Ted (00:01.543)
Everyone, welcome to the Learn Podcast. We have a special guest on with us, Alexi Robichaux of Better Up. He's the CEO and co-founder. Alexi, thanks for jumping on.

Alexi (00:13.72)
Thanks for having me, Ted. Honored to be

Ted (00:16.543)
Well, we have a really fun agenda. We're going to dive deep into your world of BetterUp too. But before we get started there, can you actually get us started with an elevator pitch on yourself? Then we'll jump into elevator pitch on BetterUp and then into the core of the conversation.

Alexi (00:33.996)
I think I've ever done an elevator picture myself. I'm Alexi. I'm one of the co -founders, CEO of BetterUp and excited to be here. And I've been building software since high school and also working on helping people with leadership development and life skill development since high school strangely as well. So I've been learning a lot over the past couple of decades and excited to been able to partner up with my buddy, Eddie, who's my amazing co -founder and COO.

bring that to life at scale with Better

Ted (01:06.655)
question for you just on your history before BetterUp. Any job experience really stick out to you before founding

Alexi (01:19.352)
Yeah, that's my I was fortunate. I had really cool jobs. I started my career at the Walt Disney Company in revenue strategy function. And I think that was really, insightful in the context of startups and that, as you know, building a company, you often oftentimes do things that don't scale and you do whatever it takes. And there's a skill set and a thriftiness that comes with that and an entrepreneur, entrepreneurialness that comes with

But what's often I find is not present is knowing what good looks like at scale. And I think I was fortunate through that lens to almost learn it backwards and get to work at a great scaled company from everything from, you know, movies to operationally intensive businesses like theme parks. And that became in a way a North star for me as we built our startups. And I find that's not always present in all startups people. Sometimes they can celebrate the ineffective and the inefficient a little too long.

instead of realizing, hey, the goal is to get this thing to, I won't say a boring, but a rather predictable business that can endure for, in the case of Disney, you know, a century. So I think that was a, given that I've then mainly been attacking startups, it was an unconventional place to start, but I think it's taught a lot of lessons as a result.

Ted (02:40.093)
Isn't that funny when I walk through, speaking of your Disney experience, as entrepreneurs, when you walk through places like Disneyland, you literally look around and you're like, man, this place is operationally excellent, not a piece of garbage on the ground. And you literally get inspired just walking through a park or using the restroom and saying, wow, how they do this at scale. So really, really cool to see that those experiences have rubbed off. Well,

Alexi (02:55.832)
Totally.

Alexi (03:00.173)
That's right.

Ted (03:05.863)
Okay, so give us the elevator pitch on BetterUp. For those of you who do not know BetterUp, give us the elevator pitch on BetterUp the company.

Alexi (03:13.708)
Yeah, the easiest way to think about it is we're a platform to help companies invest and enable at scale in people's learning growth and development. And we do that in three main focus areas. We do that in leadership effectiveness. We do that in manager enablement, and we do that in what we call mental fitness or preventative mental health. And what underpins all of this is really what are the right skill sets and tool sets and mindsets.

that people need to realize their full potential at work and as a result, to be at their best and perform better on the job. And so this creates a really powerful symbiotic relationship with the employer and the employee where I in good conscience and great faith can invest in you and your own growth and development because BetterUp as a platform helps interface and connect that back to what I care about as an employer, which is let's be real, this is capitalism. I care about increasing my firm -wide performance.

And, you know, that is at its core. What coaching is like the virtue. What's the truth of coaching increased performance? A coach is good. You know, if you have a sports coach, why are the great coaches, the great coaches, cause they win more games. It's really simple. and it's the same in learning and development, the output of learning and development. Yes. Humanistically we can get, we love Maslow better up. It should be self -actualization. It should be you realizing your potential. Awesome. But when you have to score a card

it should look like doing discrete jobs better than you otherwise would have. so at its most zoomed out level, we're a platform that interfaces those two through a combination of mixed learning methods. And we lead heavily on coaching as opposed to traditional e -learning. And we can talk more about that, but we're rather scaled at this point. We operate in 90 countries. We integrate with most of the large systems of record and other digital transformation partners.

