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252: The Skills Leaders Need When AI Changes Everything · Customer Service Revolution | Customer Experience & Employee Experience for Business Leaders

• 0:50
  Welcome back, Revolutionaries, to another episode of the Customer Service Revolution Podcast.
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  Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr.
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  Brynn Scarborough, who has spent 13 plus years scaling a North American business unit from 20 million to 65 million in revenue, doubling the workforce, tripling profitability, and
• 1:10
  leading the organization through a private equity buyout.
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  Brynn holds a doctorate of business administration
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  focused on leadership resilience, she has founded Alchemy Partners with founders, CEOs, PE Operating Partners, and C-suite leaders at Growth Inflection Points, Succession, Scale,
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  Acquisition, and AI-driven Transformation.
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  Welcome, Brynn.
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  Thank you, John.
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  Wow.
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  Nothing like hearing your own bio read back to you, huh?
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  Well, congratulations.
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  You are doing a lot.
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  So tell our uh audience a little bit about your backstory and how you got here.
• 1:50
  Yeah, absolutely.
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  Well, I spent, as you mentioned, uh 13 years scaling a business in the wellness equipment company.
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  So commercial wellness equipment that you would find in the amenity spaces of large gyms or massage in these things like that.
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  And it really taught me a lot over time about not only how to scale a company, but also individual optimization.
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  And so a few years ago when I decided that I wanted to make a bit of a career shift,
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  I thought, okay, let me go get my doctorate and see if I can found and build the company that I wish I could have hired when I was a CEO.
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  So here we are today and going through that process.
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  Oh, good.
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  That's awesome.
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  know, something in your bio that I don't know if because of AI and I think, I don't know if it's secretly the goal of AI, but I mean, I know it's the goal of AI.
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  I don't know if it's a secret.
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  Is doubling the workforce a goal of CEOs anymore, right?
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  Yeah, yeah, you know, I just wrote a post about that this morning about how optimizing your workforce is something you can only do once or twice.
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  But yeah, I'm with you.
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  think even when we have these engagement conversations, when we're talking about retention, that whole conversation has changed in the last couple of years because we're
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  looking at how do we optimize across business functions and units, not necessarily about how do we grow the workforce.
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  So you're right, that metric has changed.
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  So, Brynn, you are in the business of building cultures that perform.
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  You're working on the leadership infrastructure side.
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  What's the gap that you see most often between a company's cultural aspirations and their leaders' actual readiness to deliver on them?
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  You know, more often than not, it's understanding the true behavioral change element that's required to change culture.
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  You you work in the culture space, I work adjacent to the culture space, but really it's about organizational change.
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  And it's not as sexy or as fun as going in and maybe doing an offsite or the emotional work that happens when we have leadership team meetings and things like that.
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  It's more about entraining new behaviors.
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  into our leadership team, into CEOs when they need to transform their organizations.
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  And that usually happens a little bit at a time.
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  It happens with accountability.
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  And it happens when it's not fun or interesting anymore.
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  It's kind of like what I call the messy middle miles of a marathon.
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  When you're tired of doing it, uh it's when the most important work is actually taking place.
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  And so I come in and build infrastructures around that change so that it can actually happen as opposed to something that kind of dies on the table.
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  for lack of attention or lack of motivation once all of that's gone.
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  That's interesting because like I always say, you know, when, when, you know, I go in to do a workshop or a presentation, if this is all you do, right.
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  It's like deodorant, right.
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  Within time it'll wear off and the odor comes back.
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  If you don't have a plan, how do you make sure that there is a plan to moving the needle that in three months, six months, 18 months, things are different than
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  than just the aspirational side as you put it.
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  Yeah, that's absolutely right.
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  We do that on a couple of levels.
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  We do that on an assessment level with leaders to really understand where their zone of genius is and what they should be doing.
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  We do that on a structural level so that we're building structures within each organization that not only supports their operating systems and the goals, the way they
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  measure them, but make sure that there's accountability.
