Promoted but Unprepared: How AI Coaching Is Helping New Leaders

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Hey, it's your favorite co-worker, Anne, and this is the All Things Work podcast. Getting promoted is supposed to feel exciting, right? It's a sign your hard work has paid off and your company is believing in you. But for many leaders, that excitement is quickly followed by another feeling: now what?

You've completed the leadership training, you've attended the workshops, maybe you've even worked with a coach. Yet when you're suddenly responsible for leading people, making high-stakes decisions, and driving business results, many realize they still don't feel prepared.

Coaching new leaders to help them feel more prepared is a challenge many organizations face. Now, AI is opening the door to a new approach — not to replace the human connection, but to enhance it. It might sound counterintuitive at first, but when done right, AI has the potential to make coaching more tailored, measurable, and ultimately more impactful than ever before.

I'm really excited to dig into that idea today with two people helping shape this shift. Alex Marcus and Jaimi Albers are the co-CEOs and co-founders of Mento, an AI and human-led leadership coaching platform. Mento combines certified coaching with experienced business operators and AI-powered insights to help leaders improve performance.

Today, we're diving into why traditional coaching models may no longer be enough, how AI is helping address the gap in leadership development when incorporated thoughtfully, and where organizations need to tread carefully. I'm super excited to have Alex Marcus and Jaimi Albers joining us today. They both come with incredible backgrounds at the intersection of tech and leadership development, with experience at companies like Disney and Google. So Alex, Jaimi, welcome to All Things Work.

Jamie: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Alex: It's a pleasure to be here. We're big fans.

Anne: I'm so happy to hear that. So I want to kick things off with you, Jaimi. You have a really unique story that I would love our audience to learn more about. You were working at a company where you found yourself quickly promoted to the C-suite level, yet you said in one of your blogs that you actually felt very unprepared for that position. Can you tell us more about your story and how it really kicked off you and Alex starting Mento?

Jamie: Yeah. It was about 10 years ago, and I was working at an Alphabet company — so Google's parent company — out in New York. It was an incredible company called Jigsaw. In true early tech fashion, I had the opportunity to join the C-suite. They promoted me, and I had actually never even been a manager before.

So suddenly I had direct reports, and I was around a table of very senior, very accomplished leaders. I was most certainly in over my head. My CEO had actually just gotten an executive coach, and growing up I played a lot of sports, so this idea of a coach felt very natural to me.

But what you learn in the world of sports is that most often your coach has played the game. And so that's what I wanted — a coach who had operated, who had been a younger female in executive levels, someone who matched my situation. It was very hard to find, but I eventually found her, and it completely changed my life and my work.

It helped me navigate the new terrain and the frontier of management, but also the day-to-day realities of suddenly finding myself needing to operate at a much more senior level. I referred her to all of my friends. I said, "Oh my gosh, everyone needs this coach. She's absolutely amazing." And they said, "In what world do you think that we can expense a coach like you can?" And I said, "That's a really good point. I happen to be in a very lucky position where I was able to do that."

It was about that time that I met Alex, who had also played sports growing up — so the concept of coaching was very natural to him — and who had also been very much shaped by mentors in his career. So we said, "Hey, we need to make this more accessible. This is where the future of work is going, where we're consistently going to be finding ourselves in new terrain, and we need support from people who have been in that seat."

We need coaches who can help us not just develop more self-awareness and uncover our blind spots, but can also bridge that gap — take something tactical and immediately go have that conversation with a C-suite peer you've been putting off for weeks, or go have that performance conversation. So that's the origin story of Mento and why we're all here today.

Anne: I love it. And this is a question for both of you. Years later — and you said that was 10 years ago — we're still seeing professionals put in manager or even senior leadership positions who feel completely underprepared, even if they've gone through some form of training. So why do we think this gap still exists today? What are the key factors here?

Alex: Training and coaching has existed for a long time. It's not something that we created, but as we started the company and learned more about the space and reflected on our own personal experiences, it became clear that people easily grow tired of traditional coaching and training and want more out of it. We also saw that coaches very often don't have backgrounds in the fields of the people they're coaching, and therefore aren't able to help people drive their performance in their role or get tactical in a coaching session.

Jamie: I love that question, Anne, because I think about it every day. Work has been going on for many decades — why haven't we figured out how to help people perform their best? The thing I always come back to is that work is really about people, and trying to get people to accomplish a certain task, goal, or initiative.

