080 - Revolutionizing Leadership Training with AI with Erik Berglund

In this episode of The Present Professional, John Marshall speaks with Erik Berglund, founder of The Language of Leadership and Loominary AI, about the future of leadership development through AI powered practice. Erik shares how his work evolved from coaching leaders on accountability and communication into building skill simulation systems that help people practice real workplace conversations in a psychologically safe environment.

Together, they explore why traditional training often fails to create lasting behavior change, how the eight critical leadership conversations can transform team performance, and why simulation, feedback, and repetition are essential for true skill development. They also discuss the role of psychological safety, the difference between accountability and conflict, and how AI can help organizations scale leadership training and talent development.

Takeaways

•  Leadership development improves when people can practice real conversations, not just hear ideas about them. 
•  Psychological safety is essential for effective simulation and skill building. 
•  The eight critical leadership conversations create a framework for stronger teams and clearer expectations. 
•  AI can help scale practical leadership training across organizations. 
•  Accountability is not the same as conflict, and recognizing the difference changes how leaders respond. 
•  Excuses often reveal a development opportunity, not just resistance. 
•  Professional skill intelligence can help organizations understand where to invest training time and budget.

Resources
Loominary.io - https://loominary.io
The Language of Leadership Framework
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Leadership-Erik-Berglund/dp/XXXXXX

Connect with Erik Berglund
LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/erikberglund
Website - https://loominary.io

Visit The Present Professional webpage on humessence.com and learn more about how we support leadership development and culture enablement at growth-stage organizations.

Thank you for listening.

Coach John Marshall | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook

Transcript

John Marshall (00:32)
Welcome back to the Present Professional. Today I'm excited to welcome Erik Berglund to the Present Professional. Erik's the founder of the language of leadership and Loominary AI, where he helps leaders build stronger communication, clarity, and trust within their teams. And a lot of Erik's work focuses on a challenge many leaders face. They learn important leadership concepts.

But then need a safe practical way to actually practice those skills before the stakes are high. Through Loominary, Erik is exploring how AI can support leaders in building real conversational confidence while still keeping the human side of leadership at the center. Erik, welcome to the show. So happy that you're here. anything that I missed in my intro that you want to clue the audience into?

Erik Berglund (01:23)
John, thanks for having me. I'm pleased to be here. No, I think you said it really well. The confidence to have the conversation when it actually arises is usually a function of having been there before.

And that's really what we're focused on. How do we get people that type of experience as quickly as possible in leadership, in on the language of leadership side, and then on the Loominary side, there are so many critical conversations that drive performance in people's businesses. And we don't always think of them. The obvious ones are obviously sales. Most almost every company would say, yes, sales is critical to our performance. Account management comes to mind. But we get requests for dental front office workers who just need to be better at diffusing a complicated situation so they don't.

have

to pull a dentist out of a chair.

We get requests for tradespeople showing up with empathy at your home when they show up after a flood or a fire or something did damage to it. These are the types of skills, the types of experiences that really ingratiate us with other humans, that really earn us that Google review or earn us that referral or earn us that just warm feeling of I'm so glad those people took care of me. And we never give people a chance to practice them. We never train them on how to do it. So I'm I'm happy to be here and unpack a lot of that with you. Thanks for giving me the airtime.

John Marshall (02:31)
Of course, of course. Well, before we dive into the tool, I'd love to start with your story. So what led you into leadership development, communications, and eventually the creation of Loominary?

Erik Berglund (02:46)
Yeah, appreciate the open platform to tell the tale. So the the short version is I was asked one specific question that changed my life forever. Have you ever been asked a question like that, John? Can you think of one? I have one. No, I mean very few people have. Yeah.

John Marshall (02:57)
Not one that's sticking out that could change

my life forever. I'm gonna have to noodle on that though.

Erik Berglund (03:02)
Yeah, it's interesting. I I have one. I have a specific question, one moment that set this entire thing in motion. It happened in about twenty fifteen. And I was very simply asked, how do you hold your people accountable?

And this happened while I was interviewing for a new job. At the time, I was a sales manager. I led a team of 16 across three states for a multinational billion-dollar manufacturer in the construction industry. And ⁓ I thought, going into this interview, that I was a good leader.

I thought that I had been successful enough in my current leadership role that I was about to leverage it to take the next leap up the ladder at another company. You know, the grass has got to be greener over there, and all the shortcomings and hardship I'm facing isn't my fault. I'm a great leader. It's a function of the company, was all that was going on in my arrogant brain at the time. And so they flew me down for this final interview with the CEO of this company that was that I wanted to work for.

And just a casual conversation commenced in the interview, and then he ended up asking me that question. How do you hold your people accountable? And I didn't have a good answer. I made one up. I'm a sales guy. I can make stuff up just fine. I didn't get the job and I flew home absolutely haunted. And it wasn't because of the job, it was because that simple question exposed how little I understood about what it is I was supposed to be doing as a leader.

I didn't know that answer. And so I became pretty obsessed with it, John. I, for like a year, asked every single leader I could, hey, how do you hold people accountable? And I was asking it earnestly. I was asking it out of a feeling, frankly, of anxiety and guilt that, my God, everybody else has cracked this code but me, and I'm the idiot. And so it took me like a solid six, eight, twelve months for me to ask enough people for me to realize, wait a minute.

Nobody knows the answer to this question. This feels like a really important question to know the answer to as a leader, and I can't answer it, and neither can anybody else. I asked my boss, and accountability was one of his favorite words. And I asked my boss, and what he said was, well, Erik, you tell them where they need to get to, and you tell them where they are, and you hold them accountable to getting there. That circular reasoning answer was the corporate perspective from a 9,000-person company on accountability.

And so I realized there's a massive gap here. We roll into 2016, I become obsessed with this word. And over the next three years, 2016 to 2019, I accidentally created the language of leadership. I accidentally created a framework to understand what leadership really is so that we could zoom in on the tactical, practical conversations that every single leader I've ever met.

John Marshall (05:05)
Mm.

Erik Berglund (05:25)
has never been trained on and consistently struggles with. I'll I'll elaborate on what those conversations are in a moment. But but from 2016 to 2019, I was experimenting. I was trying out different things. Frankly, those poor souls that my were my sales team, they had to live with so many bad ideas of how you hold an adult accountable. But we finally got to a good one.

And then I ended up running 30 managers at the company through it, found out I'm on to something. This doesn't just work for me. It actually is highly replicable. And the company that I worked for didn't want to invest in that type of development. And so I left and launched ⁓ the language of leadership, where we really focused pretty quickly, not just on teaching people what do you say and how do you say it to hold people accountable and set expectations and all these other conversations, but we recognized that nobody gets better at things because they watched a video.

Like the number of dollars people have spent on me and my corporate career getting me to watch a video, go to a conference, listen to a speech, and then for the next week we talk about it like it's a big deal, but three weeks later, you have very highly variable participation or usage of what you learned and almost no skill added and no accountability from your boss to do it.

It was just absurd. I I suspect multiple six figures have been spent on me alone in my corporate career where I never had a chance to practice the skill they wanted me to take out of it. And that was why it failed. And so the language of leadership, I recognized that. And our core product really became a vehicle for practicing the difficult conversations, group calls where leaders would join me and I would say, All right, I'm Bob. I didn't do what I was supposed to today. Hold me accountable. Here's the framework, here's the questions, here's the process, let's do it.