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  And accountability, a lot of times, as we know, is a top-down situation.
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  but a lot of CEOs and C-suite leaders feel like they're left to either create these structures themselves or figure out kind of what runs best on the fly.
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  And so we solve for that to make sure that even when the shine has worn off of the initiative that we're continuing to lean towards the difficult work of transformation.
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  And a lot of companies, quite frankly, don't have the choice to look away from it right now with AI transformation happening at the pace that it is.
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  We need leaders paying attention to what's going to last to the other side of organizational redesign.
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  And how do get them from chasing the new shiny object, right?
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  Because it's so easy, especially for the CEO visionary, we're not good at the implementation side.
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  Yeah, absolutely.
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  Implementation has to be a natural function of the outcomes.
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  So the work with Alchemy either way has the ability to speak in your native operating language, whether that's EOS, whether that's SAP, whether that is, we're going to give you
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  outcomes.
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  We're going to pull the consulting work in off the island and give you outcomes that are in your existing language and also make sure that you're working those into visibility as
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  well.
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  It's kind of the nuts and bolts of it.
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  It's not the transformation work.
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  It's the work that happens behind the scene to make sure that the transformation keeps happening, whether someone is pushing you towards that all the time or not.
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  So what's the impact AI has?
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  You you've written about, you know, the information layer of business is collapsing under AI, that the premium has moved to human judgment.
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  What does that mean for how companies need to rethink learning and development?
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  boy, there's so much to say about this topic.
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  The first is we need to stop sticking learning and development into a compliance and HR black hole where we have, you know, it's the first line item to go when things get cut and
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  it's the last line item to be strategically planned for.
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  But the reality is strategically upskilling your workforce is going to be an absolute imperative if you're going to reap the benefits of AI.
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  And you and I both see companies doing this very quickly, right?
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  They go to work in the operational layer, they lean out, become more flat from an organizational or org chart perspective, but then the people who are still there have to
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  be taught how to lead and design organizational processes differently.
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  And that layer is missing almost completely.
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  So you go in and you get that big operational win of, let's say, reducing workforce or optimizing a process.
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  But you can't recreate that growth the next year because you never took the people with you.
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  You never taught them how to lead differently.
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  You never taught them how to grow an organization from an AI native or even AI transforming perspective.
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  And that can't be reproduced.
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  So you've set a precedent for yourself that's almost impossible to repeat at that point.
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  You call it experience engineering.
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  Tell us more about that.
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  I love that term.
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  Yeah, you know that really points to a lot of my doctoral work as well.
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  A few years ago I began to see this thing coming not only in resilience but also in the way that experience is engineered within organizations.
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  Since the Industrial Revolution, working your way up through an org chart in an organization, experience and discernments, some would even say wisdom became a byproduct
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  of just
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  making it layer by layer by layer through that organization.
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  If you had enough staying power, you were going to acquire a certain amount of wisdom, tribal knowledge, things like that.
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  When we look at what AI is doing from a task perspective, let's use financial services as an example.
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  When we are replacing junior analysts with AI, when we are replacing frontline employees that would normally be building reports, synthesizing data, doing the hard work of hand
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  jamming in Excel,
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  We've optimized both of those layers of business, but what we haven't done is replace the experience that gets created by going through those processes over time, right?
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  So automatically we have people who are elevated in the organization without the wisdom, discernment, or experience to make decisions, or without the discernment and experience to
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  become that next relationship leader, managing director, whatever that is, that's running a $300 million book of business.
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  because suddenly we have literally changed how experience gets engineered.
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  And so we will have to be intentional in the future about how we grow up the next generation of leaders because let's say five years from now, your second or third band
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  analysts within a financial services organization will have only been dealing with the curated outputs of AI.
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  None of their own thinking, none of their own analyzing, none of their own like struggle.