The reality is that people are complicated. We all have different wants, needs, desires, communication styles, histories, perspectives, and skills. Bringing a group of people together consistently to achieve objective goals — whatever they are for the business and for themselves — requires support and guidance to do that most effectively.

And the urgency around the problem has only increased, because we're also dealing with the challenges that come with this AI transformation. We're constantly finding ourselves navigating new terrain. We have the technology, but the real question is: how do you get people together to use that technology most effectively?

Anne: Exactly, and I love that you hit the nail right on the head with that. We are seeing so many advancements — not just in AI, but major shifts across the board — and upskilling and reskilling have been top topics for the past few years. So that's why we're here talking about it today. Alex, I want to turn it to you. You and Jaimi have created the 80/20 rule for coaching. Can you walk us through what that is and why it has proven to be effective?

Alex: The 80/20 rule stands for 80% coaching, 20% mentorship. It's the concept and the framework that we train all of our coaches in, through which we encourage them not just to use their learned skills as certified coaches, but also to use their lived experiences to support their clients and help them develop in their roles.

So a Mento coach is coaching roughly 80% of the time, using inquiry-based questions, helping someone better understand their own strengths, growth areas, and goals. However, when permissioned, we want a Mento coach — and this is where our coaching is different — to be able to take off their coaching hat and put on their mentor hat and get into the weeds with a client.

If you are a coach who's been a CFO and you're working with a director of finance, you should be able to have your client pull up a P&L and jump into the details with them. If you are a coach who is a VP of engineering working with a client who's an engineering leader, you should understand what it's like to manage engineers and collaborate with product managers or designers. We want our coaches to be able to take advantage of that understanding and use it to influence their coaching and their line of questioning. That's really what the 80/20 model is all about.

Anne: And I love that you differentiated between coaching and mentorship, because I feel like people might blend the two.

Alex: People may blend the two, but often — especially in the learning and development and talent development space — people really try to separate them and say, "Here's what coaching is and here's what it's not." Coaching with a capital C is not consulting.

But when we got to know coaches, especially those with great backgrounds as business leaders and operators, we learned that those coaches wanted to use their lived experience. They knew they had great opportunities to positively impact their clients and their performance at work by mentoring them. So at Mento, rather than fading away from that gray area and saying it's something to avoid as a coach, we said, "Let's lean into that and lean into the practical realities of what you would do as a great coach to support a client."

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So let's dive into AI's role in all of this. A lot of people, when it comes to coaching and mentorship, may think that AI makes that relationship feel less human no matter what role it plays, but you've taken the opposite approach with Mento. Why do you believe AI can actually strengthen — and not weaken — the coaching relationship, and how are you using that in practice right now?

Jamie: So many thoughts on this. At the center is the human — the human coach and the two people in the session. That is a foundational philosophy for us: it needs to start from the human experience. The reason why is that we love AI and we love technology, but it hasn't yet quite gotten to the point where it can create the behavior change that can happen in a coaching session.

At the end of the day, a coaching session is co-created. You and your coach are working together to generate new insights and actually drive behavior change. So where AI can be helpful — and where we're focusing first — is in helping people take their insights and discoveries and what they need to change, and actually apply it in the flow of work.

The challenge is that sessions go by very quickly. An hour flies by, and even despite my best efforts to take notes, I look back and they make no sense whatsoever. And then you hop into another meeting, and it kind of sticks in the back of your mind: "I need to do that. I need to have that conversation."

The beauty of AI is that it can capture the key insights — leveraging the prompts and the information we've built in-house, all of our expertise — so that a member leaves a session knowing: what was this session really about? What was the core insight and takeaway? What were those few things my coach shared that I want to go apply? Whether that's a specific conversation, tweaks to the product road map, or just a different way to think about a relationship or a situation.

And the goal here is to help you understand your patterns and behaviors — the things that AI does really well and that humans do not. It's not just about an individual session; it's also longitudinal. It's hard to see our own growth, but AI can help us do that. So where we're really focused today is leveraging AI for what it does very well — complementing and enhancing the human experience and making it more effective.

Anne: I love that. Alex, do you have any thoughts to add to that?

Alex: Jamie said it really well. AI is incredible at understanding context and bringing context into environments where we previously weren't able to access it. Bringing AI into human coaching is just an extension of what we've always done around this concept of coaching with context.