And in that process of building the language of leadership, we came to realize that the way you hold somebody accountable is highly custom. There's a process, there's a framework, but you're gonna do it different in Texas than you are in LA, than you are in New York. And you're gonna do it different to a bunch of lawyers in New York than you are a bunch of healthcare workers in Atlanta, than you are a bunch to environment a bunch of environmental engineers in Southern California. There's nuance, there's jargon, there's industry-specific norms.

The company that I worked at sold into the construction industry. In that space, if you're not swearing at somebody a couple times, they aren't gonna take you seriously. So the framework applied, but the nuance of it is what we really got good at helping people do: customizing the lexicon so that you could adapt it to your industry and it would feel normal and it would feel like John instead of Erik. And that whole process is what the language of leadership became. We ran that business for five years. And to try to wrap the tail up a little bit, at the beginning of last year, early.

Early

2025, I started recognizing that large language models and AI tools were at a place where the natural language recognition of these tools was sufficient to replace me as a role player. Nobody really likes to role play. Like at the end of the day, I ran a business that was built on getting people who hate role-playing to role play. You can imagine the headwinds and the service-based business trying to build that. And so I recognized that if I could productize this, if I could make it something people could do in their own home on their own.

phone or on their own desktop, it would be better. And so I licensed somebody else's AI roleplay tool that was built for sales, and I built what I believe is the world's first AI roleplay for leadership program.

So that you could practice those conversations with an authentic avatar that would be every bit the pain in the butt employee you're used to dealing with, way better than I could have ever acted it. And you could practice it on your own with the framework of the language of leadership and get feedback on it and just practice it a large number of times. So I built that, sold a bunch of it, and then as I took it to my corporate clients, they said, Hey, that's cool. We'll take two or three of those. But ⁓ could you build me the same skill simulation thing? Could you build that same AI roleplay thing for this weird conversation?

We don't know how to train for dental front office workers, for tradespeople showing up with empathy, for lawyers doing deposition preparation. We found over two dozen different use cases for the concept of an avatar that can authentically simulate the other person of a conversation, and then you can practice it and get feedback based on whatever the best practice is for that industry. And so now we have two companies: the language of leadership, where we allow people to practice those core conversations and get better at the leadership conversation, leadership skills.

And we build custom skill simulators that allow you to level up whatever performance driving conversation you've really struggled to develop over the the you know course of your career company. So that's the backdrop of it. I know that was a whirlwind. I'll pause there and see where you want to take it.

John Marshall (09:42)
Beautiful, beautiful. I mean so many follow up questions that I had as you were speaking through that that you already answered. So I just want to give the audience a little bit of context here that I believe that this is a really bridging the gap between moving insights to behavior.

It's great to convey all of these wonderful insights and theories that can get real get people really excited in a conference, a talk, a workshop, even. But then to start building it into habits and behavior change, this concept, not even concept, this act of practice, right? Of being there, of having the experience, of having the conversation, is just something that

we couldn't replicate until now. And when I met Erik, this was something that I saw in my own business that could be really, really helpful. That when we go in and do leadership trainings, workshops, and we're so focused on the human side of development. And when when I came across this tool

I was excited and just letting the audience know that we're piloting the tool right now, going over

how it can be used in some of our specific use cases with some of our clients, some of our the organizations that we're working with, because we want to not only scale just the leadership behavior or tr or training new behaviors, but also scaling that to culture. And how does this scale within the systems that these organizations operate? How are they training the specific skills by which they promote on, et cetera? Because

I

think that those crucial conversations can be the difference between not only someone's career and elevation in their leadership, but also the culture they create within their team. And then how those teams and those conversations create the culture of the organization at scale. So I really think

You're on to something with Luminary and the tool that allows people to practice what they're trained on in a psychologically safe environment. So again, audience, we are piloting this right now because I think it's really a gap between it bridges the gap between insight and behavior and it can scale to the culture. But

Yeah, that's that's my perspective, but I want to hand it back to you as well to say, you know, when what are some I guess examples or stories that you have about some insights to behaviors that have resulted in the change in the fabric of a team or an organization?

Erik Berglund (12:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, great question. Thanks for that. You mentioned a critical word there that I'll jump off with, and that is psychological safety. And we've really done a lot of ⁓ a lot of work to better understand what are the best practices around these simulators. And in order to understand simulation, we kind of need to zoom out a little bit. We we forget in the business world how common it is for professionals to practice things before they go and perform them.

So we don't have to go make this stuff up. We just have to look at other arenas to better understand how do the best performers in the world practice things before they show up for whatever thing they do. We could look at sports. Sports are a great example. You know, you look at an NFL team, they practice five days for the four-hour game that they play.

And they practice in the offseason. They do a tremendous amount of film watching. And they aren't just watching somebody speak to them about how to throw the football better or how to block and tackle or how to read a defense. No, no, no. They're gonna go concoct a simulation of that scenario so many times that it is just muscle memory.

John Marshall (13:12)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (13:27)
That you cannot help but read the defense that way collectively as a unit because you've done it so many times. Same thing is true in special forces, firefighters, police, EMTs. If someone's life is on the line, we see the amount of time you spend practicing go up exponentially. I had a retired ⁓

I forget his title. He was he he spent twenty years in the army and twenty years at the UN in Gaza. And I had him on the podcast a number of weeks ago. And I asked him, hey, what percentage of time from each mission would you spend preparing? And it would be fifty percent.

If you were gonna go on a mission that was anticipated to be 10 hours, you would practice for 10 hours. Total mission time, 20 hours, 50% of that is spent practicing. And you are thinking of every variable that could come into play in the war zone, every building that could be blown up, every reroute that could happen, every miscommunication breakdown, every we forgot batteries example, anything. So we see this alignment between the if the consequences are high, you spend more time practicing.

The Super Bowl's a good example of that. They get two weeks between the last game of the playoffs and the Super Bowl. Why? Because it's the most important game of the year.

And this tends to be the case for the final, the final series for the NBA, for hockey, for all sorts of things. We know this is true for musicians. Could you imagine if you went to a concert, John, your favorite band, and you're like, man, I'm so pumped I spent 400 bucks on these seats or whatever. This is gonna be such a great show. And they came out and they're like, yeah, we all swapped instruments and we didn't practice anything together. We're just gonna wing it tonight. You'd be furious that they did that. And yet I led a sales team where it was incredibly normal for us to just wing it.

John Marshall (14:57)
Yeah.

Erik Berglund (15:02)
You know, I know what I know, and I'm gonna go in and I'm a gamer and I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna rise to the occasion. We have learned people do not rise to the occasion under stress. They shrink, they lower to their highest degree of repetitive training. Your muscle memory and your automaticity is what kicks in when you're in times of stress. So we know that there are some best practices that exist in the world around simulation, and all we've done is audit those.

And try to think about how do we translate that into the workplace environment in all of the different applications I'm talking about? I mean, we're talking about sales teams that are in front of people all day. We're talking about live fire calls coming in, we're talking about pre-planned projects, we're talking about emergency calls coming in. There's a lot of different contexts. How do you bottle up those best practices and make them adaptable to all of the different dynamics environments we serve them to? And really, there's four core principles that we've identified that are critical to simulators performing well.

The first one is one you mentioned, psychological safety.

We need to allow people to fail without consequence. That's what psychological safety really comes down to. Project Aristotle was a research project done by Google a number of years ago where they researched the number one indicator of success for a team was psychological safety. And weirdly enough, the next four were highly dependent on psychological safety. We know this word matters, but what it really means is you can fail without consequence. You can say something stupid and nobody will tear you down. It will not be a career-limiting move. It will not mean

Don't get that assignment or that promotion, you're allowed to be wrong safely. So psychological safety is critical. That's one of the reasons everybody hates role-playing with their boss. No matter how good of a job you think you're doing, it's not psychologically safe. It can't be. I am in performance mode, I'm in impress my boss mode. It could be a CLM if I screw up.

