learn, there is no hope of change. Yeah.

And it's, we talked about it's, is this a vitamin or is this an essential vitamin or it's if the payroll system went down. That would be a big problem. But if your people aren't as happy as they could be, like nothing really, right? Nothing implodes that second.

So that's right. Or chronic fights and arguments or low morale or people just messing as people being passive aggressive with each other. All of these are indicators of what I think is poor leadership. And yet there are many leaders, not all, but there are substantial number of leaders who just ignore that kind of stuff and say, get over it. Why am I— why do I have to be a kindergarten cop? Because you're the leader, the one that everybody looks up to. Yeah, it's— that's a hard thing for people to get. I'm curious, you've learned— you— I think you've learned, uh, a lot about listening over the years. Tell me how you— how— tell me how you developed your listening skills.

You remember I was talking about that executive coach, right?

He—

for me, I will say I had two problems. I wish listening was one of them. Sorry, I wish it was just listening, but I wasn't. Two things. I didn't hear people. In fact, I would say I'm just average at this now, but I literally was just waiting to talk.

Yeah, you started out poor and now you're average.

Yeah, but that's a lot of improvement because I started really bad and now I'm just okay. But okay is better than where I was. But I think so one is listening with intention.

Absolutely.

And then how, how I did that was just really make sure that I gave some more space.

That's exactly right. Not part of— there are two kinds of listings. I call it Type 1 listing and Type 2 listing. Type 1 listing is what most people engage in. They're, it's, they're listing from their agenda as the listener. They're gonna ask questions, get facts, have assessments, have their own rebuttals to whatever people are saying. They're doing everything but paying attention to the speaker. And then there's Type 2 listening, which is what I teach, and that's where the sole agenda of the listener is to make sure the speaker feels heard and validated from the speaker's frame of reference. And that's where the magic is.

Yeah, I think that for me, that's interesting. You should frame it up that way because I really like that.

I, I obviously, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I stumbled into this as a way in my mediation work as a peacemaker and mediator, trying to figure out a way to calm angry people down. And I had this epiphany back in 2005. And basically what I teach and what I do is ignore the words, read the emotions, reflect back the emotions with a you statement. It's called, the technique is called affect labeling. And 2 years later, a brain scanning study came out of UCLA that showed that this concept of affect labeling literally inhibits the emotional centers of the brain and reactivates the prefrontal cortex. In some really crazy ways. And so it's, there's a scientific basis for this and it's extremely powerful. And, but what it allows you to do is when you're focused on the emotions and not the words, all of a sudden you gotta pay attention. And I think that's the biggest problem in Type 1 listing is it's really hard for people to pay attention to what's going on. They get bored.

That was a big thing for sure for me was I was like, I already know what you're gonna tell me.

Exactly.

And the idea that what you're talking about I, what I've tried to do, and a lot of it came from my co-founder Megan Cook, who's my co-founder at Happy, but I've worked with for a long time. She would always tell me it's really important to understand someone's perspective, not to set justice on it, right? Because I'm always thinking, well, that's not fair, or that's not what happened. And it, like, the reality is none of that even matters.

That's right.

It doesn't. It, that might all be true if we were going to court. And it was like, and anybody that's married certainly understands right and wrong is that's out, right? It's okay, I'm right, but I'm sleeping on the couch for the next, right?

Right. So the word that I use for that is I say in relationship, abandon reason. Reason has no relationship, has no business being in a relationship. Do not use reasoning or rationality in a relationship. It doesn't belong there. What's important in a relationship is emotion.

Yeah. And I think that the employee experience is similar to that, right? Absolutely. This idea that like, what experience is someone feeling? And that might not be your reality, but it's, it might be their reality. And so it's just, it's really valuable to understand it. And I think maybe my philosophy now would be, I'm gonna try to fully hear you. It doesn't mean I'm gonna agree with everything you say.

Of course.

But I don't need to. I just need to understand what you're saying and process it. And I will, it will inform how I respond. And if I don't listen, then I really can't respond. I can only react. And, and maybe even worse than that, I'm just gonna actually just talk at you instead of even hearing you. So that's a good point. John taught me, for me, I was talking about space and listening. And for me, it was space combined with something really important, which is I had to put in for me. I still had the fire, like inside. I would still like if I was frustrated, that never went away. I was like, I'm listening and I'm like frustrated. I'm listening. And that's how it is now. I'm like frustrated. I'm hearing you, but I'm frustrated. And then I just shut up and I just give myself space. And if it's like a very difficult conversation, it might be tomorrow. I might be like, hey, I've heard you out. Let me repeat the 3 major things I got from you. I'll get back to you tomorrow. And I might have to get all the way to overnight to where I'm actually ready to respond in any type of emotionally intelligent way. If it's minor, maybe it's 10 minutes, right? But if it's something big, I've gotta really take inventory and then go, okay, what will get— what is the most appropriate way to respond to this that is going to get us closer to an understanding or a successful outcome?

So it, that's exactly right. And in, in my, when I teach graduate courses at Pepperdine as well, and what I teach my students and, and my clients, de-escalate, then problem solve, calm people down. Then when they're calmed down because they felt heard, they're willing to negotiate with you or listen to coaching for improvement, whatever it might be. But as long as people are emotional, they'll never be able to hear anything that you say, and they're not ready to change. And what you're saying, exactly, you're exactly right. So you've got a difficult conversation, you listen to them, maybe reflect back or paraphrase what they've said and say, I'll get back to you tomorrow and on our next step in this conversation. And that's a perfectly legitimate way to handle things. The other thing you can do is simply say, so you're really angry and frustrated. You feel completely disrespected. You feel like you're unappreciated and unsupported. And they'll say, yeah. And if it looks like they've calmed down, you say, how do you think we ought to go about solving this problem? What do we need to do to make this work? And once they've been listened to, then they, then they'll offer up ideas on what they can do. And that's also extremely effective. That's the skill that I teach. Very powerful.