We've been really fortunate to work with kind of the who's who of global 2000 companies and we also are loved by our users and we make a lot of positive transformation in people's lives or enable them to do it. They really are the ones to do it and are having a lot of fun building the scale of the business.

Ted (05:24.575)
That's awesome, that's awesome. And then in terms of target, just to understand the business a little bit more, I believe several thousand employees you talked about in 90 countries, focus areas for companies that you would say that you really focus on at BetterUp.

Alexi (05:42.19)
Yeah, I we serve all segments, but we've been we've been precocious, I would say, for a startup in our history and that we've we've almost exclusively focused historically, and we've brought in that focus over the past few years in in large enterprise. So really, fortune 1000 to global 2000, often outside of the US. We service companies that are five people though. So we really service at all market segments, but the bulk of

revenue comes from very, very large corporations. Some of the, I think it's something like almost half, I have to count, four to five of the Fortune 10 companies are better off customers, to put that in perspective. So, and what we find is these larger companies face these problems at larger scale. So they are, you probably see this too, they're more sophisticated often in how they think about talent. Certainly when you put the scale factor

Ted (06:19.411)
Wow.

Ted (06:27.625)
Mm -hmm.

Alexi (06:36.714)
And they're willing to spend because the opportunity cost and what's to be won for them is so palpable and so realizable.

Ted (06:46.045)
I'm gonna put a pin in that comment, because I wanna hear a little bit more about your vision on how do you democratize this more to companies where maybe amazing leadership development and coaching isn't as accessible for the resources of these companies. But I'll put a pin in that too, because when I was doing my research, I was really curious what you think about the future for the rest of the world that doesn't have as much resources as the top echelon of companies. So, okay, so we have a good background on yourself.

better up the company. You know what I love? Let's jump into the meat of it too. I wanna go through a handful of topics around leadership development and coaching. When you go to better up the website itself, and I'm assuming this is in your pitch and I'd love to see it on the website, but I want to understand it a little more from the source. So you talk about digital transformation versus.

human transformation. And my old company, was Box, that was the company I was at before work ramp. Our CEO, Aaron Levy, who we've had on the show before, talks a lot about digital transformation. It's the Service Now pitch, it's the Box pitch. Everyone talks about digital transformation. Tell us about how human transformation is different and why companies need

Alexi (07:54.35)
Let's try

Alexi (08:01.922)
Yeah, I I think, you know, the parent category, what people are really talking about is they're talking about how do I transform, let's call it performance potential. I, as a CEO, as a board, I have some vision of the potential performance my business could have. And I need to kineticize that. I need to take it from potential energy to kinetic energy.

And I have different levers to do that. And at a very high lever, and you pointed to the most common one, the first lever, and it probably should, in many ways, maybe it should be first. We don't have to dispute that. It's first chronologically, I'd argue, in time, is what are the digital tools I can use to help kineticize some of that potential energy? How much time am I losing to bad business systems? How much time do I lose towards, you know,

in box's case, originally changing the name of a file with the date at the end and having five different versions and you know, revision control issues and like, how much more efficient is box now Google Docs now, right, they've solved all these and that's digital transformation. How much more efficient is my Salesforce when they don't keep their notes and customers in notebooks, but they have a system called a CRM out how much efficient are my HR teams when they don't have things in notebooks, but they have an HGM that's what that is what

digital transformation seeks to answer. It's basically saying, how can we bring platform efficiencies, increased scale factors to the operationalization of your business process? so underneath all that system, it's not system for system sake, just to name it, I'm selling you better processes. And I'm saying your business, when you break it apart, is a set of processes, and we're going to supercharge these processes. We're going to use a lot of technology to do that. We're going to do that now in the cloud. And by doing that, we're going to supercharge your business.

And we would agree with everything there. And we would say in a cause of change model, that's like not even half of the potential that you've kineticized because while your business is a lot of processes and that's true, the reality is your business is a lot of culture too. It's a lot of squishy stuff and digital transformation doesn't touch the squishy stuff by design. It's touching these business processes, but you

Alexi (10:20.822)
What salesperson is going to perform better? The salesperson who has their notes really well organized in a CRM or the salesperson who is deeply empathetic, has great discovery, can understand and walk in the shoes of the customer and has the kind of active listening skills to that. Well, it's actually a false dichotomy. The answer is every salesperson now is doing the former. So it's a new question. Like no one's competitive on digital transformation post COVID.