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  positive struggle to get to the experience layer that would lead them to the next level of leadership.
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  Yeah, how do you reign executive teams in from turning everything over to AI, losing the human touch, and therefore it's a commodity, right?
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  Because if you can do it through AI, I, as your closest competitor, can do it through AI, which means neither of us have a differentiator.
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  That's right.
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  Right.
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  The differentiator in the future is going to be human involvement.
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  Right.
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  I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about how the price just went up on humanity.
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  you know, let's say from a customer service perspective, talking to an actual human is going to be what's reserved for the VIP of the VIP of the VIP in the future.
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  And that's also going to be true in the business world as well.
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  But what that doesn't do
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  is create the skill set that's going to become ultra premium in the future because the ultra premium skill set is going to be the most human of skill sets.
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  It's not going to be can you build a great pivot table?
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  It's not going to be can you build a PowerPoint deck that leaves people impressed?
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  It's going to be can you read the energy in the room and respond?
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  Can you change the trajectory of a conversation in person or from a relationship management perspective?
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  The things that we used to
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  call soft skills just became the hard skills and they became the only thing that mattered really quickly.
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  Yeah, yeah.
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  You've recently finished your doctoral research on leadership resilience.
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  What's the finding that most surprised you and how does it change what you would tell a CEO about developing leaders can actually hold up under pressure?
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  Yeah, you know, what I learned and what I think I knew intuitively going in is that I asked the question, can resilience really be built like a skill set?
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  The good news is it can.
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  But if you look out across, let's say, a younger working population, we realize that resilience, like experience, needs to be engineered intentionally, because it's not
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  anymore just a byproduct of living life or working your way through an organization.
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  And so
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  On the resilience layer, we talk about resilience organizations and we talk about resilient individuals.
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  And sometimes those two priorities can be in competition with each other.
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  If you're solving for a resilient organization, you're looking at redundancy.
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  You're looking at processes that are not critical to an individual.
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  If you're looking for individual resilience, you want somebody with grit and tenacity and what we're now calling executive agility, this skill set to be able to
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  move very quickly with very limited information and to be able to trust your experience to do that, you know, we're looking at a very different skill set than what we needed
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  pre-COVID to look to grow people up through an organization.
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  So it's about creating those reps or creating that muscle memory around having hard conversations, doing that with grace, being challenged.
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  being challenged with information and making decisions before you have perfect outputs, all of those types of things that need to be done very intentionally from an
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  organizational perspective.
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  And so is this something you, a skill you can look for in hiring or that's frosty on the cake, but it's more something that you want to train your existing and future leaders to
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  have?
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  Cause this resilience, it's a key word, right?
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  Because, you we all get into it, but we're going to have 9-11s, know, hopefully not again, but,
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  but the great recession, the pandemic, shit's gonna hit the fan.
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  You can count on that.
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  We don't know if it's gonna be today, tomorrow, or next week, but it's gonna happen.
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  And I think human reactions to curl up in the fetal position and hope it goes away, but no one's gonna be following you if you're doing that.
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  And maybe a young leader, now 35 and under, who hasn't lived through that yet.
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  professionally.
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  You know, how do you look for it, train it and prepare for it?
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  Yeah, that's a yes and answer there.
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  The reality is that if you were leading an organization through COVID or through the Great Recession or any of these kind of pivotal moments in the last hundred years, you got a
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  lifetime worth of career experience in a wildly accelerated way.
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  I think the thing about the pandemic that really changed how we structure business is that it seems like since then,
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  Nothing has really gone back to normal from a market or forecasting perspective, right?
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  In the past, you could build a 12 to 18 month forecast, you're going to go execute to plan, and businesses had this layer of predictability that now seems to be pretty much
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  gone from a longer term perspective.
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  What that's done is it's compressed the amount of time that organizations have to be able to execute change.
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  It's compressed feedback loops, meaning you have to move much more quickly and much more assertively if you're going to be successful.
