Ever prepped for a difficult conversation in front of the mirror, with a friend or colleague, or even with a leadership expert at a workshop? Well, practicing in front of the mirror has nothing on this new L&D tech designed to help managers tackle difficult conversations.
Tenor, the AI-powered leadership development platform, announced today it raised $5.4 million in seed funding from Base10 Partners, with participation from Reach Capital and additional angel investors.
Founded last December, the product delivers more than 75 different out-of-the-box training scenarios built by Tenor’s learning and development (L&D) team. It includes scenarios that focus on some of the most difficult manager-direct report convos in the world of work, including the ones you dread: performance issues, unfavorable comp decisions, termination for cause, and layoffs.
“These are practices…where people honestly just didn’t have the ability to practice it,” said Tenor co-founder Charlie Stigler. “We know practice works for any kind of learning, and people haven't been practicing these conversations. People have just been doing them, and all the things we know about the science of expertise and learning say that just doesn't really work. You need to do something repeatedly to learn how to do it.”
Customers can also work with developers at Tenor to build company-specific scenarios that address communication needs facing managers and leaders inside their organizations and train the AI guidance to incorporate company leadership philosophies.
Stigler’s co-founder James Cross noted that managers and L&D pros can also create scenarios “on the fly” if a conversation arises in which practice might help facilitate a smoother interaction.
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With the seed funding, Tenor intends to further develop the product, including a new coach feature, and build out HCM integrations.
Stigler and Cross are the Workday alums behind the software company’s Learning Center. They’ve designed this new platform especially for enterprise customers. Tenor customers are generally large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees and established leadership development programs in place, according to Cross, but they’re working with businesses across industries and sectors.
While some leadership development training rely on slide deck presentations and perhaps include peer-to-peer role playing activities (sometimes with pricey leadership development coaches or even hired actors), inside Tenor, L&D pros can create a realistic scenario instantly.
“AI starts to make those role plays available at any time, where leadership development teams can just spin up a scenario, push it out to managers, track completions, and then they can just kind of know that all of those managers have actually practiced it,” Cross said.
Cross noted that many Tenor clients layer the tool “on top of existing interventions,” incorporating Tenor into new manager onboarding programs or high-potential programs, for example, and create learning paths and custom scenarios inside the product that align with the content of that experience and allow managers to put it into practice.
“We know a lot about how folks learn,” he said. “Folks do learn when they’re in a classroom setting, but they also need to then put that into practice…and get some feedback, and get the reps in.”