Achieving Your Pinnacle in Career Growth with Alexei Dunaway

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of the HUDDL3 Group, and today I have Alexei Dunaway joining us. Alexei is the co- founder and CEO of Pinnacle and he's doing a lot of work in the coaching space, particularly making coaching available on a daily basis to early and mid- level career professionals. Welcome Alexei.

Alexei Dunaway: Thanks so much and glad to be on the podcast.

Dane Groeneveld: Coaching's a big part of this podcast. We talked to a lot of people about it and you and I before the show were talking about how it has a price point and how your positive experiences with coaching has encouraged you into this new business model with Pinnacle. Maybe you could share a little bit more about those positive experiences and how you've come to be where you are today.

Alexei Dunaway: Sure. I came to Pinnacle in part because I've been an executive coach now for the past four years, full- time for early to growth stage startup founders and executives. I saw a really consistent set of problems emerge that they would bring to me and built a pretty large content library of articles and tips that I would send in between, or frameworks, that I would send in between coaching conversations. Ultimately, I realized as part of this process that there was much greater demand for these services, much lower in the organization than could afford the price point of a premium executive coach. We built Pinnacle in part to enable that access, following a lot of the methodologies that coaches use, but providing a lot of the content that is foundational to the art of management.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. Tell me a little bit about your early experiences. How did you fall into executive coaching? You don't kind of wake up and say, " I'm an executive coach."

Alexei Dunaway: Yeah, it's a good question. I had one, I found it to be incredibly valuable. For five years actually, I was CEO of an accelerator in Kenya and we were working with early stage Kenyan entrepreneurs providing various forms of consulting support and investment advisory and connections and so on and so forth. As part of building that business, actually my board recommended I get a coach. I hadn't heard of it before, but it felt really profoundly transformational. I then took a lot of the coaching practices that I was learning as part of that relationship, brought them to my team. Ultimately, when I left, decided, hey, there's actually more of a science here than I probably am acknowledging, and so sought additional training, which I think is really important in the world of coaching. There's a lot of people who don't do that, I think to their loss and to the loss of managers everywhere. Then, it's with that I really dove deep and built a practice, spent a little bit of time in venture as a coach attached to a fund and then built out a practice primarily through word of mouth from entrepreneurs that were finding value.

Dane Groeneveld: Neat. Anything about coaching early stage entrepreneurs that's different in your opinion to some of the coaches that are out there working with scaled more operational Fortune 100 or whatever it might be, as far as an established company?

Alexei Dunaway: That's a great question. My read is that the challenges that entrepreneurs are facing or that entrepreneurial CEOs are facing is a unique one because they're creating something out of nothing and they're not operating within an organizational structure, which has an inordinate amount of separate challenges and constraints and opportunities. There's the ownership that these people feel over their teams that I think senior leaders everywhere feel, but they're also operating in this total band of uncertainty. The demands placed on entrepreneurs too is just incredibly high to not only lead and manage and do all that, but figure out the rest of the business too.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like the way you talk about the band of uncertainty. I was actually doing some training this morning on coaching in our LMS, and one of the things that it was saying was it was trying to assess where you think coaching fits in an organization. One of the questions that they had some data on was what is the role of an executive coach in helping a leader or a manager set tone for the team? When you're a leader or entrepreneur with a lot of uncertainty, it can be pretty chaotic setting tone for the team. I guess that's where the coaching relationship's very critical.

Alexei Dunaway: Yeah. I think the more senior you go, the more utility the coaching framework has, as something that coaches and leaders can adopt for them themselves and their own teams. There's actually some really interesting transitions too that entrepreneurs are facing in that their role is not changing, their title's not changing, but the way they have to operate with respect to other people and other teams is changing because as they grow, they're the people that used to do everything. Then they become the people that manage the people that used to do everything, then they become the people that set the vision and let other people do it. In some settings, other people make that progression throughout their career, but it's accompanied by some delineation of, okay, we are stepping into this new role, into this new title. For an entrepreneur, it's all this sort of steady gradient and all of a sudden you wake up and you realize, " Oh wait, I have to be orienting myself in a totally different way now that I have this broader stakeholder community group and investor network around me. Now all of a sudden I have to change." But there's no marker of that.

Dane Groeneveld: That is interesting. Even with the market that we've gone through in the last six to 12 months with a big shift towards profitability and really having a close look at burn rates and things like that, I guess an entrepreneur or a founder or leader in one of those businesses has to be having very different conversations.