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  And AI is helping with that.
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  It's helping with speed to impact.
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  But we're breaking a lot of things at the same time that we're going through the speed to impact thing.
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  So coming back to resilience, yes, you can hire for it and we can help you look for that as a skill set.
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  But more importantly, what's going to happen in the future is not can you hire these prefabricated
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  perfect operators because we know less and less and less operators are out there all the time.
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  It's going to come down to from a resilient organizational perspective, can you build these people?
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  Can you intentionally create programmatic access and succession planning for people to be able to grow their way up through organizations internally to be able to build this skill
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  set?
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  It's not necessarily something that companies have really had to do.
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  on their own because they could go higher whatever skill set they needed.
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  But as that talent pool begins to flatten out, which is already happening, it's something organizations will have to learn to do or have help with.
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  And that's exactly why Alchemy exists.
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  I don't know if Alchemy deals with this.
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  I assume you do.
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  My leadership epiphany coming out of or during the pandemic was for the last thousand years.
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  there was, or, you know, in the pandemic, there was, there was two new leadership skill sets that we had to know basically overnight that for the last thousand years, we never
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  had to know before.
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  First one is leading from a distance.
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  Like that's a whole different skill set, you know, of, of, of motivating you, being engaged.
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  uh building some kind of rapport as an employee of someone I don't see every day.
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  And then the second one, I don't really believe, and it should have been, worrying about employees' mental well-being.
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  Like those two things were never taught in class or never taught anywhere.
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  And then all of a sudden it was dumped on everyone and kind of caught us on our heels.
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  Well, the leadership paradigm is literally, it's turning on its heels, right?
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  Before COVID, for us, it's all before COVID and after COVID, right?
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  That has been the defining piece of what we've done from a career perspective, other than potentially the Great Recession.
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  But before COVID, EQ was a nice to have, but not necessary for leaders, right?
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  And that's just the truth of it.
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  Now,
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  EQ is going to be the only thing you're hiring for because you can outsource every other process in your organization.
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  And we didn't have to know how to get into a digital environment and create rapport and ask the right questions and create spaces where people would speak up when they're not in
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  front of you.
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  We could lead with presence.
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  We could walk into the room, be in the office, be in the boardroom, be in a
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  walking around the organization.
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  And there is still an important part of that.
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  But now for a company to scale, to get the right talent, they've got to be able to do that digitally.
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  That's a skill set no one was ever taught.
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  We figured it all out the hard way.
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  But what we are trying to teach for now is not just an awareness about mental health, but resilience plays directly into this piece of it.
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  know, mid-level and top-level managers are being disproportionately affected.
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  by burnout, by the fact that they cannot get the same results for the same amount of work anymore.
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  They're never offline.
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  No one ever taught us how to create boundaries around these things as well.
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  And so it's actually leaders of the organization that we see burning out more impactfully than we do across any other bands.
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  And it is because of this resilience piece.
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  It's also because we were never taught how to be in this constant state of, I don't want to say turmoil, but in a constant state of pivot.
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  Right, we would build the plan, execute to the plan, like I said earlier, that paradigm doesn't exist anymore.
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  Right, you build the plan, you go get some feedback, you change the plan, you go again, you go again, you go again.
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  And that ability to continue to feed your own, let's say, state of being, while also being highly engaged and in a highly unpredictable workplace, no one was ever taught.
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  And it's a skill set that's becoming absolutely vital in the workplace today.
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  Excellent, great point.
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  How should founders, CEOs and investors be thinking differently about learning and development?
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  Where do we get off track and how do we revive the enterprise value layer of strategic upskilling without wasting time and inefficient training systems?
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  Yeah, you know, we have to stop treating learning and development like a compliance problem, right?
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  It ended up in this HR space and I love HR and I do a lot of work with incredibly talented HR leaders.
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  But learning and development now in the age of technical transformation is not about checking the box.
