From Ordinary to Extraordinary: The Future of Communication Coaching​

Rachel Cossar: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode in conversations in the future of work. I am your host, Rachel Cossar, and I am really excited to share this last episode of the seventh season with a very special guest who is a communication trainer and leader, and author in his own right, Vernon Roberts. Welcome. Hey, Rachel. How are you?

Vernon Roberts: So good. So good. So excited to have you on the show.

Rachel Cossar: If you don’t mind to get started, would you share just a few lines about your background, what you’re up to now? Sure. My background I grew up in banking.

Vernon Roberts: So I spent the first twenty years of my career in banking and and finance. And towards the end of that, I started teaching, and I realized, wow. I love this teaching piece and helping people get better. And that’s when I started my company after I left the bank after twenty years. And I’ve been doing it for a little over twenty years now, helping people communicate. Amazing. Fantastic.

Rachel Cossar: I always love the different ways people have moved through various experiences, and I’m sure that your clients find that your twenty plus years on the more corporate side Yeah. Really makes your coaching pretty relevant to them. So maybe this is partly because of your experience in in banking, but what inspired you to focus on communication as that kind of core driver of leadership and team success through your business? Yeah.

Vernon Roberts: Well, you know, I was in banking, and I’ve seen a lot of different verticals, whether it’s health care, finance, construction, pharmaceuticals, whatever it is, Rachel. And what I saw in all of those was that smart people really lose their impact because not because they don’t know their stuff, but because they can’t get their message across. And I saw a lot of meetings just where people were just dying in mediocrity because they couldn’t say what they really meant. And that’s what really stoked me to push towards communication.

Rachel Cossar: Were there any verticals where you felt like that was that was coming across more so than others, or was it literally just like across the board?

Vernon Roberts: Across the board, but one sticks out, which is technology, Where I work with a lot of engineers who are so brilliant, but they couldn’t get their full message across. They wanted to tell the entire story when I wanted them to truncate the story into why their audience really cared about it. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: It’s just interesting because I find, what you your point about wanting to share, like, the full story and get all maybe the details in there and just get all the information across versus thinking about the packaging of it and what message actually needs to land and in what format. Like, you know, from a a leadership perspective, like, how often do you do you think or have you seen people get promoted to higher level positions, not because they are better or or smarter or whatever than other people, but actually because of the way they show up and because of the way they communicate, like, because they have that skill?

Vernon Roberts: Obviously, you’re seeing leaders with bad communication skills, which is gonna say that from the start. But I would say about 80% of folks, when they can clearly connect with folks and show a couple of things, Rachel, clarity, empathy, and to really share their point of view quickly, I think those leaders move up much more quickly than others. Yeah. No kidding.

Rachel Cossar: I I know you and I have talked about this a lot, and I’m gonna dive into some of these questions quickly because I you know, you’ve done a lot of really interesting work incorporating AI in a number of ways to enhance your training firm. So can you share some of the ways that you’ve been doing that? Sure.

Vernon Roberts: Well, first of all, we didn’t pick AI because it’s trendy right now, which it very much is. But, Rich, I’ve been trying to solve a problem for years, I might say for the last two decades, and that is connecting the workshop to where people really do work on a daily basis. And we’ve been looking at how do we how do people really sustain the training that we do. And there have been lots of ideas over the years, but I think that AI has created an opportunity for people to practice on their own, whether it’s at one in the morning or after dinner in in the silence of their office and really utilize the frameworks that we’ve taught. And I think that’s what the power of AI is for us today, and that’s why we’ve we’ve moved towards it to solve this problem of sustainability. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: I I I, I that was kind of the main reason that we started Virtual Sapiens was, you know, through my own experience as a communication coach, kind of leaving people, quote, unquote, to their own devices and, like, no accountability to actually practice these behaviors that we all know take repetition. I find in communication in particular, right, like, we’re talking about behaviors that often need to change and being aware of whatever this behavior may be and the reason why you might want to change it is the work that happens in the construct of a workshop. But then, like like, to your point, integrating that into your new arsenal or toolkit of how you show up as a leader and as a communicator really actually takes so much more practice than I think people realize or maybe want to admit. I totally agree.