Alexei Dunaway: Yeah, absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: Very cool. You used the word there framework a couple of times. I often think about a coach as someone who has really good conversations with me, asks me a lot of the questions that point me in the right directions, but I don't often think about them as bringing a framework per se, that I can then use with my team. There are some good examples of coaching frameworks that you've really attached yourself to and you see leaders kind of taking forward in their daily operations.

Alexei Dunaway: There's two ways to tackle this question for me. The first is my personal opinion as a coach, and then the second is how we're approaching this through Pinnacle. I'll start with the first and get to the second. As a coach, I don't necessarily think there's a particular framework that is worth following. There are great frameworks that are easy to teach leaders to integrate into their work. Top of mind for me there is the grow framework that was popularized by Sir John Whitmore and Performance Consultants. I think practically because it's something you can teach and it's more or less easy to follow, I think as a coach you learn that it's the beginnings of something, but the real coaching relationship is much further.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Alexei Dunaway: Obviously there's a lot of other incredible coaching training academies that have their own orientation to the world. What, to me, is really interesting is at Pinnacle, we've really built a product for early to mid- level managers. One of the realizations that we've had in working with that population group, which feels radically different than the most senior leaders, is that they're stepping into a space where the idea of what management is feels really opaque. What has brought them to success so far is delivering effectively on their technical work. Often, we promote them because they're fantastic ICs, but the role of managing people is very different. As you make that transition into being that frontline manager or that mid- level manager, the sort of call it director level, you're opening your work up to a whole new set of tasks that you don't know are important to do. It feels really nebulous and abstract. And it's in that context that we're not bringing in coaching frameworks, but we're bringing in management best practices, how to effectively hold a one- on- one, how to delegate, how to have career coaching conversations, how to give feedback, all of the important aspects and behaviors of managing people that you wouldn't really know if someone didn't help you through it. The reality is, in this day and age, now that we're all virtual, it's much harder to apprentice yourself in the same way that you used to. You can't watch other people manage as well as you used to be able to. You're at a loss for how to learn these skills. Maybe you're asking a peer, you're asking your manager, you're Googling, but that takes a lot of time. It's hard to surface the relevant and important content, and you're not integrating that into your workflow and into how you operate on a day- to- day basis. That challenge is really what we built Pinnacle to do, to bring some of those management development frameworks into people's workflows so they begin to adapt them and use them on a day-to-day basis.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. I like the way you describe management being opaque to those individual contributors that have just come into it. I think back to one of my first leadership jobs, and I was just a billing, I was on desk billing as a recruiter, and now I was a team leader. One of my team who is brilliant, Paul, he had 25 years more experience than I did. I'm like, " Why am I managing this guy and how do I have a conversation with him when he knows his customers, his product, his daily routine, way better than I do?" To your point on apprenticeship, I was able to observe other team leaders in the business sitting down and having conversations throughout the day, not behind closed doors too. Because we were in a big open floor environment. You got to see whose team was doing well. You saw their numbers on the board and you'd be like, " I'm going to follow Clinton." Or Julian, or whoever it might have been on the floor that you saw doing a good job. Or, " I'm going to take them for a beer and ask how they have one- to- one meetings." We have gone from, it's no less opaque now than 20 years ago, but now we don't have those interpersonal observational opportunities.

Alexei Dunaway: Particularly for new folks that have never really been in the workforce for a long time or have entered into the workforce in this post pandemic or because of Covid. Right?they're the cadre of people that are just now starting to become managers and they're at a loss for, they haven't had any of that physical context of what the office looks like. I wanted to note that one of the more interesting, most common sentiments that's been expressed to me by early and mid- level managers is the exact words, " I don't know what I don't know." This sentiment of not quite confidence in what I'm doing yet, because I don't know what the parameters of the job are. I don't know how to measure myself against the parameters that are invisible to me. There's this sense though that I know I should be doing things. Is there a checklist or is there a place that tells me all of the things that I should be doing so that I can be aware of them and then actually begin to act? It's particularly at those threshold moments of transition where this feeling emerges. I think independent of level, this happens at that entry level, this happens when you get promoted to director and VP two. Any of these threshold moments. It's, " I know I'm stepping into a new unknown environment. I don't know what are the bounds of that environment and therefore I don't know how to measure myself against it." In the context of management, that means that a lot of people end up having poor managers because the managers haven't figured out what they're supposed to be doing or how to do it effectively.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Actually, if you think a level up from that, the new manager's manager isn't really coming in and saying, " Here's the onboarding into the new role." They're saying, " Why isn't this metric here?" Because most organizations aren't managing for people metrics, they're managing for customer metrics, sales metrics, product metrics.