There's nothing psychologically safe about role-playing with your boss. I'm not telling you not to do that. It's better than nothing. I'm just saying that that's why it's so freaking difficult. So that's one of the core principles. This is why the Patriots might practice before the Super Bowl in a quiet stadium with no reporters there.

They just might want nobody to watch how badly they're ready to handle Seattle's defense before they actually go embrace that situation. So psychological safety is highly critical. We try to emulate or create psychological safety by allowing people to click the retry button and nobody knows. Their boss doesn't know. There's no one looking over their shoulder. You can just screw it up as bad as you want, man. It's okay. So that's one critical factor we take out of it. The other is that simulation has to be accurate.

John Marshall (17:11)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (17:27)
This might be somewhat obvious, but there's a reason you don't shoot free throws at a driving range and you don't hit golf balls in a quiet gym. You need situational accuracy so that it feels at least close enough to the real thing that it fits.

So the simulation, the avatar, and everything we do is verbal or written. So it's all about communication at this point. And so the avatar has to play the other person pretty well. Meaning, if they're supposed to swear at you, like our correctional officer examples that we build for, then we need to make the avatar swear at you a little bit. If it's going to be passive aggressive, then we need to make it a little bit clipped in its language, and it might enunciate a little differently when it talks to you, John, because it's trying to make a point without using ver words, which is how people in your industry or space might do it.

That. So we need to accurately emulate the scenario such that the background information, the characters, the personality, the lexicon, the jargon, all those nuanced details need to be realistic. Putting this back in the environment of sports, that's why, sure, it might be a closed practice that the Spurs have before they go into the next game of the series in the playoffs right now, but they might pump the stadium with crowd noises.

Because if you're shooting free throws in the fourth quarter and you're exhausted, it's not quiet. And so they want to emulate reality as much as possible without taking away from the psychological safety. So those are two of the critical factors. The third is we have to be able to give you feedback. The realistic, timely, accurate feedback that reinforces the best practices and corrects the most common mistakes is what needs to happen. If you don't give people a chance,

John Marshall (18:43)
Mm.

Erik Berglund (18:58)
To do that in a psychologically safe way, they don't want to fail, so they'll never make the mistakes. You want them to make the mistakes, but you wanna be able to say, nope, that's not how you ask that question. In fact, this slight word change is what's gonna make that person share so much more with you. Or, hey, your body language is, you know, you're closed off as you're doing this, and that's why the person is staying closed off with you. We need to be able to give people reinforcement of whatever the best practices are.

Now in leadership, I know what those best practices are for the eight most powerful conversations you need to have as a leader. I don't know what they are in the dental world. I'm not a dentist. So at Luminary, we aren't experts at what you're supposed to say. We're experts at extracting those best practices from the tribal knowledge that exists in your company. Maybe it's written down, maybe it's an SOP, maybe it's really well baked.

Maybe it's not. Maybe you just got 50 years of wing in it that's worked for you in your industry. So we've got to help you kind of identify that, codify it, put it into a form that's digestible, and then use our tools to reinforce those best practices.

But if we do that, if we emulate it realistically, we give you psychological safety, and we we give you feedback that's timely and accurate, we do have a lot of fun stories to tell of people getting better. And the fourth thing that comes out of them that I'll share is we do this thing.

You know, imagine right now you lead a team of 50. And you know, through that team of 50, they don't all report to you. So you lead through layers with that size of an organization. So you've got three direct reports that report to you on the performance of the other 47 people that you're responsible for.

You're so far removed from it that you have no intelligence beyond the vibes and what your team tells you. Maybe you have some KPIs. Maybe people actually use your CRM or ERP well, so you have some data. But really, you just don't have any clue what anybody on your team's great at or what they struggle with. So if somebody were to ask you, hey, I'd like to invest 50 grand into your team this year, where should we pour the gasoline?

Like I just I don't know. I'm gonna I'm gonna ask my team and maybe they'll tell me, but they don't necessarily know either. Those managers with 15 direct reports each, they can't be everywhere. They don't have a a detailed assessment of everybody's skillful ability to do what matters on the job. If you had an entire team going through skill simulators for sales or negotiation or leadership or customer ⁓ customer success or whatever it is, you would.

You would have this large data set that we call professional skill intelligence that you do not have today, that you cannot possibly get to make wildly different decisions on who you would promote, where you would pour the gasoline, and what you really need to have your team trained on. There's no optics like that right now. So I've said a bunch of things there. Again, I'll turn the mic back over to you, but those are the that's the foundation upon which a lot of the anecdotes or stories I'm happy to share that you initially asked about. I'm happy to come back to those. But what are your thoughts about those, those core principles of

Simulation.

John Marshall (21:40)
They're all necessary. It makes sense that you start with the psychological safety and allow people this environment to practice. But I think there's a key there's something that makes you unique in this process. And I think it's the combination of the work that you've done with the language of leadership and

now translating that to coaching organizations through the creation of their Loominary simulators, right? Because what I'm really hearing is that you you created something really successful and the the sim and really accurate simulations when it comes to the eight leadership conversations, which I'm gonna have to have you ⁓ share with the audience as well, but we'll come back to that. But

It's this framework that you've put behind the the simulator to provide accurate feedback against the framework that you've already been using and developed with language of leadership. Right. So I'm imagining that this is a very prime example for garbage in, garbage out. Right. So it's it's like yep.

Erik Berglund (22:47)
It absolutely is. If we don't do a Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

John Marshall (22:50)
was I was just so whenever you put all of the years that you've put into language of leadership and the act of the active simulations that you were leading in the room with teams, with leaders, and coaching them on their specific responses, so you had a framework on which to evaluate these specific conversations. So I imagine a lot of the work

with these organizations to really create a successful product within their teams, their organization, is actually the work you're doing with the creators of that simulation up front. Like really understanding their industry and asking the right questions, pulling out the right data points. Like what are we actually evaluating people on and coaching people on? Like

I really imagine that is the like really the crux of success when an organization wants to take on these ⁓ take on your product and implement this and now

So then they get this successful. You've spent all of this time up front. They start running and piloting some successful simulations, getting feedback, you're learning, you're iterating on that. I'm assuming their model continues to improve each round that you iterate on it, the more accurate it gets. Maybe you tweak the way conversations are getting evaluated, et cetera. But then what I heard you say at the end there was that that also feeds a an insights platform to where that leader of 50 people.

Erik Berglund (24:16)
Yes.

John Marshall (24:18)
how all of those fifty people are interacting with the system and be able to see insights into how they're performing, who to promote, what questions to ask, who would be in your next pool of high potential candidates for leadership or even even some different technical roles, if you will. Am I am I on the right track there? Okay.

Erik Berglund (24:38)
Yeah. Absolutely. You you're a hundred percent correct. Now

it's important to add some nuance to this. First, the accuracy of the best practices, let's just colloquial call them that. ⁓ whatever your sales process is, leadership processes, account management processes, customer negotiation, whatever, whatever that is, is deeply connected to the professional skill intelligence layer.

If we're measuring the wrong things, if we're giving feedback on the wrong things, then your data is terrible. And you're measuring the stuff that you don't actually want to promote somebody off of. And so deeply interconnected. And as is the ⁓ the nature of the conversation. Most ⁓ we really hone in on performance-driving conversations. And most performance-driving conversations have a desired outcome by the company.