Yeah, that's one of the things that we found with HAPI is just It's some of the data coming out of our analytics has really been fascinating because one of the things you'll find is that when someone just asks for, hey, I need to, I want to resolve a conflict with Amanda and they can access that data, it gives them perspective, it gives them some things to think about, and then you get a better outcome just because in that moment they needed, if they didn't do that, they would be at a coworker's desk going, goddamn, Amanda pissed me off. She did XYZ. I love that. Yeah, we're finding this utility in some of these different things. It's really interesting. Yeah, no, I love that.

And again, it gives— go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna say it gives people a chance to cool off a little bit and get some objective data on what's going on so they're not fixated on themselves needing to be heard and validated, but they can reengage their prefrontal cortex with the app and that allows them to do something very important, which is perspective taking. That's a great, that's a great idea.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's, I think the biggest challenge that we've experienced is it has to be very lightweight and easy to use. And so continually had to find innovative ways to reduce the workload on the app to where an employee can just like, if you use Slack, it just sends you a daily coaching tip on a coworker automatically.

That's pretty cool.

And yeah, there's a really cool number. I actually, I hadn't heard of this. I'm not an L&D. Like I'm not a vice president of learning development. I've obviously learned a lot in the L&D space. And there's a lot of fascinating data that our team has been able to consume. But just learning what is important to L&D leaders has been really interesting because they, you've heard the term scrap rate. It's this concept of like when we implement some type of L&D or some training, like what kind of retention is there? At 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? Like, what stickiness is there? And so listen to this. So when we first started and we did all of our coaching was all through the app, our retention was poor. And then when we started sending email coaching, it bumped up, but it was still like, I would say maybe 60% of people continue to get their coaching via email. When we added Slack and Microsoft Teams and some of the tools that they used every single day, the employees used every day, Our retention rate is over 90%, meaning— yeah, so that means at 90 days, employees are still continuing to retain and get coaching on their coworkers. And I think all it is is this idea that you just remove the friction, because if someone finds it useful to get coaching on their coworker, they're not going to go in and turn it off.

No.

But you've made it easy for them. You've delivered— and the app figures out who they work with the most and sends you the coaching most on who you work with every day. But really, it's made it easy for a very busy person to continue to like get continuous learning, which is—

I love that.

Yeah.

I love that.

So that's been an interesting data point that we've learned.

Yeah. No, I love that because in the, in my engagements, for example, you don't hire me to do a workshop. You hire me to do a workshop and then 8 weeks of follow-up sessions for accountability and support. Because I'm not gonna walk in and do a workshop for you knowing that at the end of the workshop, 90% of it's gone in 24 hours.

And what I would say is, to your point, like John, my executive coach, I saw him for 2 years. I'm talking about this 12 years later, Doug, right? The impact John had on me. But I saw him every week or 2 or talked to him every week or 2 for 2, 3 years.

So there's an impact that occurred. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I think you're right.

Yeah. Your happiness. I hadn't thought about that, but your app provides tremendous accountability and support at presumably a relatively low cost per employee. And deliver it in, in, in places and ways that people can access. I, yeah, that's a terrific idea. I didn't not get beginning to get excited about what you're doing. I think you have a really cool idea. I, and I hope it catches fire, uh, because I could see the stuff that I teach, somebody being able to go onto an app and say, I got a conflict with Mary. What do I do? And so tell me what's going on with Mary and type in a little bit and it comes back. So this is what you need to say to Mary. And all of a sudden now, they're getting the script on exactly how to listen and respond to Mary. And that could be really cool.

Doug, you mentioned the cost, you know, you can't put a price on happiness though.

No, you can't. And I understand that, but I teach you—

that's my joke. That's—

I understand. And I—

yet I have to.

Of course you can't put a price on peace either. What's the value of being able to stop fights and arguments in your life forever? It's priceless. That's the thing. One more.

Are you available, Doug? I just wanna make sure after this, I'm gonna just pipe my wife in for you to talk a little while.

We can talk about that. I wanted to ask you one more question before I let you go. This has been an amazing conversation. I could go on for hours, but I, my audience has a short attention span, as you can well understand. What's one thing about yourself, James, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

One thing that nobody would know about. I have learned over my life, so I come across as passionate, very confident. Determined, started multiple companies. Everybody is just as insecure as everybody else. And it's a very young age. Like, I had a lot of insecurity. And though one of the ways that I've attacked that is just by going out and trying new challenges constantly. And so probably the biggest thing— I've driven a race car 200 miles an hour, won 2 championships, I'm learning how to fly.

Oh, good.

Run a tech startup, all this fun stuff. But it all comes from not this base of like, overconfidence. It actually comes from insecurity. And I am just as nervous and uncomfortable as any other human, including any employee that walks in the door of a new company when they're 18 years old.

There you go. Pilot, huh? I've been a pilot for over 40 years.

Oh, really? Okay. I'm 9 years in, or 9 hours into my flying.

So good for you. You're not too far away from soloing.

Yeah, I'm close. I'm close. I've been doing landings. So we, on Saturday, I had to land in a 14-knot crosswind, 6.

There you go. That's the way it is.

That was not the most fun thing in the world, but it's going to be challenging. I thought I was a hero, Doug. The previous day there was no wind. I'm like nailing my landings and here comes the crosswind. And now I'm like, don't know what a rudder is anymore.

It's all about learning. James, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

Hey Doug, thank you very much.

You're welcome. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.