EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, Brandon Laws sits down with James Lawrence, Co-Founder and CEO of Happy, to explore how AI is revolutionizing employee development. Lawrence shares how AI tools can free up time for creativity and problem-solving, allowing employees to focus on what really matters. If you’re curious about how AI can make work more productive and fulfilling for everyone — from frontline employees to CEOs — this episode is for you.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
James Lawrence, Co-Founder and CEO of Happy, is an entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience. He is passionate about empowering people, fostering intentional leadership, and improving workplace culture.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON AI
James Lawrence sees AI as a powerful tool for enhancing careers rather than replacing them, despite early fears that it would “take our jobs.” He explains that AI tools allow employees to shift focus toward creativity. “If your work was 20% creative […] and there was an 80% load that had nothing to do with creativity,” Lawrence says, AI can help reduce that mundane workload, letting employees “spend more time being creative at work.”
He also highlights that AI isn’t just for tech enthusiasts or leaders but benefits everyone — from “your regular individual contributor all the way up to the CEO.” While tools like Happy aren’t necessarily creativity-focused, Lawrence believes AI can make life easier and more productive for people across all levels of an organization.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Coaching for All
“In most organizations, it’s only the leadership team, maybe, that would get access to a human coach. […] But they’re not the only ones that want to get coaching, right? […] There are a lot of employees inside the organization who want more coaching, and the managers don’t have time to do the coaching. That’s actually what Gallup’s data says.
And so the problem we’re solving is just really being able to bring more coaching that’s more accessible to people.”
Fear Not
“Happy treats people’s data with a lot of respect, and so we’re not reading your Slack messages. We’re not reading your emails. The thing Happy is most interested in is understanding who you’re interacting with and the type of coaching you’re accessing. […] But I think employees have a valid reason to ask questions about what’s being monitored. In Happy’s case, we want to have a very transparent relationship with all of our companies and the people who use Happy. And so, believe it or not, we don’t actually need to read your messages to understand you. Happy’s got a behavioral assessment based on DISC. So when you first log into Happy, you spend about 5 minutes answering some questions. And then from them, we are looking at how we’re using a platform, the type of coaching you’re accessing, and we can learn from that enough other behavioral cues to be able to render coaching to you.”
Knowing Your “Why”
“Getting access to a coach as a young CEO, I found incredibly valuable, and John was actually the first one who taught me how to use a personality assessment. But what John really taught me to do was to better understand my coworkers and to build even a shred of listening capability — learning how to listen to people more effectively. But what I realized in working with John was taking that very valuable coaching and trying to distill that to the entire organization was really hard. […] And I only had maybe say 80 to 125 employees at the time. So how do you do that when you have 500 employees? How do you do it when you have 1000? So scaling like that type of coaching is really hard. And so my co-founder and I back in 2018/2019 had developed this idea of using AI and using behavioral science to do this at scale and to do it in a way that was really easy for the employee, and the rest is history.”
How “Happy” Works
“The software knows who you work with every day, just based on our social connectivity algorithms. So, we’re looking at who you’re meeting with, who’s getting coaching on you, who you’re sending messages to. We’re not reading your messages, but we know who you’re interacting with, and then we can profile your coaching around that. […] You can also build coaching circles inside Happy. You can just pick the people you want to get coaching on. […] And then maybe you pick like your boss, maybe you pick two other senior managers and the CEO because in your role, you interact with those people every day.”
Vital Connections
“There’s really nothing more important than improving the manager-employee relationship. […] Happy helps you learn your manager. That’s Job #1 for us is how we provide insights into how your manager thinks — what’s important to your manager. With Happy, there is a behavioral science component to it, but you can actually go in and tell your own story at work. […] And so that’s really valuable because, especially for me, I know that when I can understand what’s important to my boss, […] get useful tips every day on how to improve our relationship with you, and I know that my boss is also getting some insights on me.”
Addressing Conflict
“In terms of improving organizational culture, I think it would start with communication collaboration. A big one is conflict resolution. […] Healthy conflict is important. The ability to have healthy conflict and how you navigate conflict — like that’s a real thing. And I think sometimes people want to avoid conflict instead of promoting a healthy organizational culture where conflict with your manager — with the decision maker — that’s probably quite healthy. […] Happy does a really good job of helping provide some perspective. You don’t usually go to HR and say, ‘I’m having some light conflict with my manager, and we’re having a disagreement.’ Because people don’t go to HR for those types of things. They go to HR when there’s a real problem. But to your point, big problems come from little problems, and giving you the tools to sort out a problem — what I would call a healthy conflict or a disagreement — is really important.”
Meeting a Real Need
“You want to transform your workplace — a big part of that is, what do I do as an organizational leader to create these types of conversations? Well, I think it just starts with this very flawed assumption, which is that […] a new manager somehow knows how to manage people. I mean, most managers don’t get any real training on how to manage people. And so you have a workforce typically that has a lot of managers themselves who are looking for training on how to work with their people.
People want coaching. Their bosses just don’t have the bandwidth to coach them. So it’s kind of like this organizational challenge that’s existing where everybody wants some help on sorting through their work relationships, but they just don’t have the time to get it or to give it.”
LEARN MORE
Discover your Happy Profile for free and start your journey toward personal growth — visit happyprofile.com for your free assessment or connect directly with James Lawrence, Co-Founder and CEO of Happy, on LinkedIn!