You want to reduce churn, you want to cross-sell, you want to increase the average ticket size, you want to diffuse the situation, you want to get higher Google review. You have a desired endpoint of the conversation. And if we reverse engineer that.

What do you gotta go through to get there? Is nature of the questions we ask. What happens right before a satisfactory ending? And what happens right before that? And what happens right before that? And sometimes this is all well understood, documented, and easy for an organization to communicate. Most of the time it's not. And most of the time it's not very agreed upon. If we were to have three of those leaders with 50 people each that all are in the same company doing the same job, rolling up to the same boss, it's quite complicated to get a

a true representation of what they think good looks like, which should be quite alarming and telling for their boss. Imagine that. You're you're the boss and you've got three guys that lead 50 people each, or three girls that lead 50 people each, and none all three of them have different versions of what good looks like. You should be like, ⁓ man, we're

John Marshall (26:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Erik Berglund (26:18)
This explains a lot, is what we often get to with people. It's like, you know what? This process explains a whole lot of why we've been struggling. Because we haven't ever really broken down what good looks like on the processes that we use to drive communication. And that's a critical word. Processes. What we do is we train skills. We break processes into the subcomponents in the conversation that need to be skillfully navigated. And this requires some expansion because.

Often those trainings I would go to, those trainings you went to in your corporate career, the ones they sent you to, they're like, all right, you're gonna go to sales training. You're gonna go get a bunch of sales skills. No, you're not. You're gonna be taught a sales process.

Or you're gonna go to leadership training. You're gonna learn so many powerful skills that are gonna help you. No, you're not. You're gonna be exposed to a different way of thinking about leadership so that you run a different process with that individual. But they are processes you're trained on. Skill is what happens inside the process. So we'll just I wanna break this down a little further because it's a really important distinction that might get lost if I don't.

John Marshall (27:15)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (27:18)
We're just gonna go to sales because it's the easiest say the sales process is uniform. It has never varied. Every single sales process you've ever paid for training on, whether it's Sandler or Challenger or whatever, has always followed the same model. You build rapport, and then you find out what the person's struggling with. We would call that discovery, and then you qualify them as a buyer to make sure you're not wasting your time or theirs. And then you match your value proposition to what they told you they were struggling with, and then you close, and then you objection handle, and then you close again. Like that seven-step process.

Added to or taken away from with whatever words companies add to it, that's selling. It always has been and always will be. So each one of those is a skill. And if you do they happen to be a sequential set of skills, if you do the early stuff poorly, it becomes really hard to do the latter stuff. If you do a terrible job at discovery, which most salespeople do because most sales organizations don't train on discovery very well, it becomes really hard to match your value proposition and terribly challenging to objection handle.

So there's a sequence to that particular set of skills. But for example, to counter that, basketball is also a set of skills.

If you were, if you lost a basketball game and you got off the court and your coach was like, All right, we got our butts kicked. tomorrow we're practicing basketball. You'd be like, No shit, coach. Like that coach would be fired. The coach, the good coach says, we need to work on reading defenses and we need to work on our transition game and we need to work on whatever specific skill that we can go and drill. That's what a good coach would do. So there are games.

That are not sequential, like basketball, and there are ones that are highly sequential, like sales. We have to work with the team to figure out which of what are we dealing with here? Is there a series of steps that must be taken in a certain order and they stack upon each other such that if you don't do one well, everything else gets harder? Or is it a smattering of skills that just kind of come out depending on the situation and circumstances?

We have to extract that from the team. And we to build that into that milestone-oriented conversation with the desired outcome, such that we can take a transcript from it and check the box and go, yep, you marched correctly, or nah, you write recipe in wrong ingredients or right ingredients, wrong order. You know, you didn't have the oven set to the right temp, but you hadn't enough eggs. Like whatever analogy we want to use, all of that is heavily necessary.

to to actually build something valuable. But there's there's one other detail that'll add to it, and that is that if we compare the simulator to perfection, we have to take this to the nth degree. But

We're not comparing it to perfection. We're comparing it to what you're doing today to train your team. We're trying to make improvements. So we're often trying to do what I call raising the floor. I want everybody on your team to go from a two to an eight at every single skillful step necessary in the processes they need to run. I don't care if they go from eight to ten. Sure, someday I would love to be in the eight to ten business. But collectively, every business does such a poor job of getting everybody from a two to an eight at the skillful conversation.

That I've got years of runway in my business before I ever have to work on maximizing the perfect accuracy of this tool. But we have to help people realize that. We have to help recognize no, no, you're not going for the perfect simulation. You're going for one that acts as a forcing function that makes your people repeat the stuff they're supposed to do such that it becomes muscle memory. And as long as it's that good, as long as it doesn't break the fourth wall, and as long as it, you know, they don't they don't, as long as they don't realize midway through that they're playing.

A video game with their words, like as long as that as long as it's good enough that that's not happening and the feedback's good enough that it's helping them get better, we only have to take it that far. So as much as I make it sound like this, my gosh, massive undertaking, and it is, the goal is not perfect simulation, it's significantly better than zero practice reps. And we don't even have to build a very good simulator to do better than zero practice reps. I'll pause there.

John Marshall (31:43)
Hundred percent. And one thing well, I also want to highlight that yes, maybe it sounds like a large undertaking, but I would imagine like that for example, that scenario where those three different senior leaders have different perspectives on what's good. Right. And in in my experience working with organizations, teams, leaders, that is by far the majority of cases.

Right. Organizations that they're growing. And when you're in a growing organization, like you're thinking about surviving. You're thinking about product, you're thinking about delivery, sales. Like you're not thinking about the uniformity of what is good within our training process until you're at a point where you have enough capital or there's been enough problems to start thinking about that. Right. So

I I'd say again, vast majority of cases are like that. So I would think that the large undertaking of understanding what good is is almost just as valuable to the organization as the product. Right? If you spend the time really refining what good looks like.

Erik Berglund (32:48)
We sure think so.

John Marshall (32:54)
getting it coming to an agreement as an organization or or at least a vertical within an organization, you find that uniformity of training and then you upskill your people. Like you said, from a two to eight on that uniformity. Yes, huge step change in growth and performance in the conversation. But I think there's a huge step change culturally understanding what success looks like at our organization. So I would say that

To anyone that was that was hearing this and is thinking about this being a good pursuit for my team, for my sales team, my operations team, but geez, that sounds like a lot of work up front. Right? I don't know how much time we can put in. I just wanted to highlight that actually I think that upfront work, as opposed to just being a part of the process to get to a product that actually works, I think even if you did that work without the simulator.

that you're getting a lot of benefit as a team and an organization. So I I just wanted to to highlight that so maybe it breaks down that barrier a little bit to the work up front to get this product.

Erik Berglund (33:58)
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great point.

Thank you for the emphasis of that because ⁓ we have had people who are scared of the initial time investment to make something like this happen. And it truly does depend on the size of your organization. If I'm working with one leadership coach and one person on his team to figure it out, we can do it pretty fast. Like in less than an hour of like two separate sessions, less than an hour, we'll probably have everything that we need.

