How A Rebel Psychologist Is Disrupting The $366 Billion Leadership Development Industry
Source: Medium, Shanna Loga
Photo: Courtesy of Darja Gutnick
Darja Gutnick, co-founder of the AI coaching app Bunch, is making it possible for anyone to be a leader
To hear Darja Gutnick describe it now, entrepreneurship has always been in her blood. “I grew up with a mom who was an entrepreneur — very dynamic, very results-driven, very-determined. I grew up in her business, and I didn’t know how to live [other than] in an entrepreneurial way. I always wanted to know how things work and how I can use what I understand to solve problems.”
Getting to know Ms. Gutnick on a Zoom call, she’s every bit the entrepreneur — effervescent, discerning, disarmingly charming. She’s donning a wearable blanket in homage to one of my humor pieces. She talks at a breakneck pace, and I have to concentrate on following her runaway train of thought. It’s easy to envision her leading teams and inspiring fundraisers. It’s harder to imagine her behind the staid walls of an ivory tower where she began her career.
From rebellious psychologist to bold entrepreneur
“I was always really curious about why people behave the way they do,” Gutnick begins as she shares her origin story with me.
She pursued a Ph.D. in psychology but felt called to something else during her studies.
“I felt alien to the academic world. And I think it was because it never was fast enough. It can take up to eight years to publish in a top-tier journal, for example. I was too impatient, and when I did a study with entrepreneurs for my thesis, I instantly connected with the ecosystem and understood that this was my tribe.”
Toward the end of her academic program, she entered and won a pitch competition. “Then, I had to decide, do I take this $25,000 and try to build a business, or do I stick to the safe route [and stick with my Ph.D.]? It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life.” She quit just short of earning a Ph.D. to pursue entrepreneurship full-time.
Her first foray into entrepreneurship was rocky. “With the pitch competition start-up, I had difficulties fundraising. I did over 100 pitches to raise money, and it still didn’t work.” Gutnick left the company after two years.
She moved on to establish her own leadership coaching business. Using her expertise in psychology and entrepreneurship, she developed her business into a full-blown consultancy.
During her consultancy years, Gutnick and her team profiled and worked with over 600 founders. They conducted surveys, analyzed data, and researched and recommended solutions. Through their work, they saw the power of rituals for leadership development.
For Gutnick, rituals are quick hacks, like using a stress pause to remain calm during challenging encounters. She and her team began cataloging these rituals and compiling a database.
Gutnick explains, “People want to make you think every problem is unique — that no solution is replicable and every team and organization is special … and I think that’s bulls***. We can absolutely revolutionize leadership development by using existing wisdom and research.”
“We can absolutely revolutionize leadership development by using existing wisdom and research.”
In 2015, an investor approached Gutnick about creating a product based on her database of rituals. She began developing and selling B2B products, which evolved into Bunch — an Artificial Intelligence (AI) leadership coach delivering daily, individualized management tips.
Anyone can use the Bunch app. After filling out an assessment to determine your leadership style, Bunch sends you personalized lessons you can complete in two minutes a day.
“We pride ourselves in our users spending three minutes and 40 seconds on average per session. The business world is so noisy already, just from talking to many, many managers, and we’re looking to transport the minimum amount of information that’s necessary to move our users forward.”
Tips including learning how to facilitate a behavioral retrospective, use a 1:1 meeting template, or tactics for improving your emotional intelligence.
“We’re building the largest collection of management tactics and leadership rituals that is fed through an entire community of leaders and aspiring leaders,” Gutnick says.
How Bunch is making leadership training accessible
I ask Gutnick how Bunch fits into the $366 billion leadership development industry, the standard of which is the three-day facilitator-led training. “If we do our job well where we make the daily sessions interactive and engaging, people do return because they like the experience. So over [time], they will eventually consume the same amount of information they would have received in a three-day seminar.”
She continues, “The biggest issue with a three-day seminar is that people can’t stick to what they learn. For us, we see a week 12 retention rate of around 30%, when the average mobile app retains only 5–7% of its users. In the post-beta version of Bunch, I think we’ll be able to reach 40, 50, even 60% long-term retention. We have ambitious targets.”