Anne: This is a question for both of you as well, and Jaimi, you touched on it a little bit — can we elaborate more on how AI can play a role in helping leaders translate coaching conversations into better business decisions? Because we know that can get complex.

Jamie: What we do today in terms of using AI to improve how leaders make business decisions and transfer their coaching into their work is by leveraging our own AI intelligence platform that sits within the coaching experience. We're able to capture the coach's guidance, the decisions that were made, what the session was really about — and then we make that accessible to members directly in the flow of their work outside of coaching.

For example, perhaps one of the things you decided was that you feel passionately about making a change to the product road map, and you want to go have that conversation with your boss — something you workshopped with your coach. Now you can actually access that insight, the language you were going to use, the conversation you were going to have.

That not only helps you translate coaching outside of the session, it helps you perform at your best and have exactly the type of conversation you want to have — so you don't get caught up in the heat of the moment. But also so you actually have that conversation. It can be good to talk about something in a coaching session in theory, but actually having that conversation, pitching an idea, or showing up differently in a relationship — that's the hard work.

The more that we can bring that directly into people's flow of work, the better. There's a term we play around with on our product side: ambient growth. It shouldn't be so hard to make behavior change or grow in your role. The more ways we can help people do that naturally, the better — and AI can almost certainly play a role there. Because as much as we love people, and the human is at the center of the experience, you only have a coaching session every other week.

Anne: Exactly. I personally had a career coach for a bit — shout out to Joanne Jasett, she was awesome — and now my brain is going, what if I used AI tools to assist me? What could I have done to make that more efficient, maybe to role-play some conversations or think something through? I love that you brought that up. It just makes me go back in time and think, "What could I have done differently?" And now I'm thinking, "What can I do differently moving forward?" I hope our audience can walk away with that same mindset.

So Alex, bringing up your tech background — everyone who comes to AI or technology always asks: how do we make sure there are no issues, no malpractice? Where do you think organizations should really be thoughtful or even cautious when it comes to introducing AI into their leadership development strategy?

Alex: AI now persists in all parts of work. It's in your Slack, it's in your Teams, it's in your spreadsheets, it's in your Word documents. On every cloud-based platform you use, there's some form of AI. It's able to track your work, help you port your information from one platform to the next, and better grab business context and bring it into whatever you're doing.

What's important, though, is that AI continues to be a tool that allows people to amplify their own work and do their work more effectively. What AI cannot be is Big Brother. It can't be a way for businesses to spy on or be more watchful over their employees in unethical ways.

This is especially important for us, because what is the most critical part of coaching? Confidentiality. Coaching is a safe space — a place where you feel comfortable speaking your mind. There's a sacred nature to the coaching space, and it's why our users love it so much. It's why we see a 4.94 out of five star average rating in coaching across more than four years of tracking that metric.

So when we think about how coaching insights can benefit a business without compromising confidentiality, that's a big challenge we're actively working through. Businesses want to understand ROI, just like they do with any other vendor. The AI tools we've built allow them to better understand the impact of coaching upon their workforce and across groups — so they can make informed decisions about how to continue investing in it — while keeping individual coaching sessions confidential.

Anne: Right — because I think it can be quite easy, especially with how busy everyone is day to day, to become a little over-reliant on AI. And I think it's super important to keep in mind what you said: maintaining confidentiality, avoiding bias, and making sure it remains a fair and respected process. Jaimi, do you have anything to add to that as well?

Jamie: Yeah. What we're hearing from our partners and HR leaders is that everyone is trying to strike the right balance: how do we leverage AI to help people, and where do we keep it human? AI still doesn't help us create judgment and empathy — the things that really challenge our perspective in the way a human can. And of course, it doesn't have the same lived experience as your coach.

But the question we're hearing more and more is about enhancement and growth — especially in the coaching space. The promise of coaching is huge. You're going to come into coaching for six months or a year and completely change as a leader. That's an incredible privilege to facilitate, and companies are invested in supporting that. And there's so much more we can do to help people achieve that goal faster, deepen their growth, and cascade what a leader is learning down to their team, their peers, or their manager.

I think we're a little bit past the moment of "just toss AI tools at everyone and they'll suddenly become the best leaders of their lives." People are people. We all have a ton going on. Tossing a ton of AI tools at people is probably not going to take us to the promised land. But with that said, the tools that already work really well can get a lot better, and that opens up new avenues for HR leaders to explore — and for us, of course.

Anne: It is amazing where we are now.

