Ep 214, Strong Microcultures Build Thriving Organizations

Welcome to Conflict Managed. I'm your host, Merry Brown. This week on Conflict Managed, we welcome Artem Koren. Artem is the co-founder and chief product officer of Sembly AI, where he is building a new category of meeting intelligence and enablement technology for professional services teams.

With a background spanning systems engineering, enterprise consulting, and product leadership, Artem combines deep technological expertise with a strong understanding of how organizations operate, transforming everyday business conversations into structured insights that drive revenue, delivery, and decision making. Artem is passionate about using AI to augment human potential, enabling teams to work smarter, collaborate more effectively, and unlock value hidden within their day-to-day interactions his work sits at the intersection of ai enterprise productivity and the future of knowledge work pushing beyond simple automation towards systems that actively support how organizations sell deliver and grow good morning artem and welcome to conflict managed.

Good morning glad to be here i know we're gonna have an interesting conversation we're gonna be talking about ai which is on most people's minds in one way or the other but before we get to that i would like to hear about the first job you ever had as a young person oh my how far back are we going the first job so not a job that i hired was hired for but i was putting out leaflets and houses and car windows. And then I was standing in a corner handing out those same leaflets.

I think it was like a barber shop or something. And I just remembered some kids from high school and they were older than me came up and they're like, can we just take all your leaflets and just you'll be done for the day? So maybe, so that was one of my earliest jobs. And then I had a few kind of computer jobs throughout high school.

Well, let's talk about that first job of handing out leaflets. So going around, distributing them, and then being propositioned by friends or people that you knew of, hey, you can just not really do the work and look like you're done. Did you take them up on the offer or did you say, no, no, I need to pass these out? I think so.

First, I didn't know them. They were just kids that like kind of were in a good mood, I guess. I think what happened was this is I mean, this is a few years ago. I think what happened was they like I didn't give them everything, but like they took a You know, they took a child.

And, you know, the barbershop took off and became a multi-billion - no, I'm just kidding. I just think it's interesting when we think about getting into the world of work and something that we just learned so much from every job we have, but from the very first one, things that you don't really think about encountering, such as what am I going to do with this dilemma? Somebody asked me to do this or the workarounds that we find, the ones that are good workarounds that make our time efficient and those that are counterproductive, such as, you know, not really doing but looking like we're doing what we're supposed to be up to.

So you went from that into some computerist jobs. Have you always been interested in technology or where did that come from? Yeah, I think so. From a very early age, this was back in the Windows 3.

1, Microsoft DOS days, and I didn't really know that much about computers, but I was curious. It kind of seemed very cool and very full of possibilities. So I learned to code first in QBasic and then in C, I think by about maybe seventh grade. And then just kind of took off from there it was also like this was the 90s and the 90s were kind of like and very similar to what we're experiencing now with ai in the 90s we were experiencing with the internet i know for for many generations now it's like what does that even mean that's like a black photo but uh yeah there was a time when in internet was not a thing, and for those few who had access to internet it was like a world a whole new world of discovery I agree.

So it was exciting. And, you know, there was there was a lot of new and interesting things to learn. And that's something I enjoy. Gosh it's interesting in the way that you've been talking about computers and then and now this idea of creativity of the new the possible i could imagine so i'm more of a humanities background than any science background it's not really my thing but when i hear you talking it sounds very creative and and discovery oriented not so much and maybe you do like the mathematics of it, the zeros and ones aspect of it.

Talk a little bit about that. Is this, do you like computers and computer science and all of that because of discovery, because of possibility of what you can do? Or again, what is drawing you to it? Yeah, I think the possibility is the thing.

Well, so first of all, I'm a big weirdo. And I like, I used to tell people that, I'm a humanities person that was like stuck in like a math body. So like when I was little, like when I was, you know, like earlier classes, like high school, like I, I tended to kind of be put in like a lot of math science tracks and I did well there. And that was the problem.

So sometimes it's kind of an interesting phenomenon. i actually don't hear a lot of people talking about it where your aptitudes don't equal your passions and some people are very mathy and they love being very mathy and that's great and some people are very humanities and they love being very humanities that's great but some people can be both or can be aptituded in one but really passionate about another and i don't and i'm i think I'm one of those. So I enjoy writing. I was always very good in my humanities classes.