John Marshall (34:12)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (34:22)
If I'm working with a leader with three subteams with 50 people on it each and they can't agree on it, it takes a little bit longer. But the interesting thing is that we don't have to go s we're we're not solving any problems or creating anything at that layer. We're just asking a couple questions that maybe you haven't asked before. And

John Marshall (34:37)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (34:37)
This is the type of thing that they know what good looks like. They I'm pointing to my heart for those who can't see it. They know what good looks like. They just may not know what good looks like. And I'm pointing to my head right now. And so when we just have a conversation about it and we say, well, why is that better than this? And what what's the end goal? And you know, what have you found to be most valuable about it? And I mean, we're still talking less than an hour of conversation to help a team extract.

what's really relevant about the milestones of the conversation, the skillful application of influence along the way, so that we can at least get the first version of the demo built.

And that's the other part of it is we don't have to do all of this cerebral work beforehand. We usually, and you've lived through it, we usually have you talk to one of our bots. We we eat our own cooking at our company quite often. So when someone jumps into our program, they jump in and they deal with one of our avatars, and that avatar is an expert at asking all the questions that allow us to build the first version of a simulation. And the first version is just that. It's a first version, it's gonna get a bunch of stuff wrong. But in that one 20 to 30 minute conversation with Frank, that's his name.

John Marshall (35:08)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (35:34)
We usually get everything we need to put a version back in your hands so that you can play with it. And if your team plays with a little bit, they go, wait, you know what? I thought this in the boardroom, but that was wrong. Now that I'm in the middle of it, this is actually what works. So we try to get you back into the simulation to bump into all the walls and help us fill in all the dimensions we don't have right, rather than doing it as some esoteric exercise in a boardroom and a whiteboard. because that's just more lived experience. All we're doing is trap is channeling what you already know about how to do well.

You just may have never said it out loud or written it down before. If we get a bunch of people to do that together, weirdly enough, all their answers look the same. Like we're doing this right now. There's a there's a global team we're rolling this out to. And we're starting with a group of 90 sales professionals in North America, and we had their three leaders on. And I just simply asked, what does it take to earn a meeting? Like, what is the best practice you want all 90 of your people following?

simply at the moment of initially meeting a prospect and trying to earn a meeting is the desired outcome. Like what's the playbook? Tell me. And

They brought on 14 of their senior leaders and we had a dozen different answers. They thought, but when we sat down and analyzed it all back on our end, we went, this is the through line between all of those things. And it's the same four steps. And you know what? Like it's not that complicated. And we put it back in front of them. They all Yeah, that's actually exactly what we did. Cool. So like it isn't like we have these Titanic battles that form out of a disagreement around a process. If the process is working, you're probably all largely doing it the same thing. You just may never thought of it that way, articulated.

it that clearly or really put parameters around it. And yes, if that's all our service was, if we just were experts at helping you figure out what good looks like in your organization, yeah, I suspect we could sell a heck of a a heck of a lot of that to people. We just want to take it a step further and let you practice it once you know what it is.

John Marshall (37:07)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly. I think it's which is a really game changing next step, I think. Because these are again, you're creating what would be

I mean, sometimes a career of experience and conversation that people can practice iteratively with feedback in the moment. It's wonderful. It really is. And that's why at Humescence we are, you know, we're looking at it as well. We're we're doing a pilot right now. Because and I I I also want to say to all the, you know, other coaches, development professionals that are listening to this as well, it's it will also help you refine your process. Like the thing that you're teaching.

the workshop that you're leading, the things that you have pra people practice in your trainings, the process to take those skills into action will actually help you refine your frameworks and give your clients an opportunity to practice within your frameworks. So that's where we come in at is Humessence with Loominary. But again, like you said, any crucial conversation, this could be applied to. It's just the work that you put on up front to make it happen. But

Before we c we continue ⁓ beating on Loominary, I wanna jump back to those eight conversations. And right, 'cause I I wanna make sure that everyone listening gets to hear like from your experience, what are those eight critical conversations of leadership?

Erik Berglund (38:33)
Sure. Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah.

Thanks for the direct ask. So it all started at accountability. I'm gonna tell this as I'm gonna I'm gonna unfold it in the way ⁓ I experienced it, and then I'll wrap it up with a clear view of all eight as well. But it started with accountability. What words do you say to a human being in a voluntary employment situation when they didn't do what they were supposed to do? Like in the moment, what do you say? Because that's where I was stuck.

And I led team salespeople who were verbal ninjas, and they could they could verbally jujitsu me all over the place, even though I was also one, they were better at it. And man, I'd find myself buying every excuse and getting ran over all the time, and then I'd be so frustrated that all I could do was push really hard, and in that moment things would go poorly, and like I know most like leaders have lived through that. So, what the heck do you say to not have that happen? Was the first question I really asked. How do you hold somebody accountable? So that's conversation number one. And

As I started getting better at holding people accountable, I realized this thing, and audience members may have lived through this too. If you ever try to hold somebody accountable and you realize you did a terrible job of setting expectations with them in the first place, so it's actually your fault, yeah, me too. So turns out holding people accountable is really important, and it's so difficult to do that if you haven't set expectations with them beforehand. So that's a hypercritical conversation.

And if you've ever tried to set expectations with somebody, it tends to happen around delegation, assigning a specific type of work, project, outcome, whatever it might be, or giving feedback. Where I want that person to hear a change that they can make that would level up their performance. Those tend to be the expectations we set with people. Sure, it could be around hygiene or showing up on time or workplace habits, whatever, but it tends to be something that you're starting a conversation that may not go well.

John Marshall (39:52)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (40:18)
So prior to setting expectations with people, you might want to have a skillful ability to get somebody to voluntarily participate in a conversation that they may resist. We call that enrollment. So started with accountability, worked back to expectation setting, work back even further to go, man, if I start the conversation correctly with John, he might be more open to the feedback that I give him. And therefore setting expectations with him will be a lot easier. And then it's gonna be a lot easier to hold him accountable to those things.

John Marshall (40:29)
Mm.

Erik Berglund (40:43)
That's the flow, that's the that is this is definitely one of the processes that have sequential importance to how you have these conversations. So we've gone from the moment of accountability backwards to the origin of the conversation. And in this type of origin of conversation, you're going to the person to give them a piece of feedback, to delegate work to them, or to strike up a conversation, to get them to do something different. But that's not the only way conversations start in leadership. Often your team comes to you.

So a lot of times when your team comes to you, they say, Hey, what do I do about this, boss? And now you're sucked into whatever problem they don't know how to solve.

And so you need the skillful ability to get them to try to solve their own problems before sucking you into them. And we call that 60-second coaching. Can you get the person to at least take a stab at solving the problem without you there? Maybe they get it right, but more importantly, you start to begin to build a culture where it's just normal for them to have to come with you with ideas and solutions instead of problems. And cult that cultural shift over time is gonna prevent them from coming to you a whole bunch of times in the future.

John Marshall (41:24)
Mm.

Erik Berglund (41:41)
So we've just mapped out four really important conversations: accountability, expectation setting, enrollment, and ⁓ 60-second coaching. Those are the first four. So now those all happen before accountability. Let's talk about the ones that happen after accountability, because no matter how good you are at all four of those steps, sometimes you would hold somebody accountable and they're gonna still make an excuse. You may not know it, but there's only four excuses in the world.

I'll say it again because it usually surprises people. There are only four excuses that human beings make in the world. I've never heard a fifth. I've been seeking a fifth for years globally. I thought culturally maybe it was just a thing in the West. I have yet to uncover one globally that is different than the four excuses. I'll come to those because I know there's gonna be a question about it. But people are gonna make excuses, so.