Like what company isn't using cloud computing? I'd love to find them. They're probably not super competitive unless they're in like a protected, you know, space, like they have a government berm around their business or something like that. Or there's some reason for that or the, you know, hip, some level of HIPAA compliance that even that can be in the cloud. The real answer to the question is it's like, yes. And it's like, you have to do that just to keep up because everyone's done it over the past 20 years. So if you still have a Salesforce, not using a CRM, good

But if you have a sales force using a CRM, you're just treading water. Everyone else is doing that too. Now what are you competing on? You're competing on your salespeople. And what determines if your salespeople are taking all that latent human potential in your business and kineticizing that. And the reality is a ton of money as you know, does in fact, is one of the biggest spins in terms of where companies spend is on the training and development of their people. is hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the U S alone.

The problem is no one's brought the systems thinking of digital transformation to this landscape. And this landscape is littered with cottage industry, littered with services vendor, littered with people with the shingle on the roof saying, I do this one little part. And so if you're trying to string this together, you don't have the vendorscape a CIO says where they can go to be a Microsoft shop or a Salesforce shop and have this all done in a seamless way where they all integrate. You literally are out there piecing and cobbling together a patchwork thing.

And it's not even they're all even digital. Half these things aren't even digital. And that is what we talk about when we say we're building a human transformation platform. How do we bring this and systematize it in the same way digital transformation did for all these business processes? How do we standardize them? How do we make sure they're empirically and evidence -based so they actually work? Because one particular risk of this market segment is snake oil. There's a lot of stuff that like feels good, sounds good. Does it really work long -term? We don't know.

Alexi (12:45.71)
And most vendors don't want to ask because the answer can be really scary if they find out. And so what we, what we are trying to do, and it's going to take us decades, maybe five to 10 decades, no joke to do it is say, what are all these jobs to be done that you're doing to kineticize the human potential of your people as a business? And how can we be a platform that makes that easy, manageable, cost -effective, more evidence -based and more measurable for both the end user, the employee, but also for you as an employer.

That was probably more pitch than you wanted, but that is how we think

Ted (13:18.783)
No, I actually had a follow up to, wanted to be a fly in the room in a sales pitch, but the follow up question I had to your walkthrough there is when you think about digital transformation, can talk about the hard ROI, like, I'm taking this process, cutting 30 minutes out of it. so we've reduced that operational process in half and you can look at the hard savings. My follow up question

What kind of hearts, how do you approach the hard savings in today's market? Like for example, do you do this by line of business? And then who do you sell that to within an organization? Do you feel like this is a CHRO need around human transformation? Or do you feel like human transformation is a CXO or line or a department leader or even CEO board level discussion? I'm really curious how you actually bring

full circle to actually sell the ROI.

Alexi (14:16.514)
Yeah, I mean, it's ultimately a board CEO level concern. mean, any year you can take any survey of what CEOs care about, and I guarantee talent's gonna be one of the top three things. It's gonna be some version of talent, culture, agility, resilience, leadership capability. Even in a JNI world, talent is still trending as one of the top three priorities, right? It's people, like the vast majority of companies today live in a knowledge economy or creative economy. The number one spin on

P &L is people as you know. So like, it makes a ton of sense when you view it that way. What doesn't make a ton of sense is how ineffectively we invest in that asset class, right? That's the bizarre part, which we're all together trying to fix. But putting that aside, who owns talent? It's the CEO, but the CEO owns everything. So they often delegate in many ways to the CHRO or Chief People Officer. And so we often enter there. So it's a conversation with the CHRO.

and often with line of business leaders, the rest of the C -suite or even the CEO. In terms of ROI, for sure, when you vert, like we have a sales performance solution and you know, I'm thinking of three companies. One is one of the largest insurers in the world. One is a very large enterprise software company. Another is a very large enterprise software and services company. And all of those, yes, when you get verticalized, we integrate with Salesforce.