I happened to have written a book at some point. So I'm a very weird math ones and zeros guy. So for me, I actually... The math is not what's super interesting.

I think it's important to understand, but it's what you can do with it and what you can kind of create in a sense. Technology is my medium. It's my artistic medium. And more moreover i think the best technologists the ones that really create amazing works they think about tech as as a creative like art like if you look at for example the founder of linux linus how he like he's so passionate about like a one character change even today because that's his, that's his David, you know, that's his sculpture.

And he just, he gets crazy if you try to nick David in the wrong, you know, in the wrong way. So I think, I think that there's a way to look at technology and the math and the ones and zeros in a way that's very creative and kind of potential bringing. And I think the tech that's coming today with AI is, is fantastic. I love it because it lets you be more abstracted away from the ones and zeros and your creative space is just exploding.

I love that because I think so many times, a variety of things is what you said, that just because you have an aptitude for something doesn't mean that that's what's going to bring you joy and what it is that you want to spend your life doing. But also, I think when we think about creativity, I think that so many times, or creation, we think about it in this sort of narrow way. But as you were talking, I was thinking about, so Nietzsche has this view about art, like what makes a good piece of art.

And it's, God, you have to have both the structure and the passion, right? You have to have both. So if something has no structure, it's like, what am I listening to? What am I looking at?

What is going on here? It becomes unintelligible. But if it's all passion, it's also like, what is going on here, right? And so having the scaffolding, whatever that means to you and whatever medium you're using, and then having the passion part over top of it.

And so artists, wherever we find them, whether that be somebody who's fishing, you know, I think art and artistic expression can be found everywhere. It's those people who have the technical skills down in order to use and wield that medium. And so that marriage of the two, which I think is really sad when we think about education and a misunderstanding of what education is and what it's for and how we need to develop people so that they're free to create in their given space, learning the technical art of it, but also having the space and the ability to look at the new, to innovate.

And so it's not STEM or humanities I think it's both together Yeah, absolutely And first I really love that framing The structure and passion It's kind of like a humanized form Of the product framing form and function. Which I think kind of is along the similar lines And yeah, I mean people are different You know, I have this kind of like, that idea that you know we we typically develop like one side of our hemisphere like one hemisphere of our brain or another more that it's just natural like some people are righties some people are lefties and you gravitate one way or another but for example if you look at kids who started, studying music very early like by like violinists at like six years old or piano players.

They are forced to hyper develop both hemispheres and then and then this creates this kind of like, capacity for both stem and humanities and i think it i don't think we have an educational path that that that tackles that well yes i agree and so i think we are short-sighted we are. We're hurting the individuals in the system of not giving them this robust possibility, but then also culture itself, because when we reduce creativity or we think it's extra instead of just the technical skill of whatever it might be, then we are not going to get that innovation down the road, let alone people living good, fulfilling lives.

It's like, what does that look like? It's different in different ways. And we know that people transition out of careers all the time. And society's changing and tech changes.

And so what the careers are today, who knows what they'll be in 10 years, let alone 30 years. And so this ability of being a critical thinker, of being engaged, of knowing how to use all of us instead of just pigeonholing ourselves in one particular way. And then we'll eventually get there. And maybe the things that you're developing might help us, free us to get there a little bit sooner as we think about the development of AI and how that can help as we educate ourselves and our children.

Maybe. I think there's this idea also that I like that, you know, the past 100 years, primarily progress has been driven by STEM. So if you look at all the innovations, discovery, these are all STEM people. And these kind of, you know, you're...

Kind of prototypical stem people like very math very science like and for the most part and in my experience this has been true i'm not saying everyone's like this but for the most part. I think for those engineers who are deeply system engineers they're less apt at like social and and like communicate clear social communication and there's there's good reasons for that because when your mind is so immersed in a particular system it almost you almost develop your own language that is difficult to communicate to someone who doesn't live in that environment like for example if i try to talk to magnus carlson about a chess game that he played like i'm a pretty good chess player i'm not great but like there's nothing that magnus can tell me that will make any sense to me even if he uses words that i understand so stem is the last 100 years But I think what's really interesting is the next 100 years, I think, is the playground of clear communicators and really humanities people, because you no longer need to kind of understand the math, but you have to effectively convey to the AI the picture of what you're trying to accomplish.