Vernon Roberts: Integrating is key, but people underestimate the amount of practice that you need to make it happen. And that’s where we fall down. So we give them this framework. They try it for the first week. The manual sits on their desk. It gets dust. It moves from their desk to their Kosenza in the back after a few weeks, and it’s forgotten. So that we found that the people that actually practice and actually the clients that actually integrate it into the process of work, their managers that use it and show them how to use the frameworks really helps. So that’s what we figured AI wouldn’t even take another step further. So we have actually owning the skills. Right. Exactly.

Rachel Cossar: And how like, how would you design that into your program flow in an ideal world? And this is all, of course, assuming that people will actually use this Sure. Or use the AI and interact with it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, there’s actually two ways.

Vernon Roberts: One way, we’re gonna have it blend with our face to face workshops. So face to face are virtual workshops, where it’s almost a bolt on afterwards. So my client can purchase this module if they would like to have their people practice more. As you know, Rachel, they can also if they want to, they can see how many times they practice or they want that insight into there and see how how much time they’re putting in and if they’re getting better. They can do that. Right. On the other hand, we’re using it as a fully put together training where someone can say, hey. You know what? I wanna be a better communicator. However, I hate going to classes. I’m really embarrassed about getting in front of people practicing. So we’ve created a way for them to watch our lessons in video. And then the activities that we would actually do in the workshop, we have them we reconstructed them with an AI coach. So we poured all our knowledge into the AI coach and tweaked it, and, hopefully, that coach will give them feedback just as we would. So even though I really believe in both face to face learning and this AI, I think something is better than nothing for people who refuse to go to a actual workshop. Yeah. Or, like, don’t have the time. Right?

Rachel Cossar: Like, these workshops at the end of the day are expensive from a a resource perspective. In addition to your point of, like, some people’s maybe temperaments are just not really gonna support the more social experience of maybe failing in front of your peers. Right. That’s a big thing. And people don’t like to get recorded generally in the classroom.

Vernon Roberts: When I say, alright. We’re gonna record each other, but it’s, like, slows down. But recording is the number one thing I believe, and I’ve seen over the last twenty plus years, to get better. It’s your own feedback mechanism. Yep. We get get nervous, and we shy away from it. Yeah. Absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: The other thing you mentioned that I think is such a strong point in favor of giving people this AI option for practice and feedback is that and we’ve heard this a lot at virtual sapiens too is that people are like, I found the AI’s feedback to be so much easier to receive because it’s an AI. Like, I don’t actually care about how the AI perceives me as a person and how maybe right? Because at the end of the day, and this is actually a broader problem, I think, across society, but the way people give feedback sometimes is, like, actually counterproductive. Right? And it’s like, instead of saying things like, oh, you did these behaviors and therefore, that might send this impression or whatever. It’s like, some people very easily might say, like, you are this and you are that, and all of a sudden it becomes a much stickier thing versus something that you can very much choose to control. And so the AI, especially because of the way it’s designed to provide feedback that is reflective, like, here are the things you did. It’s up to you to decide, you know, how you want to change or improve or incorporate those learnings. The AI can be like a feedback master. Yeah. And it takes the emotional piece out of it Yeah.

Vernon Roberts: Like, you might experience. I totally agree with you there. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: People always give feedback in the way that other people can hear it.

Vernon Roberts: I think the AI is good at that. Rachel, I will tell you though that the AI is pretty good at this, not only the feedback, but also the scenarios. When I was demoing my own feedback, I got stuck and I was like, okay. Stop role play. Because I was like, wow. This is pretty good. I didn’t expect that question back to me. So Right. It’s really it’s really good, and it really listens to everything you say. Yeah. And it’s, yeah, it’s kind of uncanny.

Rachel Cossar: I mean, we hear that a lot, right, at Virtual Sapiens where, like, you can get very detailed as you know with the different scenario levers that you put in place or guardrails. But you can also, like, leave it pretty open ended. And most of the time, the AI, like, kinda picks up what you’re putting down quite well, which is kind of interesting. In what ways have you seen it kind of go off course and you’ve had to be like, oh, no. Don’t do that and, like, maybe put in a new guardrail? I wouldn’t say off course per se.