I mean, we can show when people are using our products and they're working on these skills, we can predictably see in these ranges, we've seen anywhere from the teens to 20 plus percent increase and team quota attainment just when managers are using BetterUp. That's huge. So yes, very, very measurable. Sales is always maybe the most measurable job. So let's put that on one side. But even when you're talking about traditional HR metrics, I mean, you can look at retention. We integrate with Workday.

You can look at cohort -based retention effects. There's so much data out there. I think that's, know, scientifically, one of the coolest things we've done in the enterprise, and the teams deserve all their credit, is there's 30 years of advanced behavioral science. But most companies adoption of that has been rate limited by the vendor suite and the stack that brings it. And there really hasn't been someone who said, hey, we're going to take these products and build them with these outcomes in view.

Alexi (16:37.324)
honor the science of how to best move them. And then we're going to do the piping and the enterprise on top of your digital transformation landscape. We're not, we're going to honor that and build on the shoulders of giant. don't replace digital transformation. We wouldn't work without it. Like let us embed in that and show you higher ROI in that. And also show you the ROI on what we're

Ted (16:59.081)
You know, this will lead into my next question, but what you, what you talked about is spot on where one of my biggest challenges running work ramp is how do you measure productivity and non customer facing roles? And so I think customer facing roles we have, a lot of us have a well instrumented with the gongs of the world, Salesforce's of the world. You can literally see what down to the emails sent a day, how productive someone is and how effective they're being in the field, whether you're on the post sales or pre -sale side.

But you have so many of these roles internally that the KPIs aren't super clear, right? Think about engineering teams, think about operational teams internally. It's really hard to tell like, am I getting the most out of my people? And I think I've come to my own conclusion, you correct me if I'm wrong, is that leadership development is the number one place where you have control over the productivity.

of your line team members or the largest part of your employee population. And so it's a long -winded way to ask you if you agree that, leadership development is probably your highest leverage point in investing back in human transformation. And if so, love to kind of just get your state of the world on like, when you meet with customers, are you like,

Leadership development is like still in the 90s or early 2000s when everyone else is way far ahead on AI and digital transformation. We're just way behind, but I want to hear from you. Where do you feel like leadership development is today?

Alexi (18:35.406)
I mean, leadership development is this really interesting, I don't know what the word is, paradox, conundrum. Leadership is the most written about subject in the world empirically. And it's probably the most written about because it's still the least understood. And I think it's always going to be the case. The reality is there is not a fixed corpus of leadership. I think there's atomic skills and there's this finite amount of them,

Leadership, know, me just talking as me here, it's about context. And so as the world changes, as the situations change, if you think about a framework like situational leadership, the instances of leadership are infinite or approach, you know, a limit that is infinity. And so I think it's going to always be this evergreen. And then you, you put a big technological shift in like, Jenny, I, put a big economic or geopolitical shift in like we've seen in the world, the big

you know, who would have thought like epidemiological shift in with COVID and any old subject of leadership needs to be reinstantiated here and now. And so I think because of that, it is really evergreen. And I think that's because to your point, it's one of the most potent levers we have at our disposal. I think the caution is it can be evergreen. That's okay. But can it be more defined? You know, can it, we can, it's still gotta be,

What would be the right word? I don't, manageable, no pun intended, right? Like how do we make it manageable? And I think we're going through a big shift now in leadership, which is causing a lot of this stuff to change. And I mean, we opened with it, but the shift right now in leadership, just to name it is it's about performance. And like it should have maybe always been about that, but the last 10 years, if you read the zeitgeist and you know, probably did a bunch of sentiment analysis on leadership blogs.

They were very focused on employee experience, whatever you want to call that, which is the experience of followership. And there was a truth to that competitive labor market, you're competing for top talent. So, but today it's really about, Hey, the output of leadership I need as a model is productivity and performance. and I want people to feel good to the extent they perform good. and it's not to say that there's not a humanism to feeling good for the sake of feeling good is important. I think we'd all believe that, but.