How do you navigate an excuse and turn it into a productive conversation instead of letting them hijack the narrative, which is what you're trying to do when people make excuses? That's the fifth conversation. Those five make up the core of the language of leadership. Because what I found is if you're good at these five conversations, if these are muscle memory for you, it doesn't mean they don't happen. It just means that when they happen, your blood pressure does not go up, your palms do not get sweaty, and nobody is surprised by the way you handle them.

John Marshall (42:31)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (42:47)
Then that's gonna solve 80% of your leadership problems. Like almost all of them evaporate if you're good at those things. But inevitably, those five aren't the only important ones. Because if you hold people accountable well and you handle their excuses well, they could still repeatedly violate your expectations. They can still wildly underperform or egregiously violate your expectations in a really important way. So you need a different skill to handle that conversation. We call that conflict. Most leaders confuse and conflate conflict and accountability. They think

Every accountability conversation is conflict, and that's why they fear it and they avoid it until it actually is conflict because they prevent, you know, they didn't take the ounces of prevention, they're just going for the pounds of cure. And that's when you get into these really loaded, emotionally laden, heavy, you've been screwing this up for years, Steve, type conversations. That's conflict. If you've held people accountable before conflict, it's way easier.

But even if you haven't, you might be at conflict with somebody today because they've been repeatedly or egregiously violating your expectations. So you need a skill that is different, and my tone changes dramatically in a conflict conversation versus what it is in accountability. Accountability is positive and forward-looking. We're getting you back on the freeway after you accidentally took the wrong detour off ramp. Conflict is like there's a cliff ahead, and I'm pulling the e-brake, or you are. We cannot slam into that together. You need different skills to handle those different dynamics.

After conflict fails because it's going to you employ people at scale, this isn't gonna work with everybody. You need the ability to know that it's time to move on from a person or that they actually are salvageable as an employee. So, John, think back in your career. How ⁓ think back to the first person you had to fire. I don't know how long ago that was. How long did you let that person linger at the company before you engaged in the conversation where it was time to terminate them?

John Marshall (44:25)
Mm.

too long. Too long. Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (44:33)
Everybody says the same thing. All of us

sat on it for six weeks, six months.

Three years? I mean, we've we've let people stick around who shouldn't have, and we've known they shouldn't have for a very long time. So we teach something called the 30-day turnaround strategy. In 30 days or less, you're gonna know if it's time to move on, and you can then proceed with whatever legal termination process you need to follow for your state and all the things you might need to do. It might still take you six months to get them out the door, but you and your heart of hearts are convicted in 30 days or less, I can work with this person and we're on the right track. We just need more iteration, or this is never gonna happen. They need to go be

Awesome somewhere else, because this isn't gonna be the place where they can be awesome. So 30-day turnaround is the final culmination of this story arc. All of those conversations, 60-second coaching and enrollment at the beginning, expectation setting, accountability, excuses, conflict, and 30-day turnaround strategy, they follow a linear progression. This is what happens in the story arc of their career. And they're all supported by the eighth conversation, which is called rules of engagement. Rules of engagement are the conversations you have of like, how should we do this together?

John Marshall (45:30)
Mm.

Erik Berglund (45:34)
We're we're both humans here. How do you want me to hold you accountable? And hey, if I need to share feedback with you that's gonna be really difficult to hear, what's the best setting to get you in to do that so that I I'm not catching you off guard and so that I can maybe respect that it was hard for you to hear? Or hey, what's getting you out of bed in the morning so that I know which parts of the job you dread and which parts of the job you actually enjoy? And not that I can go adapt everything to everybody, but if I knew that you hated part A of the job and this other person loved part A of the job.

Maybe I can just assign tasks in a more beneficial way to lean into the strengths and values of the people that I support.

There's a number of conversations we can have to form rules of engagement with our team members so that we can respect them as human beings. And in all of this story art conversations, build more trust and alignment rather than create more friction and tension. So those are the eight, the core five solve the vast majority of the problems. The other ones are very important to have in your toolbox, but you don't get much real life experience with them, which is why practicing with a simulator is so much more helpful. And real quick to zoom back in, the four excuses go like this. These are the only four.

If

anybody ever has a fifth, holler at me. Like share them somehow, some way. I want to write the book, The Fifth Excuse, but I've never heard it. They go these four. Number one is almost always it's not my fault. Most adults don't say it's not my fault because that's kind of petulant. You know, you know, it's not my fault. Like my my my 10-year-old says that sometimes, my seven-year-old does more.

John Marshall (46:40)
Mm.

Erik Berglund (46:51)
Most of the time they say, the client never got me that thing, or I'm waiting for accounting to get me the information, or the developer never pushed the code, or whatever the thing is in your industry. It wasn't my fault, it was somebody else's. That's excuse number one. Excuse number two is I didn't know. This is the most infuriating of the excuses because usually you have a shared experience where you're pretty sure the person should know, even if they don't. But you'll never win an argument over what's between somebody's ears. You'll absolutely never win the battle of yah, you do know.

That doesn't go very well, so you need a better playbook for it, which is what the the the excuses framework teaches. The third excuse is that's not normal. This is what a person tries to convince you that the circumstances around the the data set you're about to share with them or confront them about should be thrown out the window. It was a weird day, it was a bad my kid was sick, that was a strange customer. You know, that's not normal. It just doesn't usually go that way. So, not my fault. That's not normal.

The third was, I I didn't know. ⁓ and the fourth is I'm on it now, boss. Now, I'm on it now, boss, doesn't sound like an excuse, and that's why it's so sneaky about it. And sometimes it isn't. Like let's give some grace. Quite often I forget stuff too. And so if I say, thanks, I'm on it now, that isn't necessarily an excuse. But if you hear it repeatedly from me, or you hear it repeatedly around a particular work function or task.

It's absolutely being weaponized against you, and it is an excuse. And the big thing about excuses and the reason it's so important to know there's only four is if you know there's only four, you don't have to memorize a bunch of things. You just have to listen with intent for like which what am I hearing here? ⁓ this isn't okay. This person to thinks it's not their fault. All right, well, what's the reality of the situation? Well, not my fault, still my responsibility is the dominant thought for it. So, hey, there's gonna be a lot of stuff in this business that isn't your fault.

But it is still your responsibility to have gotten that code from the developer so that we can push to this next sprint. So what do need to do in order to go get that code from that developer? We're redirecting. That's the play that we run. There's a little bit of nuance with each one of them. But the thing is, with excuses, the one your team uses, the one you hear the most, as I rattle off those four, a listener might go, that's the one. That's the one my team uses. The reason they use it is because it works.

John Marshall (48:52)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (48:52)
They have conditioned you that if they say those magic words, they get off the hook. And when that changes, when you know how to handle it and that changes, you watch excuses. They never go to zero, but my gosh, does the number of excuses go down because they just know that playbook's not gonna work on John anymore? So those are the eight conversation, those are the four excuses and I'll pause there.

John Marshall (49:11)
Beautiful.

When it comes to excuses, I'm also seeing this as a you know, a really big development opportunity that can go unnoticed. So when you are when your team's trained, right, to use a particular excuse in particular situations and it works, well

there's a there's such an opportunity to help people move beyond excuses into accountability because like when you because the thing about accountability is I always t I always tell people when we even bring up accountability that accountability isn't necessarily just to enforce consequences. Right?

Erik Berglund (49:36)
Yes.

John Marshall (49:50)
Accountability is something that's necessary for us to understand what's working, what's not working. Are we realistic with timelines? How how well are we setting expectations? How well are you performing against these expectations? What training do you have? It's almost like when you get behind excuses and you're able to hold people accountable, you can more accurately deploy those development mechanisms.