Alexei Dunaway: Exactly. Which I think is a huge missed opportunity.

Dane Groeneveld: It is. Yeah.

Alexei Dunaway: I think we should think about embedding into performance management frameworks or competency frameworks that part of being promoted is demonstrating effective management leadership capabilities because that's ultimately what will drive effective outcomes down the line.

Dane Groeneveld: In fact, we met at that transform HR conference in Vegas earlier in the year, and there was some really good products there that were starting to measure, measure and manage the optics of people analytics, which just historically when you would get promoted into a management role in a lot of organizations, they'd say, " Did you go through the training?" " Yes." " Have you hit your objectives?" Which were generally sales or product or customer. " Yes." And realistically, " Do I need to promote you to keep you?" That was the last part. Right?

Alexei Dunaway: Right, right. Yeah. That's part of the reason why we based what content we're sending at Pinnacle based on a deep understanding of an individual's actual measured behaviors. You can ask people around them, and coaches will not find this new at all, but starting with a 360 or starting with an upward feedback survey to identify for a given manager, here are the specific behaviors that you should be showing. There's a whole lot of research and people science that demonstrates, hey, which are the most effective behaviors that are linked to overall management effectiveness, that are linked to engagement, that are linked to business outcomes. These are the behaviors that we know we shouldn't be motivating. Start by measuring it and then help people figure out what they need to do to change it and then measure it again to show, hey, they've actually changed it. Then that's the point where you really can be thinking about, " Oh, this person is demonstrating these capabilities. It's not just that they've done the training, but they've actually shown the change in the behaviors." That's when we should be thinking about, " Okay, that's promotion potential."

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. With your product then, with Pinnacle, how much does measurement come in? It sounds like you just referenced that you'll bring a 360 degree tool in at the beginning?

Alexei Dunaway: Yeah. Beginning and quarterly to be able to show measurable progress. We've heard from HR leaders and executives that it's all well and good to have training, but what actually matters is behavior change. We need to reorient measurement, not around are people happy about the training that they did, but are people changing the behaviors and the way that they act?

Dane Groeneveld: With that 360, because I've used 360s, but never on a quarterly basis, how much is the framework of what's being questioned and observed evolving in these businesses? Because I would imagine that's going to be different from team to team.

Alexei Dunaway: We often have requests to tailor the survey and the behaviors that we're motivating to the needs of a specific company, which is different. Many companies, and depending on size, but many companies will have a specific leadership framework that they want to incentivize or motivate or hold people accountable to, or a set of values that indicates they want people to act in this way, and we can embed those into the survey. Now, there are questions in that survey and behaviors that we know are linked to overall management effectiveness that we don't want to pull out. It's always a balance there of the customization, but also bringing the expertise that we have in saying, " No, it is important that you consistently provide specific praise for good work." That's a management behavior that is really, really, really important. Your people need to be recognizing and using positive reinforcement to motivate people.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Alexei Dunaway: Let's measure that and make sure people are doing that. If they're not, remind them to do it or they need to be giving feedback or they need to be having career conversations because that's a significant indicator as to whether someone is likely to stay. Actually, I saw some research, maybe this is now about a year old, but lack of career progression is the second most common motivator for people's departure from companies behind compensation. That should be surprising to no one. If managers aren't having those conversations and keeping that top of mind, then it is very easy for that to fall by the wayside.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Particularly in times of the market we've seen for a lot of companies in the last 12 months.

Alexei Dunaway: Right.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really interesting. I've often had conversations with peers, colleagues, bosses around the career conversation, and there has tended, particularly in frontline managers, not so much HR professionals, there's tended to be this sense of, " Well, why would I talk to Bob or Jenny about career progression if I can't see any career progression?" You're like, " Oh." You're hardly putting faith in your team to create it for themselves here, talk about what they want to do and see where the stretch project is, or the little extra bit of learning that they could do or sitting on a committee to get some exposure. I think it's easy for people to get stuck in the day- to- day grind and probably never more so than coming out of Covid where everyone has been disrupted by where we sit, how we work together, all the different distractions that we now have, letting the dog out, tackling the five year old before they hit the enter button on your laptop, whatever it might be.