And that's a communications challenge. Like communications is all about, I have an idea in my mind and I need to teleport that idea into your mind. And effective communicators can do that well. And if you can do that to another person, you can do that to an AI.

And if you can clearly communicate an idea to an AI, the AI will build it well. You know, there's a difference between like, you know, I want. You know draw an elephant versus draw a toy that's an elephant that's purple that you know a 10 year old would know you know would enjoy playing with and maybe that toy is part of a bigger toys you know there there's there's differences in you know how you how you can share your ideas and those the good idea sharers the humanities people i think it's their time.

I like it because whatever somebody might think about AI, its uses, what it's good for, what it's not good for, what you're saying about, it might actually force us to do the thing that we need to do, even if AI isn't around, which is communicate with one another, communicate with our colleagues, ourself, communicate to ourself, be clear with ourself, our stakeholders, our partners. If the more that we're able to say this isn't working or this is working well what is the this and what do you mean by working or not working the more we're able to articulate to ourselves and to others then the more we're going to be able to have these healthy work environments and to partner and to solve problems together instead of if you and i have communicated and we haven't really and we're both now trying to solve this problem if we don't actually have the same problem we're solving for, then we're going to continue to be in a distance with one another and not achieving our goal, especially if we have different goals, because we don't know how to communicate with one another.

Yeah, it's absolutely critical. And I see it all the time. Like, so for example, at assembly, one of my rules is. Like you can't say it they like he she like you know no no pronouns like you you have you have to use the word the name thing like the name of the customer like the name of the component like name of the feature and that's that's super important because as soon as you get to any level of complexity anything the it's days he's she's that stops making any sense to anyone except up to you.

And I think there's a lot of these little practices that if you can put them all together, can kind of level up your ability to communicate clearly by a mile. And it's ever more important now because we don't spend that much time together anymore. So when we used to hang out all together in offices after work, we build a shared context in the shared language. And maybe if me and you are in an office every day, maybe I do know when you say, oh, those guys this, maybe I know.

But that's not the reality anymore. We spend less and less time together in a physical environment, more and more time online, which means that there's this natural contextual disconnect between us. And it's the communication becomes more and more transactional. You know, I think it's true kind of even more broadly across the whole country.

But let's not do that. Let's keep it in the professional world. Like, I think as a society, we're becoming more disconnected. But in a professional world, that's true.

And what that means is that you can't assume enough of a contextual overlap or as much of a contextual overlap with the people you're talking to as maybe you did 10, 20 years ago. That's really, yes, absolutely. For so many different sorts of reasons, especially when people are spread out. Now we have people in different demographics, I mean, different locations, let alone different places around the world.

And so we're bringing all of these different elements. And so there's less and less. So my my contention about technology is that technology is good insofar as it's serving us and we're not there to serve it so we have that you can whether or not you agree with that we maybe we can discuss that but then we also have what people have been talking a lot about which is the loneliness epidemic loneliness at work loneliness and culture so how do you, If we think about loneliness at work, I mean, we can ask the question, what is work for?

What should be happening at work? But it is the case that people are more and more talking about this. And then we've got less engagement because people are more disconnected. How do you see, I don't want to say technology is the cause of this.

There's many different causes of this unraveling in a way of community. How do you see technology as being part of the solution to help us deal with loneliness or not? Or how do you see that? Just a little question this morning.

How do we solve global loneliness in technological age? Well, I have the answer. No, I don't think anyone does. Certainly, technology is a big culprit.

Yeah. But it's technology in the way that it changes how we go about our daily lives. So it's not like technology is bad. It's that technology creates behavioral shifts.

Behavioral shifts create cultural shifts. And then cultural shifts create different societal outcomes. So yeah i i think i think that for when when we just started with social media like you know i was there when facebook just came out it was probably like you know in the first year uh we you know like one of the earliest batch of registrants because it hit like you know columbia university it was by university and then it had columbia university and at that point we had no idea and it was cool and it was interesting i think fast forward a decade we already had an inkling that the instagrams of the world had a lot of negative psychological impacts on children or just like teenagers because it warps your perception of what your community is and who your peers are and how you know how they live their life like it's it's a warped experience of what's going on around you.

