I guess I'm now a founder

I know, it's a terrible title. But it's the closest to what I'm currently feeling: a mix of excitement, disbelief and I won't lie some fear as well. But as Franklin D. Roosevelt said :

And yeah, it is. There are a few things more important to me than fear, and these are what lead me to start Waggle.

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So why Waggle?

Some of you might know this - as I talk about it a lot - one of the subjects I'm most fascinated by is People Management and Leadership. All of my career choices have been led by the desire to increase my impact on people's lives. And to me, there is no more powerful way to do that than through managing people.

I have been lucky to manage some fantastic people, some of whom I now consider friends. But when I first became a manager, I had no clue what I was doing. I read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, spoke to some amazing managers and some less amazing ones, and tried to figure out where I was on that spectrum. I made tons of mistakes and learned to get better that way. I was lucky to have access to mentors and friends who were going through the same journey, but most people aren't.

Then, some people I managed became managers themselves, and I supported them through learning management skills, which are completely different from the skillset they had as individual contributors. I saw them struggle with the same things I struggled with myself. While trying to support them in their journey toward management, I was appalled by how few solutions exist to address this pain point. You hear a lot of people complaining their manager sucks, that this impacts their mental health - causing them anxiety, leading them to quit their jobs etc or to "quiet quit", and yet very little is done to make managers better at their job.

Digging more into it this summer, I realized how massive this problem was:

• Employees who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity - see State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report;
• 70% of that is directly linked to their manager - see Gallup's Who's Responsible for Employee Engagement.

Imagine a world where:

• Every manager is supported in doing their job
• As a result, they're an amazing leader
• And their team performs at its best and achieves their full potential
• Leading their whole company to be as impactful as it can be
• And the world as a whole to reclaim the 7.8 trillions we are currently losing.

I want to live in this world. Innovation would happen faster, poverty would be eradicated faster, and people would be happier at work and outside of work.

And what is Waggle?

Now that we've established the problem, and that the world needs it to be solved. What's the solution?

I can tell you what doesn't solve it: the current solutions companies are using. Examples of those are:

• Ignoring the problem: we all have seen it happen. Poorly managed teams underperform, have a high turnover, are disengaged and unhappy at work.
• Punctual management training: Ample research shows it's not fit for purpose - see Why Leadership Development Isn’t Developing Leaders and has very low ROI - see Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It as:

• Coaching: I have worked with some amazing coaches and I'm a true believer in the power of coaching. But coaching is expensive and most companies can't afford to provide it to all of their managers, reserving it for their senior leadership team. Also, a coach isn't really supposed to tell you how to run a 1-1 or how to provide feedback, that's training and not coaching. And if that's how coaching sessions are being used, they're being underutilized.

Very little innovation has happened in this problem area. At best, these solutions have been taken online. We can do better.

At Waggle, we believe the following:

• Management is hard work: the solution needs to make managers' life easier. There is a lot we can do to make repetitive lower-value tasks automated to free up managers' time to focus on what matters: their people.
• Managers have too much on their minds: the solution needs to free up cognitive bandwidth for managers and give them access to the right data at the right time. We're building Waggle to be managers' second brain.
• Management is all about consistency and building habits: Apple Watch, Noom, and other apps have done wonders for people's health and fitness by helping them build better habits. Psychology and Behavioural Science haven't been applied so much to Management yet and we believe it's the perfect playground for it.

And the best bit is that I'm working on this with people I look up to and admire - more on that in the next article.

I'll be writing more this year, so sign below to stay and touch! And have a look at Waggle and let me know what you think!

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