Alexei Dunaway: Right. At the same time, there's research, I'm going to quote the number wrong, I don't remember it exactly, but there was a study that Gallup did of senior leaders understand what were the factors that contributed most to their growth, and over 70% of them said being assigned stretch opportunities as the principle factor or as the high highest leverage factor that contributed to their high career growth. We know it's important and we need to have the conversations to let people make the choices. Some people might not want that and that's fine, but the conversations at least need to be had.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. As you look across organizations, teams that you've supported, leaders that you've supported, you mentioned positive feedback, reinforcement, more routine feedback cycles and career conversations. That can be done very individually, but are there any really programmatic, well- documented approaches to that in an organization that allow you to pull data to see who's having those conversations, where those conversations are having more traction perhaps?

Alexei Dunaway: That's a great question. I'm not sure if I know of tools out there that are tracking this. I think there are obviously programs that you can run to incentivize that these are happening. There are features of performance management software where you can upload a career development plan and you can basically check who is actually having them. The challenge that I think we've all experienced is it's not great... If performance management conversations and career conversations only end up happening out of compliance, they sit in a drawer and they don't actually mean anything. I've witnessed over and over how poor people are at giving feedback. The check box isn't quite enough. What you need is the feeling from the direct reports that they're actually having these conversations on an ongoing basis, because it's really easy to have a programmatic intervention that basically says, " It's coming up on performance review season, let's incorporate career conversations. Here's a template for the conversation. Do this for an hour everyone. Report back to me that you did it or share back the plans." That is helpful. Right? But if that document then goes in a drawer and is never touched on, well, that's not that helpful. The behavior that matters is not only having that conversation, but using that conversation as a manager to filter how you provide work or how you divide work and how you support people and what opportunities you offer people and what feedback you give in line with that career orientation or in line with those performance review goals. There's a need to, I almost want to say activate, these systems which are important to have. One way to think about this is the difference between a system of record, which there are actually a lot of on the market and there are some great ones. The difference between that and a system of engagement. How do you take the records that you have around performance management and make them live? How do you enable people to have conversations about them on a monthly basis or on a weekly basis? Weekly is probably a little bit ambitious, but on a monthly basis at least. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, definitely. That engagement piece is very interesting because I've definitely seen no matter what tool we're using that you do get into review season and you do put a development plan in there. The latest tool we're using is Leap Sum. It has some nice features because you can have the employee go in and put updates on how far along they are on their development goal. It's still a bit of a box ticking exercise. How you drive the engagement and the excitement, how they get something back from it is still poorly understood in my eyes.

Alexei Dunaway: Well, I think there you are relying on the manager of that employee to care and you're relying on them to follow up and them to have the knowledge to develop the person. In the context of, you said this earlier. Right? Directors or the mid- level managers are not necessarily developing their emerging managers. Their reports are managing people as managers. They're holding them accountable to goals, but they're not focusing their development conversation. They say, " Great, you need to develop as a better manager." But then they don't provide people the tools or coaching or development to do so.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Alexei Dunaway: I think that's true not only in the context of management, but that's true in the context of other skills. It's the next step of how do you use an existing performance management, whether it's Leap Sum or Lattice or some another one of these systems, and then use a tool like Pinnacle on the side of it to basically reinforce the behaviors that you've identified that you need to work on. Not only leave it to the manager of the individual contributor to move this conversation forward, but have a third party saying, " Great, you have these goals. Perfect. Well, let's continue to provide you information and nudges to move you in that direction so that you achieve your own career growth because you achieved the goals that your manager set for you in the last performance review."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that is interesting. I want to dig a little deeper on the nudges because you and I have talked about that in the past too, as well as the coaching that you can apply with the Pinnacle product. It's funny, last week, and this is probably a lead into that deeper dive question. Last week we had Lisa Fratske on the show and we were talking about humanizing processes and stories. She talked about a project at Disney where they actually made the employee resource guide or whatever it was that allowed the cast members, I think it was the cast resource guide maybe, to know what the best practices and processes were. They turned it into a person that was having human dialogue with them. To me, when I think about all the different tools and systems we use, sometimes it does become a box ticking exercise. If you can have a more human interaction with a nudge or with a coach calling you to say, " Hey, I'm looking at your dashboard and Pinnacle and you've set these goals, but you haven't done these things." I wonder if that's a way to create a bit more accountability, shared fate, in a platform.