And already there, I think we started to see trouble. I think today, unfortunately, the further we go, the worse that's going to get. I think we're at the beginnings of the loneliness epidemic. And I think it's actually going to get a lot worse.

How is it going to be solved? Oof. I don't know. I can tell you that for sure.

I can tell you something that will definitely happen. I don't know how it will be solved, but what will definitely happen is that there will be more technology out there that's going to do a better and better job at being a substitute for companionship for you, both on a professional and a friendly and on any kind of basis that you want. It's going to get very very good there's always been apps you know over the past decade that kind of like tried but they were very weak i mean in some societies it's a lot more accepted like in japan i know there's people marrying their digital companions or friends or whatever that hasn't reached us yet i don't think but these these technologies the companion technologies are filling that void and they're getting really good.

And what that means is they're also serving as a catalyst of that problem. There has to be some, I don't think it's a technological solution to solve loneliness. I think technology gives us something that we want. Like technology delivers value.

That's why it exists. And sometimes that value is good, but sometimes that value is detrimental for society, but maybe feels good to me. So like, maybe I'm feeling lonely, so I'm going to like engage with this digital companion that's going to feel like they know me like they care there's tricks right there these things you can bake into companions like charisma and and kind of good friendship you can digest those into behaviors and patterns and ai is getting really good really good at this like a message that like oh i i just i was browsing online and i noticed something that i thought you'd find cool and ai can do that it can feel very organic so the the feeling of loneliness like ai will put the band-aid over that the problem the systemic problem of loneliness that has to get solved in our societies like there has to be a cultural value around getting together as communities in some way or form we need to you know we're going to get philosophical here, but like historically this was, you know, church, like religion.

I think, you know, just by the numbers, like religion has been on the decline and we don't have a substitute. And I think without a substitute, we feel the gap, but without a societal way to address that gap, technology seeps in to kind of give us the, like the, you know, the, the pain relief. So technology doesn't cure the headache, but it gives you the pain relief and it feels good. And that's all technology cares about, right?

Technology is like a pill. But I think the problem is systemic, and I don't think technology is at the core of solving that problem. I think that's a very human problem. yeah right i agree so we we used to find community in a variety of different places right a lot of people were religious right and so they have their religious communities and of course then before let's say the car and the inner inner state system you're much more locally you know so the community is very much more local and that bides to us we are embodied creatures in space and time right we're located spatially located someplace and then when that starts moving right We just have this, all of this change.

Human history has always been full of change, but not like it has been in the past 150 years and all this sort of technology, and we haven't been able to keep up with it. So we move spatially away from families, and then work starts to, I think, take over the role of religion. Religion is in a decline you find that people are now wanting different kinds of things they want their places of where they work to have value statements and to act in the sort of not that we haven't always wanted work to act ethically but now we are just starting transition and thinking about work in a different place because now that is my maybe dominant community but now as that erodes.

Because we have people who are in office, hybrid, completely remote, all different kinds in the same organization, right? And so people are just all over the place. This is this question about, but we are still human persons and we still have basic needs and we still are located in time and place. And so how are we going to fill those?

And so I think it takes careful thought about how can technology help us, right? If we really want to thrive and flourish, then how can we turn technology away from a medicine or a stopgap to something that is helpful to us, right? And so I can see that I think some technologies in and of themselves are negative, such as weapons of mass destruction, because you cannot wield it in the way that's intended at all for, I think, a good use. But most other technologies are neutral.

How are we going to use it? What kind of power are we going to give it? And how are we going to say, this is actually a good? I think that it's very tricky because when we say that we want to address this kind of segmentation of society, to get very granular with that, or let's say another way to formulate that, is to say we want to increase the human time, the person-to-person time.