Whether it be training, whether it be adjusting a process, adjusting expectations, goals, or letting someone go. Because I imagine this time, the month, three months, three years of not letting someone go is latent with all of those excuses. Right.

Erik Berglund (50:34)
Number

of them and it has a terrible effect on the culture. When your team sees that you let anybody slide who who says the right abricadab or magic words, your A performers flee. They don't want to be there. So you end up with this team of B, C, and D performers because your A player, your B plus player is not going to stick around on a team where that bullshit is tolerated for that long. It's just unacceptable to them. And if you are okay with that, cool. But ⁓ you're really missing out on a bunch of talent that's gonna flee because you've built a cultural

Yeah, you've met you just created yourself a heck of a cultural issue. And you said something really important there and that's that accountability and consequences aren't the same thing.

Consequences belong in the conflict column for me. ⁓ I'm uninterested in a consequence with somebody when I'm holding them accountable. I'm utterly focused on where did the failure happen? And they need to tell me where the failure happened. All I can do is ask really good questions again, unless I have deep insight or I was there. I have to ask a lot of good questions to really help them identify what caused the failure and to get them to commit to finishing the freaking job. So I don't have to do it for them or have someone else do it for them. But those are the only two things I'm interested in.

How do we help you get better right now? This is this is the vehicle for talent development. It is people think accountability is the conflict thing. They think it's the consequence mechanism. It's not. It's the talent division, it's the talent development mechanism. It's the vehicle by which you cyclically iterate talent development on your team. They get a little better, they fail in a new way. They get a little better, they fail in a new way. Like you do that a bunch and a bunch, you accomplish a bunch of work.

If the re failure is repetitive, if the type of failure is repetitive or egregious, we're now in conflict territory. Now I am in every way interested in consequences that might drive you to change, but only after it's repetitive or egregious. Otherwise, you're just getting better at stuff, dude. That's just how it works. And if we don't have that lens, you're gonna have a really hard time building a culture where a talent doesn't flee and where you don't hear an enormous number of excuses. And if you're not the best at verbal jujitsu on your team,

You're gonna get run over, man. I'm pretty good at it. And I got ran over. So it's it's just the problem we create for ourselves if we don't see it that way.

John Marshall (52:27)
Wow. The opportunity behind the excuses. I love it.

Erik Berglund (52:30)
It's it's amazing. And so you you

you hit on it. Every excuse is an opportunity to turn it into an expectation setting exercise. That's what it really comes down to. And expectations is all about getting people to tell you what they will do differently. So if I tell you this is an excuse, it's still your responsibility, you know, yes, that might not have been your fault, but it is still your responsibility. What do you need to do about it?

You're gonna tell me some things. You might push back at first, but I'm gonna get you to tell me some things of what you'll do differently next time. How proactively you'll communicate, how much better you'll write the email, that you'll send reminders, that you'll walk to their desk, whatever the vehicle needs to be, you're gonna tell me. Now I can hold you accountable to the thing you just told me, because that's what expectations and setting is all about. Not telling people what you expect of them.

You need to do that, but then they need to tell you how they will meet your expectations. And once that has been done, now holding them accountable is super easy. They told me what they would do. I didn't make any assumptions on it. I can just investigate what broke down. So it's all deeply interconnected. That's good observation.

John Marshall (53:21)
Mm-hmm. And and

if you think about the coaching psychology of it, right, people are more likely to follow through with their own commitments. Period.

Erik Berglund (53:31)
We love,

we we believe what we say, we resist what we hear. So ⁓ if I can get you to say all the things that you're gonna go and do, you're more likely to do them and we both win.

John Marshall (53:39)
⁓ the art and the science of the conversation. I love it.

Erik Berglund (53:43)
And so all of the practice of leading

this, right? So imagine for five years

I had very busy leaders, these are corporate executives in any given business all over the map, all over the globe, joining group Zoom calls to practice these eight conversations. Really the core five are what we drilled into. We'd occasionally bump into the others, but anytime somebody would bring me a conflict problem, I would ask, Well, how's the God holding them accountable? And they'd say, Well, I haven't really been doing that. Like, all right, let's practice accountability, go do that first. So we would come together and we would practice these things. And for five years, I've learned a tremendous amount about getting busy executives to practice.

So we are a role-playing company. That's what our DNA is in getting people to practice difficult conversations. There's a lot of nuance to that. There's a lot of art.

To guiding people through an uncomfortable dialogue they've never had before. You live with that as a leadership coach when you're on site with folks all the time, right? The mental blockers of it, the I could never say that, the layers of assumptions we have to peel back that come down to that they're great, they were in grad school and got yelled at for trying that once before, so they haven't wanted to try it for 20 years. Like there's a lot we have to unpack in that process.

And it's really hard to do that because psychological safety isn't very firm in those scenarios. When they go do it with an AI tool, not to circle it all the way back to Luminaire, but when they practice this stuff with an AI tool, dude, it's incredible to watch somebody who would struggle so mightily to ever say these words with a person be very comfortable getting them out of their mouth 10 times in a row with an AI, and all of a sudden, well, the barrier's gone. It's not a big deal anymore. Psychological safety is so powerful.

John Marshall (54:53)
Mm-hmm. That's

So funny you bring that up. That in a workshop just a couple of weeks ago, I think, we had we had a participant, you know, kind of raise her hand in the back of the room and say, I could I could never say things like this.

In the conversation. We were talking about giving and receiving feed. We're talking really specifically about receiving feedback well. And the questions to ask your leader or peer to get to the useful data behind the label by which they're giving you feedback. Right. And some of the questions that were up there, and she said, It sounds sarcastic. I could never say things like this. Right? And I'm like, good.

This should feel uncomfortable. Right? Or else w why why would we be here giving this training? Right? Why would we be having this workshop if it was something that you were comfortable and natural for you? You know, so it's

Erik Berglund (56:07)
Yeah, that's what you're literally what you're paying us for, is to expose

you to something you don't know how to do yet. And a lot of the conversation then becomes, I'm assuming this, I'm assuming this is where you take it. Tell me if it's not, is like, okay, how could you say that? Right? What here's the intent, right? This is where we're going. This is what we're trying to do. Our currency is influence. We're trying to get people to do something they wouldn't do otherwise. So, like, what would it sound like in your world to say this? And

John Marshall (56:13)
Exactly.

Yep.

Erik Berglund (56:29)
There's some red flags or some, you know, some landmines you might not want to step on I can guide you through, but like in general, if we can play that game, how could you say this instead? We'll be just fine. We'll get you to do something new, powerful, and different. It's you. Because it really shouldn't be us, right? At the end of the day, like I am not the avatar for what everybody looks like or should sound like in any given setting. So I don't want them to emulate me. I really want to teach them a principle and through practice.

But it's now theirs. They say it their way. As long as we avoid those landmines, you're probably gonna be just fine.

John Marshall (57:00)
Yep, and and something you specifically said earlier was something that came up, was more of the result that you want out of the conversation. So yes, hand it back to the participant. Okay, well how would you approach this situation? What would you say? What would you ask? And in the past

How has that resulted in you getting more useful feedback? Right? How do you think that improves the result by which you're able to move forward accurately changing something that's going to make a difference? So, yes, we step into doing it their way, but then also connecting their way to their desired result. And what's the gap in between there? No. Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (57:37)
Yeah, it's important. This is an important nuance. It's definitely not their

way. it is my way th through their jargon, their lexicon, their verbiage. The process is what needs to happen. You have to do these things when you hold somebody accountable. It just

It will not work if you do not do these things. How you do those things is highly variable. And I can absolutely play in the sandbox with somebody, you're gonna do it my way. It's just gonna sound like you. So let's massage that side of it. what I don't want is if I say, How would you do it? And then they tell me how they would avoid conflict or avoid accountability to reinforce that.