Bunch is an innovative app that provides a user experience far different from what’s typically offered in the field of leadership development.
Gutnick explains, “There are online courses, management books, podcasts, social media content from influencers from Adam Grant or Simon Sinek. But if I have a conflict with my team, an online seminar can help me, but I don’t know which one, and I don’t have time to look them up. So Bunch is like a personalized assistant, the J.A.R.V.I.S. of Iron Man, finding the right content for the right problem at the right time.”
Gutnick elaborates, “The only other option, how to get this personalization and answers to your questions, is typically to go to a human coach, which by the way, I’m a big fan of. I just think [human coaches] are very inaccessible for a large part of the population — people who could never afford a Stanford MBA right now but still want access to the tactics that are taught there.”
“So, I think we also have this value proposition of making the entrepreneurial/management/leadership knowledge more accessible for the mainstream. Online courses are one size fits all, human coaches are expensive, and the AI coaching approach through Bunch delivers personalized, relevant content at scale without being expensive.”
As of February 2021, Bunch has launched its beta (currently free and available on iPhone). With a base of 15,500 enthusiastic users ranging from early-career engineers to Millennial solopreneurs to senior C-level executives, the app is off to a strong start towards democratizing access to leadership coaching.
Takeaways for aspiring entrepreneurs
Reflecting on her failures and successes, Gutnick offers five pieces of advice from her entrepreneurial journey.
1. Listen to your users
“I’ve learned that it’s super important to listen to users. It doesn’t mean you have to do what they say, but you need to listen and spend at least 30% of your time talking and listening (maybe talking 10% of the time).”
2. Mission-driven teams make all the difference
“People join companies for different reasons: the vision, ambition, passion for the field or industry, personal career ambitions, or whatever. But I’ve learned that people that get the most out of a start-up journey are the people that sign up for the mission.”
3. Manage your ego
“You need to manage your ego and measure how much it impacts you and others. Ask for feedback, then look into rituals that can help you to keep yourself in check because it will happen that your ego will get the best of you.”
“If you can push your ego aside, that’s when the magic happens. Problems resolve themselves. In the situations where I was able to overcome my ego, I could tackle complex problems and complicated situations with higher effectiveness and efficiency.”
4. Practice mindfulness to keep yourself grounded
“Find little moments during the day to say to yourself, ‘Oh my gosh! This was so cool!’ Savor them and share them with others and inspire your team to do the same because everyone is hyper-stressed. It’s your job to keep everyone grounded. Being super present and paying attention to what’s happening in the moment helps you do that.”
5. Be as transparent, vulnerable, and straightforward as possible
“If you can find the strength, being transparent, vulnerable, and straightforward wins the game. Once you reflect on difficult situations you’ve had and do it openly, I’m always surprised by how much it helps people relate and encourages them to speak up and ask questions. It opens up a real conversation. It’s okay to say, ‘I f***** up today. This shouldn’t have happened. I don’t have any solutions yet. I need to think about it. Do you have any ideas?’”
Gutnick’s favorite management rituals
Gutnick is a founder who walks the walk and uses leadership rituals herself. Here are two of her favorite ones right now:
Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus Planner
“This book helps structure your day. Its focus is simple — it helps you write three big goals each day. I really benefit from this because I have so many tasks in my Trello, and this helps me prioritize my top three.”
PPP: Progress, Plans, Problems Status Reporting Framework
“At Bunch, everyone fills one out, and we post it in Slack for everyone to see. And we now added emojis to it, and so it’s funny to see people’s humor. One of our team members turned hers into a poem! So, right now, my favorite ritual is to write and read these PPPs because it helps you close the day.”
Conclusion
Darja Gutnick (Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack) is an exciting female entrepreneur who you’ll likely hear more about in the future. Bunch plans on becoming the world’s fastest-growing learning and development start-up with projections of reaching over 150,000 users in 2021.
For those interested in entrepreneurship and worried about switching fields, consider Gutnick’s journey. Ingenuity, perseverance, and curiosity about human behavior allowed her to thrive rather than fold in response to the obstacles she faced. For some people, entrepreneurship is in their DNA.