Alexi (21:02.092)
Fast forward to, you know, go back three years, there was definitely investments and people feeling good. I believe that one day will lead for performance. Okay. Now the causal chain is reduced to like directly show me that that is tying to performance to your point. And I think that's a, that's a Renaissance for leadership. In fact, I think it's an inversion. and so I think we're seeing, you know, we often think of leadership as this parent category of management and that's supported in it category.

and Steve Denning has some real writing on this, that historically is not true. It used to be that management was the parent category and leadership was the subordinate. And that got flipped in the 70s. And I think what we're seeing now is it kind of flipped back to actually what I want is management and I need leadership as a skill set to manage my business.

Ted (21:50.22)
If you're someone in the audience and you just have this inkling that, my leadership development needs to improve. I'm curious if you've seen this in your customer base, if a customer just says, our leaders are not attuned to, let's say, move to a performance -driven culture and I'm bought into human transformation. Where would you say the best effort is put initially?

You know, I'll just I'm just I'm just kind of brainstorming out loud here. For example, would you tell a company to say, know, you got to really revamp your onboarding of leaders? So that's just an example. I don't know if that's true or not. But what would you say if you're a company who thinks their leadership development is not in a great spot? Where would you what would you attack first in terms of trying to solve that problem?

Alexi (22:32.333)
I mean, first I'd say kudos. You're probably right.

I think most companies can improve here. I think most companies, I mean, we talked to companies who want to improve here. think there's a lot of self -awareness they can. We can get into that. think there's some real structural things that just don't honor the science of how humans learn and change. So they're just never going to work because they're disconnected from our anthropology. But putting that aside, I think one of the emerging things in the past couple of

10 probably, but for sure since COVID, I think of it as like the silent killer of management effectiveness is what's called emotional labor. And emotional labor is, know, Bureau of Labor Statistics track it. can, it's, didn't make this up. It's the percent of time that managers or workers spend on emotional matters. And the reality is management's percent of labor as emotional labor is

And this is stuff you don't design into your roles. When you're like sitting around as a ELT or C -suite, you're just like, let's make sure to reduce everyone's workload by 40 % of their managers so they have time to deal with all the emotional stuff from their team. Said like no C -suite ever, right? But the reality is that's what they're doing when you look at where they spend their time. And so what we routinely

Ted (23:56.383)
Is like 50 % plus or what? I haven't heard that statistic, is it like, I'm more of the scale in general. You don't have to have the exact number. I'm super curious,

Alexi (24:05.738)
Yeah, it's I think I mean, you know, it would yes, you're that's that's the right scale. I think you're thinking about that as the right scale. Like, it's for sure varied by industry, right? It's for sure varied by industry. But the main point is, I mean, it could be anything, right? It could be it could be less, it could be more. The main thing is, I think it's it's news to

Ted (24:11.506)
Wow.

Alexi (24:28.3)
Right? That's, that's the main thing is that we're not designing around it. And we kind of latently know this. We say, being a manager, everyone's gotta be a coach. Now, sometimes they're a therapist, like you all these tropes in the worlds of media, you know, and like business insider headlines, right? and there's truth to them. And I think that's why they resonate is because, know, anyone who manages like, yeah, that's my lived experience. I'm dealing with everything from a project to then someone's home life, to the relationship, to then their childcare situation all in one day.

And look, when Peter Drucker was writing about management, that wasn't a thing. You didn't do that in the 1950s for right or wrong. So it just wasn't a factor to consider the messy world, the interconnected world, the lack of these, I don't want to say boundaries anymore, but like we're more a mesh technology and meshes things better. So work is more integrated into our life for better or for worse, which means emotions.

are integrated into our life because that's what life mainly is as a way of experience. It's a bunch of emotions. Okay, so if I have a single lever to go activate my leadership button, I have to ask, what's the gap? Almost never do we find the gap is people don't know the stuff. Like people have been beaten over the head with knowledge transfer in last 10 years. There's a million learning tools. I mean, now there's AI, you don't even have to take a class. You can just start asking socratically chat GPT something and get answers like,

If there's curiosity in the age of the internet, there is no lack of knowledge. It's there. It's almost never, we didn't create the right training. That's why our man, no, it's almost always they don't have the curiosity, the motivation to do it, or they have that and it's being weighed down by they are overwhelmed. They are drowning in a sea of emotional labor and they don't have the role design. They don't have the skill set. They don't even have their manager naming.