John Marshall (58:12)
Yeah, exactly

what happens.

Erik Berglund (58:15)
The but the question you drew to is okay, well, how has that worked for you? You know, and really why are you

here then? If like, come on now, we gotta let's recognize we're in we're we're in we're in this room because we're trying to do things differently and better. That's not working. Let's kick around the idea. If you couldn't do that, but you also couldn't do it my way, what's in between? Like, let's start massaging in that direction. Let's go from a two to a five instead of a two to a ten. That's okay with me. I'm pretty interested in progress.

John Marshall (58:34)
Exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Well, we could go on

into several different rabbit holes that could emerge from different topics from this conversation. So I imagine we may be having another conversation in the future here as as Loominary develops as you continue to get more insights from the various industries that engage with the product. And you know, as we as Humessence get some more experience engaging with the product. But

Erik Berglund (58:52)
Yeah, okay.

John Marshall (59:06)
Just speaking to you as a person, I really appreciate the energy that you bring to this conversation, the passion, the personal nature of how your story evolved into what you teach and what you're trying to support people with. I think that really comes off in what you share with people. So I just wanted to acknowledge you for that specifically. And just

Erik Berglund (59:27)
Thank you. I really appreciate that.

John Marshall (59:32)
Thinking about your perspective on the future, right? As you look ahead and you're seeing people and organizations combined leadership development with real wisdom and practice and a thoughtful use of technology, what do you hope becomes possible when all of this comes together and organizations are implementing it at scale?

Erik Berglund (59:55)
Great question. Thank you for that. this is that that thought of that question

About a year and a half ago, I spent a significant amount of time germinating on. Like, where do I think this goes? Like, what is this AI role play thing? That's what we called it at the time. I think of them as skill simulation systems. Now it's far more complex than an AI roleplay bot. You can get Chat GPT to AI roleplay with you. It's not gonna be very good, but it's still better than nothing. But skill simulation systems, I think, will be something that will be in the native lexicon of business leaders. you know, call it five years.

John Marshall (1:00:16)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Berglund (1:00:25)
And I think what will happen is we'll look back at it and we'll tell stories. Hey, you remember how we used to do that? Like, do you remember that we used to just let we just let the new account executive be terrible at the job for two years? And then, like, if he wasn't good enough, we'd fire him. And the ones that survived we called good. Can you do you remember how silly that was and how much time we wasted interviewing and hiring the wrong people because we had no way to screen them before they came in? Like what a silly world that was. I think we're gonna look back in the same way we look back at faxes. You know, you ever go to a company that still requires you to fax?

fax

them something. I haven't seen it in years, but like could you imagine how you'd be like, well that's kind of quaint. What a weird thing. I don't even know where to go get a fax machine. We're gonna look back at an old technology and recognize that we don't have to do that anymore.

And hopefully we're gracious with ourselves because it literally didn't exist the possibility of doing this until two years ago. The the the n the nature of large language models and natural language processing and the work that's been done on voice recognition, facial recognition, body language determinant, all of that stuff didn't exist two years ago. So we shouldn't be harsh on ourselves about it. But we can look back and go, ma'am, remember dial up modems? Like, God, that screeching sound, man, I just can't it was so cute that we had those things, you know? So I think we'll look back in that way. I also think that,

There will be a layer of that professional skill intelligence that I think will really catch on as well. The ability to identify not only what does good look like in my company, but how capable and competent are

Every person on my team at doing each one of the important steps in that process such that I could look at that and determine where I need to spend my training budget. Because training shouldn't go out the window. Watching videos, going to conferences, hiring coaches, that shouldn't go out the window. It is important. What they're teaching is the right thing. You just need a reinforcement mechanism as a simulation layer added to it. None of that has to change. And so I think that professional skill intelligence layer will end up becoming the ultimate value of this. In the same way that I was on the phone yesterday with an executive. ⁓

Runs a couple billion dollars in in sales for his organization. And we were talking about how we're talking about Salesforce because his team's adopting Salesforce and how the ultimate value of Salesforce is not individual salespeople doing a better job of tracking deals. That is really important.

But the ultimate value is pipeline forecast accuracy, and especially our manufacturer, especially when it comes to what's our capacity need to look like in six, eight months? What's our deal flow look like at volume? You know, we we don't want to run it 100%. That's terrible for most manufacturers. So what do we need to scale into? If you don't have good accuracy,

John Marshall (1:02:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Erik Berglund (1:02:54)
Boy, you're gonna have a real hard time scaling that organization. And it all comes back to Salesforce. I think when they started Salesforce, they might have had that vision of, like, you know, I bet if an entire entity did this, they would have that view, and that will be our highest value, and that's why they charge what they charge. But I think that's the type of layer we'll the view we'll have on professional skill intelligence: the companies that have really well-built skill simulation systems are going to be super powered.

To identify the human capital that they have on their team and therefore what they could do with them. And I'll add one more point to it, and that's that as we add AI to companies, as we see AI becoming verticalized in certain industries more and more, the question of what do I do with the people who are good on my team.

But I don't know how to keep them. I don't even know how to know if they're good. What do I do with that talent that I already hired? I already paid the acquisition cost, right? To some degree, the 8,000 people Meta just laid off, a good chunk of those probably could be rock star performers in some capacity at Meta. What Meta lacks is the ability to know what capacity. Or they they lack the capacity to retrain them quickly on the things that drive performance in a new area. Well,

This kind of solves both of those problems. You'd know which layer you still need to get rid of, and you'd know how to reskill anybody into a different arena once AI bite takes a bite out of that size of the entity. Because it's going to, and we can either react passively and have to lay off a bunch of people and deal with the, you know, the Dario's perspective of employment in the future.

Or we can recognize that most companies aren't limited by market volume, market size. Most companies have an enormous TAM they could go serve if they just had more competent human beings to unpack the problems. This I think is gonna be a vehicle for doing that. And the companies that embrace professional skill intelligence are gonna be the ones that move really well through that type of technology change.

John Marshall (1:04:37)
Well said. Well said. I agree. Well, thank you so much for joining me here on the Present Professional.

Listeners, we will be putting links for the language of leadership, Loominary, so that you can access and learn more about the technology that we've been talking about today, the processes we've been talking about today, and ultimately interact with Erik if this is something that you're interested in adopting for your team and furthering that conversation. So you'll have access to all of that. And again, Erik

Thank you so much for being here. Is there anything else that you would want the listeners to know before we sign off today?

Erik Berglund (1:05:15)
Yeah, I would say if the concept of a demo of what your process or your excuse me, your skillful conversation needs to look like is interesting, go to the Loominary website, Loominary.io. We build free demos as a first step in any process. Let's just give you something you can play with. We believe in show, don't tell. So if you were even close to curious about it.

Click to get a book or book a call with me. We'll build you your free demo and ⁓ you can socialize it internally. And John's lived through the experience with us. We're not pushing you on the sales side. It's gotta fit your corporate objectives. So you'll have a demo to play with and when the time is aright, we'll be able to pick it up with you. But go check it out. Thanks for having me on, John. Appreciate it. Thanks for the good conversation.

John Marshall (1:05:50)
Awesome. All right. Thanks again, Erik.

Thank thank you all for tuning into the Present Professional. We will see you next time.