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Okay, so this brings us to the question everyone tuning in really wants answered: where do we start? For the HR professional who wants to speak with their team about how AI might help improve leader and manager support at their organization, what are some questions they can start asking today to begin that productive conversation?

Alex: At the end of the day, it's about improving existing processes. People who are in product are going to continue working on product, but they're going to do it better. People in marketing are going to continue doing marketing, but they're going to do it better. And people in coaching are going to continue coaching, but they're going to do it more effectively.

So I think looking at existing processes, understanding where there are inefficiencies, and exploring how things might be able to happen faster or work might be able to be done better — that's the starting point. For us, we think coaching is an incredible frontier to begin that journey.

Jamie: What I would say is that it really starts from the problem. What are the challenges you're trying to solve? What are the talent challenges you're working on as an HR leader?

What we see most often right now is that there's a lot of pressure on HR teams to wave their magic wand and usher in the AI transformation. HR leaders are constantly hearing from their managers: "What are we doing about it?" So the questions I would start with are: what is our goal, where do we want to be, and what can tools do to help facilitate this? But also: how do we make sure we're equipping people to actually make the change?

We've been so focused on the tooling over the past few years, and now the pendulum is finally swinging back. HR leaders we know are having conversations about what kinds of behavior changes they want to see with their talent. And having those conversations often leads us to the right solution.

We had a great example of a customer where the budget was being redirected to AI transformation — no one in L&D was actually getting their budget anymore. But through this series of questioning, they realized that the core behavior changes they wanted their leaders to make were really human. They wanted leaders to innovate, navigate ambiguity, manage the mindset of their teams, and redesign workflows. And a lot of that isn't about handing someone a tool. It's about behavior change and implementation.

That's the line of questioning I would pursue — and it's a conversation we're seeing shift a lot. Hopefully it also puts HR leaders in a better spot where they're not just being told, "All right, get everyone to use ChatGPT. Good luck."

Anne: That's the last thing you want to hear. So thank you, Alex and Jaimi, for that. For many people managers, they're trying to lead their teams while also figuring out how AI fits into their own work. So how can people managers use AI to become better coaches and leaders on a personal level — even if their company doesn't implement a specific program or strategy — without becoming overly reliant on it? Striking that balance, as you mentioned, Jaimi.

Jamie: I can just personally share what I do. I think the things that AI is great at are helping you uncover your blind spots and coming up with great coaching questions. Someone could say to AI, "Help me prepare for my one-on-one with this person, with my direct report." And I'll do things like look at all of our conversations — on Slack, in our docs, wherever — and ask: Where am I not seeing something? Where might my team member need my support? What questions should I be asking them? How do I think they're doing? How could I better support them as a leader?

These are all things that AI is great at, because it can process a ton of information very quickly, and we all have a lot of blind spots — not only about how we show up, but also about what's going on with our team members. That's a big way I use AI, and it's tremendously helpful. It's about expanding my capability and capacity as a manager in ways that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

Anne: That's amazing. Alex, for our final thoughts — do you have anything to add? Because I feel like that applies to both the manager level and the individual professional. If you're entering a one-on-one, "What can I ask my manager?" How can you do this even as reverse mentorship, as we call it here at SHRM? There are different ways to go about it, not just for the people manager, but for the individual professional and the HR professional as well.

Alex: Whether it's using AI to help you be a better coach, understanding coaching questions you can ask, or asking AI to observe different parts of your work and let you know how you can grow — it's really about being in a growth mindset.

Whether you are the CEO of a company, on an executive team, a midlevel manager, or a new grad just entering the workforce, everybody has the opportunity to grow and be coached. That's one of the things we love most about Mento: regardless of where you are in your career arc, your life, or your organization, you have incredible opportunities to grow. AI has the ability to help you observe and pursue that growth — and it's about being receptive to those coaching insights, because we all can improve.

Anne: Exactly. And AI might even help you become a better mentor for someone else in the future. You just never know. It's a really great asset to use these days. So Jaimi, Alex, thank you so much for your insight into AI's impact on coaching and the difference between coaching and mentorship. It's been great talking to you both today.

Jamie: Thank you so much for having us, Anne.

Alex: Thank you, Anne. This has been a pleasure. It's been fun.

Anne: Oh, it's been a great time. All right, that'll be it for this week. We'll catch you next time. If you enjoyed our conversation today, be sure to subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts so you never miss a new episode.

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