that that's what I am asking you to do, not knowing that that's what I'm asking you to do. Because I just said, the project done on time. I didn't realize in the process of doing that, you're dealing with one person, least someone who doesn't have child care, someone who's working from home with their partner also working from home. And people are yelling in the background. So like, I didn't even compute all that anymore. But that's what you're actually dealing with. And so the single lever for me, if you're going to ask is, that what's that lever that levers around that's around

Alexi (26:48.108)
self -awareness, that's around skill sets, that's around mindsets, that's just let's call that like behavior change. That's the lever. And that lever is not a learning knowledge gap, it's a doing practice gap. And doing and practice requires a different pedagogical tool than transmitting knowledge. I can learn how to be an Olympic swim, I can learn to swim from YouTube. I cannot learn to be an Olympic swimmer from YouTube. The only way I learn to be an Olympic swimmer is to spin about

a decade of my life, and I'm already too old, I have a ton of coaches who are helping me compete, practice, giving that real time feedback. And so when you're talking about behavior change, the pedagogical tool to use is practice and coaching. It's not knowledge transfer. And so for me, that's the single lever. And it roots why it's so potent and powerful right now is it's the biggest, I don't want to call it time sync, but it's

under the water lurking in how your managers are spending their time. And then senior leaders like, there may be, I have a frozen middle or they're lazy or they're working on the wrong things. Those might all be true, but it may be, it may just be because they're actually doing something that you didn't realize you asked them to

Ted (28:05.885)
You're so spot on. had me reflect on our category, the LMS category where we essentially are a tool you can use to distribute knowledge. But we have a lot of customers that come back and say, Hey, I haven't seen the culture change. want to change. was like, look, we can only go so far from a tooling standpoint, but kind of stops at a certain point and pass that it's really on our customer. Obviously we could advise, but it's really on them to push.

Alexi (28:14.038)
Mm -hmm.

Ted (28:33.213)
the behavioral change, and I think you just made that so clear is that I'm assuming that's really the value better up also really evangelizes is, hey, we will take your infrastructure, your digital transformation, all of your investments and take it through the last mile and really get you the results you wanna see too.

Alexi (28:51.724)
Yeah. And you need all that. Like you need an LMS, like that you need to give the knowledge. And if you have a particular way you want to do a process or a particular, you want someone to manage your lead, you owe them the training and the enablement materials to do that. But if you're talking about how to have a one -on -one as a manager or how to give a performance review, let's take something like a classic pitfall of management where we all struggle. I got to watch the videos for sure, but I got to be able to practice that in a safe space

not live ammunition, which is what happens. Like if you think about it, work, especially if you're in a high growth industry, used to be mainly just startups, but now we see big cap companies are very high growth too, is the only endeavor of elite human performance that I can think of where there is essentially by design, no practice.

Sports, practice to perform ratio, special operators in the military. I mean, they almost never perform compared to practice, right? Mission time is a fraction of practice time. Sports, like if you're Olympian, you're spending years training, doing other meets, but the Olympics is a very small part of you. Even if you're a football player, you play a game once a week, basketball a little more, baseball about, you know, a little more, but we're expected as a worker, every moment's just the Super Bowl and you have to be Tom Brady.

Ted (29:46.675)
Yep. Yep.

Alexi (30:14.922)
or you're not up to this job. It's just ridiculous when you think about it. And so what we wanna do when you ask about what that lever is, what do I wanna do as a CEO? I wanna create more space for you to practice. And practice is not like follow your bliss. Practice is I want you to get the feedback, I want you to get the accountability, I want you to get the support so you are getting better in a measurable

Ted (30:39.539)
You're spot on. remember, I remember the first time I had to lay off an executive, I asked my coach, was like, role play this because I didn't want to go in there cold, but who else is the CEO going to role play with? Right? Like I'm not going to go role play with a subordinate. And it was so helpful though, right? To change it from, this very HR speak type of script to just a very emotionally centered, like, Hey, here's the, here's the data. I'm sorry, we have to do this, but it just made that conversation.

Alexi (30:48.054)
That's right.