Ideally in the physical presence Because when you're not in the physical presence If it's not about work Like where it's just kind of knowledge stuff But what it's like common shared experiences That's very difficult to do remote And so we're really talking about like fundamental human stuff Now, when you frame it that way What you're actually saying is Any minute you spent with technology Is a minute you're not spending with another person. So you can use technologies to facilitate communities, to facilitate events, but that's very kind of low bar tech.

But any higher bar tech, and you're spending now more time in the tech. So I think that, you know, there is time for interaction with technology, and there should be time for interaction with human beings. And you can't use like you're kind of it's self-defeating to try to use technology to increase the interaction time of human beings if that makes sense yeah as you were talking i was thinking i want to talk about healthy work environments and how do we you know our goal is to whatever the organization is we're trying to achieve right and then we have individual goals team goals like all these different sorts of goals right we want we want to meet that so we want people to be engaged.

We want to take advantage of their experience and their passion and to get to all these different sorts of goals that we have. And one barrier is unnecessary conflict, right? Conflict's not the problem. We should have healthy conflict.

We should be able to disagree. That's good, right? But this miscommunication, that happens quite a lot. And as you were talking about getting better at giving prompts, right, to AI, so being able to articulate being able to think through being able to give it what it actually is that you want knowing what you want being able to give it to it so that you can get the best product i wonder if you could i wonder if your company or ai could assist people when maybe it sees that people are talking past each other not using the same definitions helping people to communicate as again, sort of this helper, not as the boss, but as the helper to get the people to communicate more effectively.

Is that, how do you see maybe AI helping that? Yeah, for sure. So for alignment across people and teams, I think it's a really great way to use modern tech. So I guess this will be a good entree for me to talk a little bit about the company and kind of introduce.

So I'm a co-founder of Assembly AI, S-E-M-B-L-Y. We started in 2019 before AI was cool. And the idea that we started with was the fact that a lot of progress across companies is driven by teams getting together for meetings and at the time there was you know whatever happened in the meeting was a was a black box so there was some tech to facilitate you having the meeting like zoom teams etc but actually what happens in the meeting the technology has no idea about and the the founding concept for assembly was that if technology could understand what happens in the conversation then a lot of very productive value can come out of that down the down the road, and that's that's how we set up assembly in the first place so initially we primarily focused on meeting notes so this is just a time saver and also kind of starts to get at your point of kind of having a singular kind of objective.

Extrapolation of the conversation because you know when different people take meeting minutes meeting notes like they'll slant it to how they see the meeting and then that could create more conflict right or that could be a misinterpretation but assembly is very objective it's non-partial non-partisan and so it will create an objective set of notes and that was kind of the first foray so that quickly turned into essentially infinite memory for your team so you have the entire context for your entire organization across all meetings.

And these can be shared across teams. So increasing alignment there. So everyone has a similar context that they're working out of. So for example, when the sales team closes a deal, they can share the full context of that customer with the delivery team who's actually going to be implementing the project.

So much gets lost in that transition with assembly that doesn't have to happen. So you get that shared context, You get, you know, notes, transcripts, tasks, risks, issues, decisions, et cetera, all of that as kind of your foundation that makes it referable, makes it searchable, and lets it live on. And then later, we developed the second layer of value, which is enrichment of your other working applications. So when you, for example, you assembly, you can automatically publish meeting notes or transcripts or tests directly to your CRM, directly to your knowledge system, directly to your PM system.

And so suddenly, again, the entire history of interaction with your customer or the entire history of project activity is reflected in those other systems that other teams use. And that creates more alignment there and then finally the third phase or the third layer of value that we added was this thing called assembly and so we were the first product to introduce this cross-meeting intelligence where you can go into assembly today and you can say you know take a look at my conversations with this customer over the past month and generate a sales proposal based on our recent discussions and it will create like a full-on proposal document for you with all the contextual details.

So because it's fully aware of all the things going on with you, with your team, and also any other teams that may be related to the work that you're doing. Or you can ask it, review all my customers this week and tell me which are close to closing and which have blockers and what are those blockers. And we'll kind of do a report. And all of that information is grounded and sourced in actual conversations.

So that's where the product is today. And certainly when people meet and if there's any kind of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Assembly can serve as that objective kind of eval of what that meeting was about. And then you can take that further if specifically you want to focus on like kind of maybe conflicting themes or anything like that.

There's a feature in the product called custom templates where you can basically define your own kind of meeting notes. You can define your own sections where you can say, okay, like, were there any conflicting issues in this meeting? What were they? what are some causes for those conflicts and what are some potential ways to resolve them and then maybe what are some ways to prevent them.

You can actually define this template for your meeting and then for any meeting that happens, you can load that template and it will give you those answers. So say this meeting, there were these conflicts caused by this, here are some ways to get around it and by the way, here's how to prevent it. Like you can do that for any meeting just by with a single click. So this is already kind of getting more into that AI side of things of assembly.

That sounds really interesting. Does it, this is loaded, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Does it pick up on tone or... Somebody's, the volume of their voice or spaces of quiet, right?

Because when we think about when people are in conflict or when people actively engage in conflict, it's not necessarily the words that are said, but how they're said and then how they're responded to. Is there any picking up on that yet? Which I don't know, that might sound, that might be really tricky because tone itself is very little. Like, what does it even mean?

It means one thing to one person and not to the other. In assembly, no, we don't use tonality in your voice to assess anything. However, you would be surprised how much is conveyed by your word choice, the whooms and ahs and things like that, because literally every word that everyone says is a data point. And then second, third, fourth word is a very, like, you're multiplying the accuracy of where we think you are so there's actually a very very clear picture and without assembly knowing that you were yelling when you're saying that you will know because there's no there's no good way for you to be like how are you doing well right that never happens right it's usually like oh my god why did you do that right it's there so so there's there's ways to get but of course there are nuances but assembly is not focused on those nuances.

I would say that there probably are products out there that can do that. It's not, it's just, it's a very clear engineering, like large language model problem that is very solvable, I would say. So if like the vocal tonality is something you're looking to pick up on, there I'm certain there's products out there that do that. We found that, so we actually build our own speech engines early on.

So we're very well versed in how to, kind of digest the meeting content in the most comprehensive way and we found so far that we don't need voice like audio tonality to tell you about sentiment and to tell you about other things like you can actually get you know 99 of the way there with just figuring out word choice and word sequence and things like that yeah i mean that makes a lot of sense to me and it is also fraught because if somebody says i in my works i deal with the conflict at work and someone say this person was yelling at me and then somebody else the same meeting will say they weren't yelling right and so all of that is just so largely up to the person relationships their own past there's so much that we bring to when it comes to something like that so let me ask you to see you work with ai you work in a tech company with a bunch of humans and so with humans we have conflicts so, my first question is as a young person a young employee how do you how have you dealt with conflict with colleagues when you were younger, and has that changed to where you are now?

Good question. I think I'm very kind of sensitive to when there's conflict happening, just naturally, so I tune into it very quickly. And, and I, I, when I did, and so I, so because of that, I actually spent a number of years in management consulting, kind of in and out of it for almost a decade. And management consulting, I think there's, I've always said, like, I should write a, like the black book of management consulting, because there's a lot of misconceptions about what it is.

People think it's like this analytical thing. It's really not. But when you go into a room, you have to immediately feel the room. And you have to feel everyone in the room.

And that's kind of a skill that you develop. And so when conflicts happen, you need to kind of already be ahead of where this person is going. I think I got better about it over time. I think I got more comfortable with voicing when things are conflicted.

Usually that's been very good. So at assembly, for example, we try to maintain a very open communication culture. Like there's no like under surface motion, like that's not okay. So anything like that goes well, great.

But anything that doesn't go well we also walk like talk through it figure it out and that's always in the spirit of in the spirit of getting to the best resolution so like i really don't like kind of panicking on about anything and i think that's something maybe very odd about assembly because we experience technical and other kinds of issues all all the you know like anyone else like a major customer has a like a problem or like you know we release something that doesn't work like it's supposed to like we we experience or like a major vendor decides to like drop an axe on us in the middle of the day.

All these things happen, but it's never like, oh, my God, like, drop everything you do. Why is this like that? No, it's always like, OK, here's what happened. What's the issue?

How do we address it immediately? How do we prevent it going forward? So it's a very, like, problem resolution centered approach. And it's not a conflict.

It's not a conflicting approach where it's like, why did you screw up? Like, it's never that at all. Never. I think i think that's actually maybe very important is that like i i don't think those conflicts make sense because if the person is competent then you figure out what you what went wrong in this situation you figure you solve that situation you solve it for the future and you just keep moving and everybody is great like good job to you solving it so quickly if the person is not competent, being angry, you should be angry at yourself for bringing in a competent person in your organization.

So I'm actually, like, I have, like, a pet peeve of people who get, like, angry at other people for stuff. Like, it's a very rare occasion at Simply. So that, yes. So I think it's like, you know, I know I went on a big tangent, but I guess to come back to the original question, I think over the years I've gotten a lot better communicating directly when what's bad and what's good and doing it in such a way that it lends to something proactive and like actionable to change it.

And I think that's worked well. That makes, I mean, just so much sense when we are able to stop and be curious about the why. What is happening? Am I trying to blame somebody or am I trying to figure out this problem?

Am I backwards looking? Am I forwards looking? And then if I am angry, where am I, who am I angry at? You know, is this a system problem?

Did I, have I not been paying attention to this person? You know, what is going on? All these sorts of curious questions. And that curiosity is a nice stop before, instead of just reacting, right?

You either are going to train yourself to be reactionary or to act in a measured way such that, you know, something happens and you're able to think and pause and then respond in a way that is in step with your values and what you think is going to actually be for your good and the good of your organization. This, however, takes emotional intelligence, right? And we get emotional intelligence in a variety of ways, but one of them is through socialization and through working with people, as you said, reading the room, right?

These sorts of abilities and desire to see that we're in it together, what's actually beneficial versus letting off steam. So back to this loneliness epidemic, if people are lonely, if they are withdrawn, if they don't have a lot of social interaction, it seems like, It's going to be a harder ask to be able to accept responsibility, to not feel attacked, to not feel, if I bring up this issue that you're talking about who I am as a person instead of this work issue, right? This kind of resilience and ability to see there's who I am versus this particular issue.

And that can be really conflated, as you know, when you try to give somebody feedback. It's like, I'm not talking about you as a person. and we're looking at this specific deliverable that's not happening. So how have you seen this in your own work or your own company about having people have the so-called hard and soft skills together?

Yeah. So the soft skills are more of a challenge on the engineering side. So you need to adjust the kind of how the organization works with people who are not as like soft skills as some of your other employees. So I think it's kind of different approaches.

And so, for example, like in the engineering world, they'll thrive on like they just want to build the thing and they want to build it in an awesome way. So like a lot of it is just getting out of their way and letting them to let them actually deliver for your company what what needs to happen so that's that's definitely a part of it that's a that's a fraction of the engineering organization there's another bit where like teamwork is very important and and there you need to make sure that you have a leader who is who has strong soft skills in addition to deep engineering competency but i think that's what i'd like to point out is there's kind of different animals in the technology zoo, where there are some folks that are very important, but they thrive in a particular style of environment that is a little bit more isolated and a little bit more introverted, let's say.

And that's the ecosystem they need to be very productive. And then there's others where it's a very collaborative team, and there's like a lot of social interaction those are different kind of subcultures and to the effect to the extent that that's possible it's great to be able to outline like different teams where those cultures make more sense and we at assembly we have like you know i'm not going to name names but they definitely know who they are like there we have teams who are very kind of just like.

Leave us alone for a few weeks, come back to see like this awesome thing. That's really going to be crazy, like amazing. And they just kind of delve into it really deeply. And then there's, there's a team that we have that's very social that they're, you know, they're constantly communicating.

They're very, they're much more interactive. Both teams are amazing. Both teams are very strong builders. Both teams create amazing engineering solutions, very different culture so to the extent that it's possible to engender that in an organization i strongly promote like micro cultures within teams with the with the understanding there's a macro culture around across your company that's consistent and i think there is a way to do that and we've you know we've done it i think to to some success at assembly but yeah the emotion like you is super important but not just externally but internally like meaning having introspection on whether you're angry right now or not so i think a lot of people think emotional iq is like i can read people's minds and like no i mean it's part of it it helps for sure yeah like it's useful to understand kind of have empathy around where the other person is coming from like that's a really good policeman skill for example but there's also an introspective aspect of it where you need to be have a pulse on where you are emotionally at a given moment and if you're like hyped and if you're like you know you're getting angry you need to pull yourself out and don't don't hit that reply button like go for a walk you know like come back tomorrow or to whatever it is i've had I'll tell you.