Alexei Dunaway: You're speaking to what for me is one of the most exciting frontiers of HR tech solutions moving forward, which is how do we begin to personify best practices? I mean that, in Pinnacle's context, what we have is based on the feedback that you receive from your team, you get twice weekly nudges and sort of short form content in Slack and Teams to help you act in a certain way. Then you also have a coach that's available to you asynchronously that you can text at any time to help you with any management problem you might have. What we're actively thinking about is how to incorporate LLMs and ChatGPT- like functionality, because ultimately it doesn't always need to be a human on the other end of that conversation. Right? If you have a leadership playbook that's 50, 100 pages long, you can put a" face" that sits on top of it. If you have a employee manual, you can put a" face" on top of it that becomes interactive so the person doesn't have to sift through all of the different pages to find the best practices for ERGs at Disney, but they can just ask a question and it will give you the answer and it will begin to really assist you in that way. For me, that is a really exciting next phase of learning and development and HR technology more broadly.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. Do you think that's exciting because it's allowing a human to essentially interface with a more humane, personable gateway to the data rather than having to go and scroll through the 50 pages.

Alexei Dunaway: Yeah. It sucks to go scroll through the 50 pages. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Alexei Dunaway: Well, I have a visual memory, and so I remember, okay, it was at the top of some page.

Dane Groeneveld: That's right.

Alexei Dunaway: And I think it was in this section, but I don't really remember. Then I waste a bunch of time looking for it, and then I end up there and it doesn't tell me the answer. I think there's a massive opportunity to sit on top of internal documents. I also think there's a massive opportunity to sit on top of leadership frameworks and books because each of these leadership training institutions has their own framework. I think there's commonalities amongst all of them, quite frankly. We can have that conversation separately, but they have their own approach, and you can make that book ... by putting a front face on it that is attached to an AI model.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's cool. It's like the caddy, am I playing the nine iron or am I going to chip out with my three wood here?

Alexei Dunaway: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. I like that. To be honest, I think particularly for early to mid- level managers, we talk a lot about psychological safety on the show, but the last thing you want to do when you are busy and your manager's busy and your team's busy is call a timeout and go and talk about something that seems maybe a little bit marginal. Am I just having a tough day at work and overreacting to a response I got from a team member? Where if you can go in and have this conversation, whether it's a chat bot or an avatar or whatever else, or click even a small video, even if it's not purely interactive, it might at least directionally get you moving forwards and you don't go and burn an hour, an hour and a half of your own time stressing about how to have the right conversation or worse, just don't have the conversation.

Alexei Dunaway: Right. We think a lot about this in terms of how LND has been structured and where it needs to go. We treat managers as if they're kids and put them in a classroom or an online classroom. Managers, like adults, don't learn knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They learn knowledge attached to problems they currently have. To the extent that we can build... The link to what we're just talking about is a manager wants an answer to the thing that they're wrestling with that they're going to bring home to their partner and complain to them about, that they're going to bring to their manager, but oh wait, their one- on- one is next Tuesday. I need this answer now in order to navigate this situation that's happening in front of me. How do we shift our thinking around what managers need not only to content broadly written, but to the right content at the right time to solve the right problem that the manager has in front of them? The way we currently solve that is with the human that you can talk to, and we think there's advantages and disadvantages with that. There's opportunity for that as we were just talking about, to be solved or for that role to be played, at least in part by large language models.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, I like that. You're absolutely right, attacking a problem that exists right now, it means something to you. It's not just going through a long list of best practices that you may need in the next 6 months or 12 months. That is cool.

Alexei Dunaway: There's a tough balance there to strike because on some level, people aren't always aware of the things that they need to be doing, and you need to elevate them or you need to elevate those things that they should be doing, but they don't know that they should be doing yet. You also need to solve the problem that they have in front of them. The art becomes how do you use technology to surface and connect the problem that they have to the solution set that you or set of behaviors that they should be working on and make that link in a way that feels personalized to that person and that situation.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that. I know years ago I did some work with Schlumberger and they had one of their operations down in Latin America, and they created this learning environment where individuals were encouraged to come back and say, " Hey, I dealt with this problem in the field and here's who I spoke to and this is what I did." People could go back in and access the catalog, and if they saw a similar problem, they could say, " Hey, how did Alexei deal with that problem when he was in Venezuela?" I wonder in your platform or in others, how much is that second order learning going to be part of the future of learning and development? Because it's one thing to say, " Hey, I went and used a Pinnacle product or a piece of training attached to Leap Sum or LinkedIn Learning." But to then go and have a conversation with peers about, " Hey, I did that training and I did this, and Bobby responded really well, or Jenny took it and gave me this feedback, and I realized the problem was over here." I think those are the stories that actually bring the whole team along. I wonder whether it's through human intervention or through evolution of best practices, whether you are starting to see that with any of the customers that are using your product and starting to do this kind of daily iterative coaching.