Vernon Roberts: Mhmm. But sometimes, your time is important in these role plays. And sometimes you would say, oh, Vernon, I see golf clubs in the back of you. Are you an avid golfer? Go back in this area. Don’t make small talk. You know, that kind of thing. Other points where time is important in these role plays where I would say, would you like to extend the role play and practice again? I was like, don’t don’t do that either. So Yeah. That’s some of the places. And particular things I might want them to focus on more than others. And I think it’s very good about that. But you remember, it’s it’s whatever you put in is what it does. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: You’ve become one of our, like, top custom AI role play builders. It’s been really fun to see how creative you’ve been getting. And, like, the dialogue from the prompting perspective that you can kind of establish with the AI, it’s really, really cool. So you you touched on this a little bit in the previous question, but I wanna go a little deeper. Like, where do you see the optimal balance between human led training and coaching? But then, also, is there anything that, like, concerns you specifically about, you know, what what and where human coaches should be really showing up and doing the work, and then what and how maybe the AI can come in to support? Yeah.

Vernon Roberts: One of my colleagues that works one of our our our most prolific trainers in my on my team, when I told her about this project, she was like, hey. I was gonna take our jobs. And I said, I don’t think it’s gonna take our jobs, but it can enhance what we do. And that’s the way I look at it. I look at this in a couple of ways, Rachel. I think that humans are best at context, trust, and, let me see, nuance. Okay? I think that’s what humans are best at, and I think that is what we do when we coach people. AI, I think, is best at reps, reinforcement, and the best ability there is, which is availability. So, you know, I can’t coach everybody all the time. But if you wanna get coached at 11PM, you can certainly log in and get coached where you if you’re calling me 11PM, I’m not answering. So that is where I see the balance. I mean, human led workshops, create a a different mindset around building confidence, and we can tailor to their real situations. And I could do that too, but AI could take it further into ongoing practice and then on demand role plays Where we don’t have time in the class and it might take a very long time in a coaching session to narrow into a specific situation, AI can do that pretty quickly when they ask you. Tell me what your situation is. Who am I? What’s what’s the challenge that you’re facing? That kind of thing. And I think that, it becomes less of a onetime event, Rachel, and then more of a journey between the human and the AI crazy journey. Right. It’s a really great point.

Rachel Cossar: And I think your your the differentiations between what humans do uniquely well and what AI can do uniquely well is a perfect categorization of it and one that hopefully, you know, our audience can keep in mind because, I do think it can be very easy to it’s like a run runaway train sometimes, especially when you see how good the AI can be in conversation. But the thing that I have found, people who just maybe experience AI versus really deeply working with it, like, I think you you might agree with this point, but you actually do have to put quite a few guardrails around these role play scenarios. And you have to tell the AI not to do things that, like, a human coach, you would never have to tell to, like like, earlier on, this obviously hasn’t happened in a in a while, but I remember, like, this you know, as as as still is the case today, people are like, oh my god. It’s gonna take all our jobs, blah blah blah. And I’m sitting there working with the AI and having to literally tell the AI that expressing itself emotionally does not mean, like, theatrically, describing its feelings and its expressions. You know? So it would be like, hi, Rachel. I said excitedly. And You got a word. Like okay. So right. So we you have to teach the AI, like, all these things, these, like, social decorum things that we obviously intuitively know as humans in relation to one another, but the AI is like it doesn’t. Right? Yeah. I haven’t had that situation happen. No. You wouldn’t because we’ve we’ve If I said that, you’d be very distraught.

Vernon Roberts: I’m sure. Yes. It has been, it has been eradicated.

Rachel Cossar: The problem has been eradicated, but it was a problem initially, you know, and you’re just it’s like all these things that you wouldn’t consider. I think a lot of times people see these demos that actually have been edited. Yeah. Yeah. No.

Vernon Roberts: I edited my demo, but I didn’t edit it for the speech from the from the AI at all. So I think Well, yeah. For sure.

Rachel Cossar: I mean oh, that was the other thing I was gonna ask you because you’ve actually been doing some really interesting stuff using AI to also create, like, marketing content videos. Right? Yeah. That’s another use case for you.

Vernon Roberts: It is.

Rachel Cossar: It is.

Vernon Roberts: We’re a small company, but we wanna do things at scale. Yeah. And I think that really helps as far as scripting things out and even taking particular workshop scenarios, and the AI can help me build the content around that. Now, obviously and with with my wife, when we talk about this, I say AI is kind of like when we had in my age, when we got calculators when I was a kid. Right? You gotta know how to add or multiply to use a calculator. Because if I do two times 100 and it comes up 700, I’m like, wait a minute. I know that’s wrong. Yeah. So that kind you have to know.

Rachel Cossar: You have to really know. But then they’re really, really excited about this. Yeah. So as a leader in your space, what are you most excited about looking ahead? Like, what’s your big vision for where things go from here?