Alexi (30:57.048)
Totally.

Ted (31:08.479)
work so much better, but it's all because of the role play with the coach, right? Someone really will practice with me. I wanna go to one last topic before we end this conversation. Actually comes back to emotional labor. I think there's a really, so I will met recently beginning into Huberman, into all his mental health stuff. And so I have a affinity to this right now, where you talked about the second product that you have around mental fitness. I even went onto your help site

Alexi (31:12.216)
That's right.

Alexi (31:28.77)
Okay, cool.

Ted (31:38.119)
and you really define mental fitness versus mental health, but give us your view on emotional labor mixed in with mental fitness. Like there's this whole emotional part and wellbeing part of being inside a company. Give us your take on like, where do you think an employer and leadership team should really be leaning in here? Where should they not be leaning in as well?

Alexi (31:49.891)
Yeah.

Alexi (32:04.91)
Yeah, I mean, look, let me go back to what we discussed earlier. cause for me, it's the jumping off point. we're in a knowledge economy, mainly a creative economy, the unit of productivity. We should just name it is people's minds. Most of us are not paid to do physical things anymore. Now that's not exclusively true. And even people doing physical things. mean, this is the brilliance of Toyota and Kaizen. Even that becomes a very mentally.

Intensive labor, right? Like you get better at building cars even with your body when your minds are aligned a certain way You have a certain system of thinking you're learning as you go. So even even Physical labor done right is enlightened by the mind to get like super performance. So what are we really talking about? We're talking about the mind. Okay Well, here's another really important thing as we think about this you don't experiencing anything in the world outside of your head like not to get too philosophical but

You know, I'm not having a direct conversation with you. You're having a conversation with my mind, technically. And like, I'm interpreting this and who knows how many ways, why is this important? Because if my mind is not right, then I'm living in a different reality or I have a different experience of this. So when we talk about management, when we talk about productivity, we talk about all that, we often skip over the most obvious thing, which is all of this is interface between two ears in our head.

And what matters in there, it's like saying the sky is blue, but we forget it. If this isn't right, if I have a propensity to catastrophize, I always think the worst in everything that I hear, or I can't shut off these behaviors or whatever. I'm a micro pathological micromanager, whatever we may get into. That is going to show up in my productivity. And so we often think of these things as character based and sometimes they

But what we're saying with mental fitness is just like physical fitness, mental fitness is not the removal of mental illness. It's the optimization of mental health. Just like physical fitness, I'm not physically healthy merely because I'm not sick. I'm physically healthy because I'm healthy. In fact, I can be physically healthy and some days be sick. Those two can coexist. The same with mental fitness. I can be mentally fit and still have a mental illness. But most of us only think of mental

Alexi (34:28.118)
as the removal of mental illness. And what three decades of science is telling us is actually mental health is the capacity to be cultivated. And so we use the word mental fitness to disambiguate from the cultural kind of baggage of mental health is the removal of mental illness. And when I do that, what is the, how do I measure that system? It's performance. Mentally healthy people like physically healthy people are more fit.

They can lift more weights, they can run longer, like they can do the equivalent. They can do more emotional labor without burning out. The real risk of emotional labor, just in this week, we go through 20 of these examples, is managers who do increasing shares emotional labor without the adequate support are much higher risk of burnout. We know that burnout is contagious. When a manager is burnt out, their team is at particular risk of burnout. It spreads like an epidemic.

We know toxicity in the workplace as a result of these two things also has a viral coefficient and spreads. And all of this starts one or two people's heads and how they show up in the world. And so one of the greatest investments you can make as a leader is to realize that in this world of like constant change, helping people manage their psychology is one of the greatest gifts you can give them. And it's helping people be healthy. It's not like a separate, there's not

the corporate guide to managing psychology versus what's good for people. They're the exact same thing when people are more buoyant, when they're more resilient, when they have more, like they better at their jobs, they're better spouses, they're better parents, they're better partners, they're better humans. That's the beauty of this is for too long we've thought of these as two different goals. It's the same goal. It's like create better human beings. You reap the resort as a capitalist business owner. You also reap the resort.

as an altruist humanitarian. It's the same thing. You're optimizing one system.