Alexei Dunaway: For me, the best place to look for solutions there is actually in the consulting world, I think that's the environment that has done so well with this knowledge management, right? When you look at the largest consulting companies in the world, your McKenzies, and Bains, and BCGs, what makes them so successful is that they have a person who saw something that looked like this once, and they already have half a deck written and they know who the right people to talk to are. It accelerates the process of learning in a really fast way. It also takes a lot of time, and it's part of what you're paying for is that wealth of people knowledge and expertise, and basically the optimization mechanism of how do you extract knowledge and manage this knowledge that is in the heads of so many people at such scale. How we're actively integrating it into the product right now is a number of our clients have asked us to build out peer learning modules. We do that regularly and we think our managers who are using the product love it. It's an opportunity. I mentioned this, don't know what I don't know sentiment earlier to sort of circle back. The idea that other people are wrestling with the same challenges that you are is tremendously comforting, I think in all walks of life with every problem, there's some commonality in suffering, I guess. In this context, it is helpful for managers to hear from peers about the challenges that they're confronting regardless of whether or not they have an answer. Just because it creates the space to feel a little bit more confident that no, there is no" right answer" as there often isn't in management. There is a path that I tried and it worked with some degree of success, and there's opportunities to learn from that setting.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. I love peers, and obviously it ties in neatly to teams when you've got peer learning. You might not be the same functional team, but you're a team for the purpose of learning together and sharing best practices. I think that's a really powerful way to learn. What does that look like if you do a peer learning module? Is it rather than just doing something digital, they come together and do an interactive process?

Alexei Dunaway: That's right. Yeah. That's currently structured as live calls with peers that are facilitated by a coach.

Dane Groeneveld: Nice.

Alexei Dunaway: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's really interesting because you're right, there is a bit of comfort knowing others are suffering. We recently did a conflict management training module with my Vistage group, which is a peer- to- peer learning environment. What was interesting was the construct that this gentleman shared with us, which was when someone's stressed out, they need to know that they matter, that they're valued, that you have empathy, that you understand why they feel a certain way, and that you're going to work with them to solve the problem. It was that matter, value, empathy problem. I thought that was a really cool construct. In a peer learning environment, people aren't going to put their hand up and say, " I have a problem with this difficult team member." But, if they start realizing that everyone else is trying to help each other with the same problem, maybe they will be more open in sharing their problem and they'll realize that, " Hey, we're here to talk about this for a reason because we know it exists, and you guys don't deserve to be guessing your way through this. Let's share some experiences and see if we can collectively problem solve."

Alexei Dunaway: And that to me too, is how you construct the space so that people feel comfortable and confident in being able to share and what the facilitation practices and processes are and who's in the room. What we have found is that you have a peer manager that's in your function on a different team, that's slightly easier to share with than another manager that's on your team who knows all of your people, which then it's like, oh, I can't really talk about the specifics of my problem because they're sort of confidential and this person that's sitting next to me will know exactly what I'm talking about. In the function, but on a different team is potentially a little bit better. In a different function is potentially even a little bit better. There's also organizational benefits of bringing together people from different teams and creating connectivity and networks there, but it also enables people to operate in a different way. Also, the dynamics of call it power and positionality, call it seniority within the company matters a lot too. A junior person and a really senior person in those peer learning settings will have difficulty finding the same commonality that two senior level people or two junior level people will.

Dane Groeneveld: That is smart. I've definitely observed that in some of the groups that I've pulled together at work. To your point as well, it goes back to the facilitator or the coaches in there because if they set the right ground rules, they can find ways to bring people into that conversation in the right way too. I know in our group, we always have a, you've got to use I statements. You can't say, " Well, we experienced this." You've got to be like, " I found this and I need you guys to tell me if I was right, wrong or otherwise." Because otherwise it's too abstract and veiled.