Vernon Roberts: You know, when I think about it, I think there there are three things I really think about here. One, one of the bigger things is personalized coaching at scale. Alright? We’ve known that for years, Rachel, that coaching transforms people. Right? We know that, but it’s expensive and hard to scale. But with the AI and the way we’ve tailored it, we believe that people can do their real scenarios within the AI and not just generic exercises. In the classroom, we’re doing generic exercise. We don’t have a lot of time with you. But you can actually feed the AI information to do a a a really specific scenario. And so personal coaching and scale is one. The second one thing I mentioned to you already, which was closing the gap between the workshop and the work day. Right? Combining human training plus AI sustainment. So that’s it, especially with difficult conversations, things like that. Mhmm. And then the last thing, the third thing and and, Rachel, this is really important to my company and the way we think. The my company, I’m joined in communications, but my parent company under that that I built was called Evoke Learning. And Evoke I named it Evoke because I believe that everybody has this inside of them. I just help them bring it out. And so my third thing is helping people show up intentionally, not just habitually. Right? So so much communication that we have today is on autopilot. But looking ahead, I’m excited about these tools because I think they’ll help people really listen more and show up as their best self instead of defaulting to old habits. Right? So to me, that’s at the heart of what we teach, in leadership is showing up as your best authentic self for that particular situation, and that’s what we’re thinking. And finally, just to wrap that one up, I’m thinking the last thing and I know I said three things, but to add on to that sort of thing, it’s really about having coaching available just not to the c suite and the execs. Yeah. We want to have it available to anybody who’s willing to practice. Yep. Yep. Absolutely agree.

Rachel Cossar: I think that the this idea of only giving people who’ve already made it to a certain point in their careers access to this kind of thing, like, logically doesn’t make any sense beyond the cost. Right? Of course. So and it’s interesting because there are studies that have been done already, from, like, a mental health and wellness perspective of people using like, having, like, one on one human conversations versus having a conversation with the AI. This is all in the short term. Right? We’re not talking about, obviously, there’s no data on anything longer than that yet. Right. But the efficacy of AI coaching from that perspective was pretty on par with the human coaching, which was crazy. I can send you the article. But it’s just interesting to consider because I also think there is a difference between workshop based experiential learning and one on one coaching and the level of that coaching. Right? Like, because if we are talking about these strategic executives, well, like, that’s gonna be actually quite hard, I think, to get necessarily to the same level of nuance as a human coach, but some of the maybe lower level kind of, emerging people, you can get, like, a good amount done with just AI, right, at scale. Yeah. I’m not sure about that.

Vernon Roberts: I might I think you might be selling it a little short there. I think not just a lower level, but I think up that ladder a little bit because I think AI maybe shows talks about some things that they may not already already be thinking about. I mean, with the frameworks we’ve put in, it’s given some great advice on what they’ve missed around talking to the business, what’s critical to their listener. So I found that to be the case. So I’m not so sure about that. I know.

Rachel Cossar: I mean, I I think, I I well, listen. There are executives who use our platform to practice and get feedback. Right? And we we do frequently deal with people who, like, are skeptical about its ability to provide anything meaningful to an individual like that. Yeah. But I think this actually goes back to the, focus of your training and work, which is that communication still tends to be one of the things that people who have already maybe mastered certain technical pieces of knowledge and experience still struggle with. And so having that, like, conversation partner Yeah. On demand and available actually is useful across the board. Yeah. And I think the executives are people too, and they put their shoes on the same way as everybody else. Totally. A partner for them is just as valuable as as the lower levels. Totally. Awesome. Vernon, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing all of your expertise and for really, you know, diving in at virtual sapiens and getting your hands super dirty with our AI role play. It’s been so fun to see you building out your scenarios and, you know, soon getting them in front of clients. Anything else you’d like to share with our audience today? No.

Vernon Roberts: I think that’s I mean, the only thing I would think about is if you wanna be a great presenter, anybody can do it. It is all about putting in the work and practicing, which is what we say about everything, but it’s all about practice. Absolutely. Where can people be in touch with you or follow your work?

Rachel Cossar: Yeah.

Vernon Roberts: You can come to our website at extraordinarycommunications.com, or you can go to, like, letterxc0mminc.com is the short, but extraordinarycommunicationsthewholeword,.com will get you right to our website. Awesome. Great. Well, thank you again, Vernon.

Rachel Cossar: And as always, thanks to our audience. We’ll see you next season. Thank you, Rachel.