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  Did you do the online training?
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  It's about making sure that you have the right group of leaders in place and you're bringing them forward at the pace that you expect the company to be able to develop.
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  That's a very different conversation than we were having before AI came into it.
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  We're adding all of these, let's say, technical layers of requirements, skill set, being able to manage, let's say, even an agentic.
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  hybrid workforce, right?
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  But we're not providing any skill sets to be able to make that happen.
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  So if you want your company to be able to continue at the speed of transformation, you've got to take the people with you.
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  Even if that is a workforce that maybe you have optimized, which is totally OK, and we expect that to happen.
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  But we need to see role redesign.
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  We need to see training and integration happening differently.
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  We need to see governance layers happening differently.
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  And that's
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  That's where learning and development becomes strategic human capital and where it lives on the investment side of the P &L and not just as a nice to have, but we're not going to
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  do it if things get tough.
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  And it needs to live at the highest level of strategic decision making.
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  um Something that I have noticed as a consultant, mistakes that I've been guilty of in my own businesses, building my own business is our orientation and our first 90 days, we were
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  blasting our employees like with a fire hose.
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  And we were like, all right, let's take advantage.
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  have Brynn, you know,
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  in this classroom for this week.
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  And we were teaching our new employees things they didn't need to know maybe for six months or 12 months, which was a mistake because you wouldn't remember.
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  And worse, it was cannibalizing what you did need to know to get your footing on the ground.
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  And then we were disappointed in you in six or 12 months because we taught you that back in your first week.
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  And I don't know if you've heard this expression.
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  I heard it from Vern Harnish, everboarding.
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  So there's onboarding, and then there's everboarding, is, all right, we're going to, know, remind you, revisit micro learning, what you may have been taught, but just keep it top of
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  mind awareness, which I really, really like.
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  I don't know, thoughts to any of that?
• 22:10
  Yeah, I totally agree.
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  think this is not, we're not talking about onboarding or offboarding anymore.
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  We're talking about, let's say the ongoing cycle of learning that's got to take place.
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  If your company is going to keep up, even on the individual level, think about yourself or myself, the pace of learning that you have had to undertake personally, if you're even
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  attempting to keep up with AI, if you are even attempting to like,
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  dive into Claude code and see what's in there.
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  The pace of learning is a sprint.
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  It's an absolute sprint.
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  Now think about the rest of your organization who doesn't necessarily have the same impetus that you do to try and figure out how to get some wins out of the P &L.
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  You've left them in the stone age and you expect them to run at a pace with no investment to be able to keep up with transformation, right?
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  These things don't work together in reality.
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  And so it's no longer a
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  helicopter in and do training situation.
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  It's a let's embed strategic partners that hold us accountable and keep our leaders running at a pace that they can actually keep up with and then continue to coach other
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  people.
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  Right.
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  It's no longer enough for your C-suite to just be great at their roles.
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  They have to be the coaches for the division.
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  They have to be the coaches for the mindset that opens up to new technology.
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  And that's behavioral change over time.
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  That's not
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  an offside on the weekend.
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  It is that too, but that's not an offside on the weekend where you come back, you know, all hoo rah rah, and then everybody goes back to what they were doing in the first place.
• 23:41
  Yeah, and I do feel as entrepreneurs and leaders, it is our responsibility to help evolve.
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  And there's going to be resistance, right?
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  People are going to be intimidated.
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  But we also don't want to just, you know, they helped grow our business.
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  And then we don't want to just get rid of them because for whatever reason and go hire someone that has that skill set.
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  I think our first responsibility, they love our brand, they built our culture.
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  Let's help them with the skill sets to make them successful, which will make us successful at the next level.
• 24:13
  Yeah, well, that works on two levels, right?
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  For employees that have been with us a long time who might, who are not AI natives, and by the way, none of them are yet, ah we're still a few years away from that.
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  It's incredible.
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  You may not take 100 % of those people with you, but the people you do take with you are going to be your most important evangelists.
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  They are going to be the people who stand around the water cooler and make it okay for everyone else.
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  to go through this transformation process because they did it and it's safe, right?
• 24:44
  Even more so than your top leaders, the people who've been enrolled for a long time are incredibly, incredibly important.
• 24:51
  The other piece of that is that the younger generation has already told us they don't wanna work for us if we're not personally investing in their career trajectory.
• 25:00
  And this is a great way to do it and still accomplish what you're trying to do from an organizational perspective, right?
• 25:06
  I posted a little bit.
• 25:08
  It's a very unsexy piece about how to get fringe benefits out of strategically upskilling your staff.
• 25:14
  Not a single CEO that I've talked to in the six months has heard of this, but Gen Z is telling us, literally telling us, I'm not gonna work for you unless you are doing
• 25:23
  something for me and my future trajectory.
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  And we can kill two birds with one stone in that situation.
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  We can bring our, let's say our wisdom with us,
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  employees that have been with us for a long time and more importantly show the younger ones that we're here to help them develop and develop into career trajectory whether they
• 25:41
  stay with us or not but the likelihood that they stay with us if we're intentionally investing is a whole lot higher than if we don't.
• 25:48
  I love, I listen, think Gen Z's is the rap they get is unfair.
• 25:54
  I think they've forced us, you know, leaders to do what we should have been doing.
• 25:59
  And I always say they're not willing to trade hours for dollars, right?
• 26:03
  But if you make them part of, you know, the bigger purpose and invest in them,
• 26:08
  I think they're better than the previous generations that we all think are the best.
• 26:13
  I love what you're saying.
• 26:14
  All right, if a founder or CEO is listening right now and they're realizing their leadership bench isn't built for what's coming, where do they start?
• 26:22
  Well, they start by either reaching out to me directly and we can go through a discovery call process.
• 26:28
  We also go through an assessment process to see what's really true, right?
• 26:32
  There's a lot of times that we need to understand or create a baseline that everybody understands and that everybody can play by.
• 26:39
  And that's the work that we do in organizations.
• 26:42
  So they can go to the website, www.alchemyleadershiplab.com, or they can reach out to me directly.
• 26:48
  either one to start the conversation as well.
• 26:51
  and we're gonna put all your email, website, LinkedIn, Instagram, Book a Discovery call in the show notes for them.
• 26:59
  But as you said, uh www.alchemyleadershiplab.com and Brynn at alchemyleadershiplab.com.
• 27:10
  We'll have all that in the show notes.
• 27:12
  What I miss Brynn.
• 27:13
  You know, I think it's just a great conversation to have and I think it's great that you and I are having this conversation because there's so many parallels between the work that
• 27:22
  we do, right?
• 27:23
  Collaboration over competition, which is the new way of doing business because none of us have the resources to spread thin like we used to, right?
• 27:33
  We're not hiring FTE straight out of the gate.
• 27:35
  We're trying to figure out how to optimize and to multiply.
• 27:39
  And so I think thinking about that from a founder perspective is really important.
• 27:42
  And I love the work that you do in creating that multiplication factor as well, even through this podcast.
• 27:48
  But then thinking about the full customer journey as well, and that the work that founders are faced with is thinking about their business differently.
• 27:57
  And most of the time, that's very hard to do from being kind of inside the capsule.
• 28:02
  getting a real third party perspective, I think is more important than it's ever been.
• 28:06
  We are talking to Dr.
• 28:08
  Brynn Scarborough, founder and CEO of Alchemy Leadership Lab.
• 28:14
  Brynn, thank you so much.
• 28:15
  I learned a ton and I have great respect for the work you're doing and the reputation you have.
• 28:21
  Thank you so much, John.
• 28:22
  It's been an absolute pleasure.
• 28:24
  Thank you, revolutionaries, and we'll be back right after this.