Alexei Dunaway: Incidentally, a great practice for giving feedback and one that we recommend a lot use I statements, don't say you or we or just objectively, this is bad, but my perceptions are much easier for you to hear than an objective reality that you contest.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Well, we've covered a lot there. It's really interesting just looking back through my notes here around some of those core curriculum elements that you'll be bringing people through on the Pinnacle platform, positive reinforcement feedback, career conversations. I really like this whole activation concept as well, because you're right, too much learning is too much learning. These individuals are busy already. As soon as they get told, " Oh, here's more training." They're like, " Oh, I'll never get my job done." Creating activation in real time nudges, or, " Hey, text the coach, deal with the real problem." I think that's super powerful. This concept of peer learning modules as well. You shared the personified platform approach, but what is your view for how teams are really working at their best? If you roll forward five years, they're on Pinnacle, they're having just great success. What's that going to look and feel like for early and mid- career managers that's different from today?

Alexei Dunaway: I get to predict the future. Huh?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's the fun part.

Alexei Dunaway: That's the fun part. This is all also the part where I get myself into trouble. What keeps coming to mind for me when you ask that question is what are the new ways of working that we have established that are going to stick? I think something that we're still trying to figure out is this balance of hybrid and remote and in person. I feel pretty confident that we've stuck on hybrid almost forever, there's significant exceptions dependent on industry. Right? But that some form of hybrid is going to be dominant, particularly for knowledge work, I guess is what I'm specifically talking about. In that context, how do you find ways to create sufficient space for the collaboration that needs to happen, break down some of the silos, provide the communication that people wouldn't otherwise get. Social scientists call the physical environment a strong environment because there are a lot of contextual cues. You and me talking on Zoom, it's a weak environment, it doesn't have all the contextual cues of the office and what everyone else is doing. Hybrid, I guess, modifies that a little bit or helps provide a little bit more of the strong context there. That's why people like it. But, we're going to continue to have people who are going to stay remote. The way that, whether it's documentation first cultures where everything is written down and more stuff is done asynchronously, I think is a really important push. An increase of company- wide communication. There's a company out there that I really admire called Pin, which is trying to make all employee communications bite- sized and sort of bringing them to people in the flow of work because there's so much information out there that it's easy to get overwhelmed by. I think the secret to what will make teams successful is navigating some of these split geographic differences and global differences. We have team members in Pakistan and the Philippines, and we're an early stage startup. Everyone has these because access to talent is global in a way that, I'm not going to say in a way that it never was. Right? This has been a movement for called the past 30 years, but even more so now than ever before is this real. There's a whole host of companies that have been set up to enable you to manage not just global workforces working independently in those settings, but global workforces working together on problems that everyone is facing, which I think is a small distinction. There's always been global multinationals. Right? Your European office is focused on Europe and your South Asia office is focused on South Asia, and now you have people everywhere working on every team. How do you enable that effectively? I think it comes down to better communication and yeah, I don't know, creating space for people to have meaningful conversations.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. To me, that's talking about the fluidity of teams, which perhaps hasn't been very fluid in the last 30 years, even when we've off- shored, it's been like that team does this work on these hours, and they don't really play with these guys. They go through a team lead or some other conduit. That picture that you're painting for me says that teams, wherever they're at, whatever functional discipline they're in, they're finding ways to play well with each other, which I think is good. The friction is problematic at the best of times.

Alexei Dunaway: Right.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really neat. Well, it's been a really fun conversation, Alexei. I took a ton of notes. I've definitely made a few highlights for myself on giving more positive reinforcement because I still suck at that. That's one of those ones, you got to wake up daily and say, get better at that.

Alexei Dunaway: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: But if any of our listeners want to reach out to you and learn more about Pinnacle and the work that you are doing, how do they best find you?

Alexei Dunaway: Easy. You can check out our website, which is heypinnacle. com, or you can email me at alexei @ heypinnacle.com and happy to have a conversation. Would love to chat with anyone about what we're working on and how we might make it better and how we might connect it to the needs that you have.

Dane Groeneveld: I love it. I've got to ask the question, heypinnacle. com, is there going to be like a Hey Siri, I'll just be like, " Hey, Pinnacle..." and it'll just respond to you in the future?

Alexei Dunaway: Quite possibly. You're giving me some ideas here, Dan.

Dane Groeneveld: That's very cool. Actually, here's my Siri talking to me now that I said it. Yeah. On demand.

Alexei Dunaway: Cool.

Dane Groeneveld: All right. Great conversation. Thanks again, Alexei.

Alexei Dunaway: Thanks so much for having me on.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet.