How AI Reveals Your True Leadership Style

00:00:07 Mark Smith
Welcome to AI Unfiltered, the show that cuts through the hype and brings you the authentic side of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, Mark Smith, and in each episode, I sit down one-on-one with AI innovators and industry leaders from around the world. Together, we explore real-world AI applications, share practical insights, and discuss how businesses are implementing responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI. Let's dive into the conversation and see how AI can transform your business today. Welcome back to AI Unfiltered. Today's guest is from Los Angeles and is the founder and CEO of Parafoil. Check out the show notes for links to anything we discuss. Ben, welcome.

00:00:55 Ben Perreau
Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

00:00:57 Mark Smith 
Good to have you on. I'm so interested in this discussion around leadership, around AI. Both of them are dear to my heart because I've always had a massive challenge with the concept of management. and not leadership. And the massive difference, and even one word that I've been pondering in the last two weeks, is the wisdom of leadership or wisdom in leadership, which is a term that I haven't heard for years, but it's just cropping up. I'm indexing on it, which is, yeah, and I don't even know that I can really define what wisdom is, but it's I definitely know it's a lot more than what I've experienced a lot of my career in the management scenario. But before we kick off, food, family, and fun, what do they mean to you when you're not working?

00:01:44 Ben Perreau
Oh yeah, wow, fascinating. Well, my dad is Malaysian and my mom is British, right? And so I probably identify a lot with the Malaysian side of my family culturally. And Malaysia has this rich and interesting food culture too. It's a real mishmash of Indian food, Chinese food, Indonesian food. All, you know, Malaysia's been this melting pot because of where it sits in the Straits of Malacca for all these different kinds of food over the course of years. And so that means my family and I are very connected to meals. And so I go to Malaysia every so often and eat my own body weight in laksa, nasi lemak, mee goreng, all of these, you know, things I find wonderful. And to me, they're like childhood. But I know to a lot of people, they're just kind of like fun foods to go and eat. So that is definitely a big part of my life. And so as a result, food has become a big part of my life. So I love to cook. I love to eat.

00:02:38 Mark Smith
Oh, nice.

00:02:39 Ben Perreau
And yeah, family is also really important in that because I think eating together is something I did from a really early age. And it really matters to me to be able to find people I care about. Even though has been moved from London to Los Angeles, it's a great way to find my chosen family here and to be able to go and spend time with them and eat together. When I'm not spending time with other people, I am pursuing the very solitary activity of photography, which I love doing. That is my fun outside of work. There's something so meditative, Mark, so meditative about sitting on the side of a hill before dawn with a camera and a tripod and a cable release, wondering how the light is going to fall on the hill across from you. And Nothing happens for hours while you're sat there, usually freezing, honestly. And then as the light starts to hit the hill, all of a sudden, nature's show plays itself for you in a way that you just don't expect. And everything happens so fast. And you're watching the light cascade across whatever hill you've chosen, whatever landscape you chose, whatever bridge you've chosen. And it moves slowly and then incredibly fast. And it's so entertaining to me. Every time that happens, the day presents itself to me. And I try and capture as much of it as I can, and then take it home and pore over the things that I found. So I love doing that. Photography is one of my true loves, and I do it outside of work whenever I can, which is not as often as I would like, but one day I'm sure there will be more photography in my life.

00:04:06 Mark Smith
Yeah, it is amazing. I just happen to live in such a beautiful place that I get to go out the front of my house and do that across a farm valley out to the ocean, Pacific Ocean. And so it just the magic right of a dawn. I try to be up at 5 every morning just to observe, like I go outside for the next hour and just to observe it the day, and you're right. It just, it's magic. Absolutely magic.

00:04:32 Ben Perreau
 Good for you, man, for getting up at 5 A.m. I mean, I aim to do that. I'm probably more of a 6 A.m.person, but I have had jet lag recently. And so getting up at 5 A.m. has happened very naturally to me. And I've got to enjoy the start of the day. So it's worth remembering that when you can, you should.

00:04:46 Mark Smith
Yeah. I've got two young kids, so it's the only way that I can get, before they wake up, my only me time, really in the day. I can imagine.

00:04:57 Mark Smith
That's why it works. Tell me a bit about what you're doing now and how did you get here? Because I understand you started your career in what, radio or?

00:05:09 Ben Perreau
Journalism.

00:05:10 Mark Smith
Journalism, yeah.

00:05:12 Ben Perreau
I started my career as a music journalist of all things. And so many, many years ago, I worked for the New Musical Express in London, which is the music magazine that was the 1st place to write about the Beatles and the Sex Pistols and the Strokes and all these bands that ended up being fairly big, Oasis, a recent example. And we built a pretty big music website.  And I realized through that I was probably a better product manager than I am a journalist. And so I subsequently took jobs at the BBC, at Sky, at large journalistic institutions where I was working in a product capacity, kind of bridging the gap between news and product. And so after I did that, I thought, can I start companies? Because that was sort of the next click up. I could maybe build a product, could I start a company? And so I started a couple of companies, had some sort of moderate success and some failure for sure, and then found myself into a leadership development company that was started by early, early Apple people. So I worked for eight years for SY Partners, which is the firm that was founded by 80s Apple people, if you like, who worked there in the 80s. They're not in their 80s yet. And I was lucky enough at that firm to work at a fairly senior level with a lot of C-suite leaders from the 1450s. So, you know, companies that are in the Fortune 50, we have worked with them along the years. They have worked with Starbucks and Google and Meta and obviously Apple and JPMorgan Chase and AT&T and all these sort of large multinationals. And working with leaders at that level in the C-suite with people who are quite honestly intellectually hard to surpass. I learned a lot about what leadership means at that level, but I started to realize that Leadership development and growth is very easy when you have access to a lot of resources. But what does it look like to have access to leadership development when you're really new and very young in your career? As I had been once when I was a music journalist and didn't have the resources and the hope to be able to be supported that I thought I had. And so we set about building Parafoil as a product to democratize access to great leadership knowledge, to access to the kind of reflection that you normally only get from having a coach, And some of these leaders in the C-suite at Fortune 50 companies have three, 4 coaches that they're running in cadres behind them, knowing, you know, watching what they're doing. Many of them have sort of partnership relationships and peer relationships with folks who are helping them out day-to-day, minute to minute. And so I thought, can we create that? And it turned out, I think, in the context of AI, we're able to do that now. We're able to build a product that can load a lot of the world's leadership development knowledge, cognitive science, behavioral science into one place and to help managers and career leaders benefit from that knowledge and to minute by minute understand how they're doing so that they don't have to wait for a feedback session that happens once a month or worse, their performance review, which happens once a year to understand how they're doing. So that's kind of how I got here and what I'm doing, I guess.

00:08:28 Mark Smith
So this is amazing because I assume you need to ingest a lot of data from that individual or particularly this fear of influence activity to be able to identify those career limiting move conversations, those, you know, almost like missed opportunities. You know, you had the ability as a leader to really impart something to that individual, but you were so busy, you moved on and you lost that opportunity. Like, how does it all come together in technology?

00:09:00 Ben Perreau
Yeah. parafoil, we call parafoil leadership intelligence, right? It analyzes how you lead in the work. But as you say, you need to have context for what's going on in someone's work to really do that. And so the way it works right now is it's an app you install on your desktop or soon on your phone. And when you choose for it to do so, it analyzes the conversations you're having with your team. And through that conversational data, you can understand all sorts of things that wasn't possible for. In fact, Power4 uses a number of different methods, including psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics is the study of what's going on in someone's cognitive state on the basis of the language they emit in a conversation. And most of the time, you're measuring what we would consider to be garbage words in a conversation, pronouns, prepositions, those kinds of things. By measuring those, you can work out all sorts of things, like how cohesive a group is based on language pattern matching styles. You can understand what someone's Big Five personality type is. Enneagram, a lot of those things where you used to do self-reported surveys, you can now do in a way that is less biased because it's now no longer self-reported, but also more convenient because you're just emitting your sort of daily work. And Powerful analyzes all of that stuff, puts it all together, and then gives you an analysis of how each conversation's gone after the fact, right after the fact, because we try not to distract people during the meeting. And then over time, it builds a picture of how you lead and starts to measure the trend in how you're doing in your leadership. So how well are you creating clarity with your team, collectively and individually? How good is the alignment you have with your team? How many feedback moments are you creating in your conversations? And more importantly, how many feedback moments are you enabling for other people to give to you? And so we measure all that stuff. And it just builds a better picture for you as an individual in the work. So you don't have to recount what happened to a chatbot. You don't have to fill out a survey. You can just go about your daily work. You get full control over what it analyzes and what it doesn't analyze. So you can stop it at any point. But it's just a way for it to be able to integrate with the way you're doing your work anyway, rather than having to be just had another piece of homework. We've all got enough, haven't we?

00:11:22 Mark Smith
Yeah. Incredible concept because when I observe across my career, one thing I do is if I have to fill out a survey, a form around management or leadership type work, there's an element that your brain wants to game the system, right? It knows where you feel you should be. And so therefore, I will finish these things and go, I think I answered it biasedly. Like I want this outcome and so I'm going to answer the questions and how I hope I am performing too, because that's my aspirations, but it might not be a direct reflection of how I'm actually doing. And so I think that is incredibly powerful. And I wonder how much of the other parts of our life, technology like this is going to go into, because, you know, one of the things that I noticed with agents at the moment, all the hype around agents, you need an age, aging can do, you know, this, that, and the other. The problem is it takes 50, 60 hours to build an agent that is going to save me 10 minutes. Like it's the effort to output is just not there at the moment. And I wonder whether we'll get to a scenario where an AI will observe everything I do in my day. It could have access to my cameras, my audio, and my entire whatever device I'm on, and then be able to go proactively, hey, I see you do this process over and over again. Do you want me to create a business process? We can automate it on your approval to start with. And then when you're comfortable with it, I'll look after it for you, right? And just in what you describe there is the first time I've seen in reality this kind of observational of what you do, then it's going to feed back around what you can learn from it, what you can take away, what you can implement from it. Is that Have I kind of captured what you're talking about there?

00:13:17 Ben Perreau
You captured it perfectly. And you know, today it's feedback. Tomorrow, I think it's clear actions that you can go and take in service of your leadership. And I think in the near future, it'll be able to, with your, you know, with your acknowledgement and approval, to take some of those actions for you as well from a leadership perspective. So Maybe, Mark, you and I have been in a managerial conversation, you're managing me, and it's been a bit of a tense conversation. And so step one is identifying that. Step 2 is saying, hey, listen, that was a bit of a tense conversation. Maybe you want to follow up with Ben and see how he's doing, you know, because you didn't necessarily notice that because you were so busy dealing with the content of the meeting. And step 3 is, I've booked a meeting for you tomorrow because I know that you like to make sure you follow up quite quickly after You've had a conversation with Ben, and you want to see how things are doing. Here are the three things that cause the most amount of frustration in that meeting. When you go in, just bear that stuff in mind. And so we're working on that path, I guess. And at the moment, it's really just about identifying those moments.

00:14:26 Mark Smith
I like that, as in that proactive nature of getting it booked. One thing I've, and a lot of the people I've mentored in my career, is that a problem never gets better with time.

00:14:38 Ben Perreau
Right. Right.

00:14:40 Mark Smith
 An unaddressed problem never gets better with time. It only goes downhill. And I'm talking about major project failures, et cetera, because there was a disconnect when I went and did a, you know, an autopsy on why we got to this point. Six months earlier, it had been identified what the issue was, but I didn't want to say anything.

00:14:57 Ben Perreau
Yeah, you know, and memories wane and everyone starts to build their own narrative of what happened and it just becomes more and more challenging, potentially toxic if things get really bad. And that can turn into contempt if it really is left alone. And so that's, as we know it from all relationships, but particularly projects and work, you need to move on that stuff faster than you would otherwise, I think, in order to be able to correct the record.

00:15:24 Mark Smith
Yeah. How do you, in the organizations you work with, differentiate between leadership and management, as in like there's a lot of managers that aren't leaders. And then, and I'm almost, sometimes I find it hard to find leadership. So I've, I don't know, was it a year and a half ago, I left a relatively large company called IBM. And when I looked at the chain of command up the organization from me to, you know, state-based, country-based, region-based, I found a lot of managers, and I've got to say not a single leader, not a single one, right up to Asia-Pac region level. Everybody was taking a director from New York and just pushing it down with really no leadership at all. It's just, you know, it's been going 115 years as a company, and it's a product of its processes, but the leadership is just And this is like what I couldn't get over. This was not like low-level management. This is every level of management. I couldn't find leadership. In fact, I'd go as far as to say up to the CEO.

00:16:38 Ben Perreau
I mean, IBM's a big company with, as you say, like such a long history at this point. And so some of those structures must surely have calcified somewhat in the organization. And my opinion of, you know, the difference between leadership and management is pretty stark, you know, Organizations appoint managers and they find themselves in roles often that have manager in the title, they're not always. And it's sort of something that's bestowed upon you. sort of get awarded it by the company as a kind of badge or you pick it up. And for some people, it's a badge of honor. For some people, it's a curse. But either way, it's something that tends to be awarded to you. Whereas my opinion on leadership is it is something you generate for yourself. by moving beyond the boundaries of the formal authority that you've been granted, that's the moment at which you're starting to step into leadership. And that is all to say, if you just move and do the work that you've been given and you perform it with great accuracy and you're delegating just the right amount, I think you can be a great manager. It's possible to be a great manager that way, right? But if you really want to lead and you feel called to lead, because I do think it's something that's a vocation of its own, then I think that's something which is a choice that you make and you sort of realign it into your identity and you say, hey, listen, I want to lead people because I believe I've got something to give here. I believe I've got an understanding of people or an empathy or, you know, I really love this space that we're working in and I just want to be able to have a different degree of influence on it. And I think leaders are people who have chosen to do that. And so sometimes in whole organizations, to your point, you don't encounter them because what matters is quarterly targets, very tactical work. It's not about thinking strategically. It's not about moving beyond the formal boundaries so you're in control. And it just happens, doesn't it? It's sort of over time, the idea of leadership takes a lot of energy. I mean, you know this, leadership takes a lot of energy every morning to get up and do, right? You can't just sit up and go, hey, I'm going to lead today. I'm going to give it 10%, 20%. But you can get in and go, I'm going to manage today and give that 20%, I think.

00:18:45 Mark Smith
Yeah. So, you know, people go to university and they do an MBA. Right. They're taught to be good managers and theoretically run businesses. Do we see the leadership courses and when someone identifies in themselves perhaps that they are a leader, what are the opportunities for that person to go, you know what, I've got, let's say I've got a deep technical skill. I might have a deep financial literacy that I can apply to business. It might be in human resources, but I've identified that I'm a leader. And how do I build that muscle apart from the other skills that I might have been hired on, et cetera? But I want to build my leadership capability.

00:19:32 Ben Perreau
Yeah, I think this is where a lot of people who feel called to lead run aground. Because if you've been very academically gifted, you did at school, you've learned fantastic things technically about the discipline you're working at. You know, perhaps you're an amazing software engineer or a wonderful designer, or maybe just a fantastic writer and you are doing really great in the marketing team. And then somebody says, hey, listen, have you ever thought about leading some people? And you're like, oh, I don't know. Or maybe you're like, yeah, I want to do that. But you know, most people's approach when they want to kind of grow is to read more books, go much more, you know, watch more material on it, I think you can learn a lot about the knowledge and the information behind leadership that way. But my opinion, and this may be an unpopular opinion, so please disagree with me if you feel that way, Mark, is that leadership can only really be learned through praxis. It can only really be learned through the doing of the do, rather than necessarily through just purely the academic sort of reading of books. And so until you start to step forward and say, hey, listen, from today, I'm going to try something that feels like a leadership behavior, then I don't know whether you can ever really start to practice leadership in that way. I don't know how that resonates with you. What do you think?

00:20:53 Mark Smith
No, it does. Like I can, there's a book on my shelf here. The book is called Radical Candor. And After I'd been a manager for so long in a business, I read that book while traveling and it kind of hit me between the eyes that I had the authority bestowed on me by the company. I had a team of 70, you know, working for me. And yet if I reflect on was I a good leader and was I even a good manager, I would give myself an F in hindsight. And after reading that book, It totally opened up my eyes and I was like, man, I want to go back and maybe do this again in my career. And I was presented with the opportunity to do so and did so, and I failed again. And so, as you say, I'd learned the theory of it, but there was a big difference in many elements of it, applying it and putting it into practice on a daily basis with my reports in the business. And so I think you're right that yes, you can get the theory from books and, the conferences, sessions that might be on the topic. But there is, yeah, there's more that's needed.

00:22:11 Ben Perreau
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think you might be giving yourself short shrift there by giving yourself an F, because I think just the fact that you're being this self-aware about it probably means that you probably get a better grade than that. But I understand the point you're making. I imagine you were not a bad leader at all. I think it has to be something that you are able to find the space to practice in, and you have to feel like you can apply yourself. The tricky thing about that is, most people who are called to lead are installed in jobs and then find themselves to be accidental, right? In fact, there was a survey done by the British Institute of Chartered Managers, and they found that 82% of managers consider themselves to be accidental, which means they just arrived here. They don't know how they're here. And so how do you find your own leadership identity when you consider yourself to be an accidental manager? You know, you're not even necessarily somebody who's been, anyone said, hey, listen, I really believe in your leadership potential. I'm going to find a way to support you. That's not what's happening. These people are sort of just put into a role and really struggling. And I think it's reasonable that 1/3 of leaders flame out within the first year as a result of that kind of work. So the opportunity there is how do we support people better? to get from a place where most people get promoted into their first leadership role when they're in their late 20s, maybe early 30s, to the massive delta that exists where they don't really generally get support until their early 40s. How do we help people much, much earlier in their career? And, you know, this shouldn't be about age. Anybody can find their way into those things at any point. But how do we help people earlier in their career and not have a 10-year delta between when you arrive at the idea of leadership And when you actually need to start feeling like you're supported and you have the tools and what needs to happen and you can start to really feel like you can thrive in that environment. And I think 10 years is a long time to get from okay to good. And that's, think of all the people you're managing for those 10 years who are having to deal with the version of me. I mean, look, I was 24. I was one of those people who massively over delegated or was so lean back I just didn't, I just did it all myself and didn't delegate anything. And I could not find the space in between the two of those things. And what I really needed to understand was some apprenticeships, so there was someone to shadow in terms of the role that I was doing, and also some reflection. I needed to know to ask for feedback. But the idea of asking for feedback didn't actually occur to me until four years after I'd been leading people. And then I thought, how am I doing? And even then, I would only go and ask the people where I felt safe asking them, which isn't really everyone. It's not the people who really have something to say. And then eventually, I got the feedback I needed, whether it was because I asked for it or not, and started to become somebody who was able to start to grow a little bit as a leader and a manager. So I think just trying to crush that time period down from 10 years to, I mean, even if we can get it down to two, That's 8 great years that you can spend in leadership, doing more, achieving more, being the kind of leader you want to be. You're going to get better roles, you're going to get promoted, you know, all those things are going to happen much faster if you can just really focus your energy on your own growth and leadership like that, I think.

00:25:34 Mark Smith
Without naming names or anything to identify the people involved, give us some examples of people that have engaged with you at Parafoil and the technology and kind of what type of results are they seeing and what kind of feedback are you getting?

00:25:53 Ben Perreau 
Yeah. I'll tell you a story about an engineer that we worked with as a freelancer for a while who was one of the early users of Parafoil. And, you know, engineer felt like they were quite self-aware and quite comfortable in the leadership space. And so we gave them a couple of people to work with and They were managing them in the day-to-day, but they started to employ ParaFore because they were testing it. In those early days, the product was still kind of finding its feet a little bit, but they were definitely getting the kind of analysis they're getting now out of the product. And it was telling them consistently that their leadership style was quite transactional. And as somebody who self-identifies as a leader, you very rarely want to hear that unless you're in the newsroom, in the battlefield, there are areas where transactional is good and there are areas where it's not, right?And so this engineering leader really struggled with it because they felt like they self-identified with this idea of being a much more democratic leader. But I don't think they realized, and we all suspected that their language style, particularly in their communication style, was a little bit more tactical, transactional, you do this, I'll do this, you know, that kind of thing. And so Over the course of three or four meetings, they kept getting this consistent score. The first time they were like, I think there's something wrong with the product. We need to think about how we're engineering the product. This isn't working right. And I was like, Oh yeah, what's going on? So we would chat about that for a minute and we'd look at the heuristics and we'd spend time with the data scientists and be like, Is this wrong? I'd be like, Everything looks right on paper. Let's give it another go. So then he'd come back a couple of days later and be like, I'm still getting this score. And I'd be like, It's so interesting, isn't it? Meanwhile, I was thinking, yeah, this kind of resonates with me. I was thinking like, this is, this person does communicate a bit like this. And I was learning that this is giving language to the way that this person communicates. So I didn't have the language necessarily to be able to shape it. And he was learning as well that maybe there was a chance that he was potentially transactional. But it was on the third attempt when he did the third meeting, obviously, and it was still landing in that transactional zone that he came back to me and was like, I am, aren't I? I'm one of those communicators who communicates in a transactional way. And I said, I think it's possible. Maybe there's some investigation to go and do there. And, you know, and he did. And his communication style really shifted over the course of the next two to three weeks. He really started to become the kind of leader he wanted to be. And that was great for the team. It's great for him. So, you know, that's one example of somebody who really early on had done that. And since then, We've been able to do that with leaders who work in all sorts of companies and startups in Silicon Valley. So there's a whole bunch of different tech companies that are now using Powerful in that context. And most people are engineering managers, product managers, design managers, marketing leaders, you know, most of them early career, because I think Powerful works best when it's working with folks at that space. But yeah, it's been the kind of tool that's shaping those kinds of reflections for people, which I think is really cool to see, you know?

00:29:01 Mark Smith
Very cool, very cool. My final question is, this tool for, folks that have got deep pockets and, just the Fortune, 50, 100, that type of thing? Or, and is it something that you can engage with you as a company or just as an individual that wants to?

00:29:23 Ben Perreau
Yeah. As you can, access it as an individual. At the moment, it's 59 bucks a month, 59 USD a month, or $599 a year. We've got an introductory offer on at the moment, which brings it down to about $34.50 US a month, which is, I think, pretty affordable.

00:29:43 Mark Smith
 Totally reasonable for the value that you've described.

00:29:46 Ben Perreau
 Right. Most individuals use their learning and development stipend.So IBM, for example, had an L&D stipend. For most companies that they're kind of in tech, it's somewhere between 1000 and... I mean, Google says very generous, but it usually covers the annual fee of Powerful pretty nicely. If anybody's running into trouble with their enterprise and using it, then we also have an enterprise, so the enterprise can access it. There's a very limited view that the enterprise actually sees in terms of what's going on in Powerful. They understand with no individual data, what leadership styles people are using across the board empirically, or how often Powerful is being used empirically, but nothing individual.

00:30:26 Mark Smith
Yeah, Amazing. Ben, such an intriguing conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:30:32 Ben Perreau
Thanks so much for having me, Mark. I really enjoyed it.

00:30:35 Mark Smith
You've been listening to AI Unfiltered with me, Mark Smith. If you enjoyed this episode and want to share a little kindness, please leave a review. To learn more or connect with today's guest, check out the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next time where we'll continue to uncover AI's true potential one conversation at a time.