Ted (36:22.527)
Do you feel, the last question I have here is, you feel like there is, so we talked about performance as the key KPI for mentally fit employees. Do you think there will ever be a KPI we can look back on that's outside of performance? I can imagine there's actually no people who perform really well, but then maybe go home to their partners and say, man, I'm super burnt out. Like, give me a new job. Yet they perform on the surface really well.

Alexi (36:46.892)
Holy. Yeah.

Ted (36:50.813)
What do you think is the KPI we should be looking for to measure the mental fitness of our teams?

Alexi (36:58.028)
Yeah, I mean, there's actually a whole construct of that and organizational site called the engaged, exhausted and worker. In fact, often your most engaged workers are the most at risk of burnout. So you can think of a lot and look, and this is, this is all on a relative basis. Like if I'm more mentally fit, I will do better than I are. It doesn't mean I'll definitely do better than you because skill sets matter. Maybe you, I don't have the skills to do the job. So no amount of me being like center is going to help me be a better salesperson. Cause you know, so we should just clarify our statements here.

When in the spirit of optimizing your workforce, in general, at a population level, people are going to perform better than they otherwise would if they are in the right headspace, if they have the right psychological skills. Like I think that we can say pretty undisputedly. I don't know that there's one silver bullet. If there was, it would be psychological resilience. But there's probably a handful. We use multiple of these in our BetterUp care

But psychological resilience is very indicative. There's about 2000 plus studies on just the most common construct comes from thread, Lutherans and psych psychological capital. and psychological resilience has been found to be correlative and causative with everything from higher civic behaviors in the workplace, productivity, retention, reduction, and intent to leave. So all these things that you care deeply about. And I think the reason for that is at its core resilience is about

the ability to respond to adversity with triumph and to actually get better because of it. It's like the ultimate learning ability. And so yes, I would probably throw some other stuff in there, like on the negative side, screening for burnout, some of these other things. But if you had to pick one metric, it would be measure people's psychological resilience. And if you saw that increase, as you saw that increase in your workforce,

I think what you will find and what our customers find is you see a host of other behaviors also improve.

Ted (38:56.069)
or just get the better of happen, they'll tell you.

Alexi (38:59.17)
Yeah, that's right. For sure. For sure. But like this stuff transcends better. We just operationalize it at scale, but we didn't invent this. Like this is like so well researched. And it makes sense. Like when I talk to CEOs, the most common frustration I hear is a concern about the fragility of their workforce. The world is swirly. Everything's changing. Sometimes it's an emotional facility for fragility. Sometimes it's like a

Ted (39:03.197)
Yeah, totally.

Ted (39:19.465)
Thank you.

Alexi (39:28.622)
Can they just change fast enough for agility? Right? Are they just too rigid? But it's somewhere in this resilience anti fragility continuum. I don't know what change is coming, but I know change is coming. My team already looks really knackered to use the British ism and really tired. And if you know, the next model of AI comes out and it's even more disruptive at an exponential factor, are these folks going to have what it takes? And it's a fair question.

Okay, what's the antidote to that? mean, there's a personal level, there's a team level, there's an org level, it's all working together. But at the personal level, what we're talking about in great part is that person's capacity as, it would be called a psychological resource, but we're talking about resilience.

Ted (40:17.267)
Yeah, and to close the conversation, think just this whole conversation has, I think, taught us that, hey, you basically have one of two decisions as a company. You can either turn a blind eye to it and just say, you know what, we're marching ahead and I don't really care how everyone feels. We're just going to go do it. Or you open the blinders and look transparently at your org, see how you can fine tune it and prep it to be resilient. And obviously that's what BetterUp is really.

positioning in the market too, but I love how you've really studied this and you're providing the tools for companies to analyze it and to remediate it and become better organizations. Back to your human transformation pitch, Alexi, that was amazing. So other questions I want to ask you, but we are out of time. I'll have to ask those offline because I was super curious things from AI coaching to where do see the future of better up to, but we'll say those for another time, Alexi.

Thanks so much for jumping on. This was an amazing conversation.

Alexi (41:16.386)
Thank you, Todd. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me, Todd.

Ted (41:21.191)
All right.