I had a situation this was, you know, very early on at assembly, and you know, I was working with someone who we brought on who was very senior, and. And this person had a lot of strong ideas on how to do things. And he was a very powerful entity. And you can do a lot, but there was a lot of push.

And at some point, he was throwing things out that just ticked me. And that same, he, and he, he's very aware. He's got high, high, very high IQ. He knew it.

He knew it. So he followed up. He's like, Hey, let's have a call. Let's figure it out.

That was not the time to have a call with this person. Right. So I was like, we're not talking today. We're going to talk tomorrow.

Yeah. And it's that, right. It's that it's like, no, like if we're going to have a call right now, no one's coming out of that call alive. So so we shouldn't have a call now we should breathe we should sleep we should you know go to the gym drink water and then and then do the thing right so so i think that's very important is being introspective interrospection i think they call it in psychology or something like that so that you know if you're not in the right state you don't you don't you don't get into it unnecessarily in a kind of an unreasonable way.

100% agree. It's very hard, I think, to read the room if you're not reading yourself, because you're in the room, and because of how you're showing up, you're understanding what else is around you. A lot of times we like to think that the world is just full of facts, and we're just like on an Easter egg hunt, and we're collecting all these little facts and putting it in our basket, but it's really not like that. So I walk into a room and I'm understanding it from my perspective.

And if somebody rolls their eyes and I'm already tired and hungry and dehydrated, I might take that as a personal front. But if I am rested and fed and hydrated and understanding where I'm coming from and I am de-escalated, I might see that same behavior and have a different understanding. I wonder what's going on with them. I might reach out later.

And so, you know, reading the room comes from the mirror first, right? What is going on? What am I bringing to this relationship for good or for ill? What am I bringing to how I'm understanding the dynamics that are going on?

And so, yes, when it comes to leadership, when it comes to just being a person in the world, right? If we can understand who we are and how I'm feeling, like I am feeling angry, and being able to acknowledge that and then try to figure that out, feel it, all that kind of stuff. But I want to go back a little bit to what you said about having these micro cultures and the macro culture. To me, it was a beautiful ode to diversity.

Diversity is such a good. And if we try to make everybody the same, the Walmartification of everything, then everybody loses. Because we're all asked to do the same sorts of things. But the beauty is that we all operate in different kinds of ways.

And if we can see that and capitalize on that, and then those people can go further. Right we're going to be able to free them to whatever that might be free them to be creative in a team and collaborative free that person to just go in all in and work on this particular project and then everybody benefits if we but that means you have to have strong leadership. Who is interested in particularity of the people in front of them who knows and is comfortable to lead as needed, which, unfortunately, a lot of people are promoted because they were a good engineer and not necessarily a good people person.

So what do you do at Symbly to promote a culture where leaders... Leaders are good leaders. I think that I've never really thought about, like, to promote leaders who are good leaders. I think some people have some skills and abilities, and they lead to work with teams of people.

And they're just kind of, they coalesce a team around them. And there's just a combination of things that they do that works really well. It's part skills, part personality. Like I think some people are just born very, it's very natural for them to do that.

And for some people they have to learn that more for, and so they, they lead in, in kind of a human, like in a very personable way. And then there's other leaders who lead in a very like engineering way. So they're kind of leaders as far as they're like competence centric versus maybe something like overall output centric, something like that. So like there's leaders who like value more competence, there's leaders who value more just productivity.

And both are good. I think, you know, what I promote in my leaders is, so first, they have to be very competent in what they're doing. That's, you know, that to be, those are table stakes. Beyond that, they have to have a drive.

I think one of the kind of most underappreciated leadership quality is this thing I call drive. Because I think that's what flips the switch from just kind of a regular worker to a leader. I think a lot of people think it's like, oh, I have authority over someone or something like that. I think that's the last thing.

I literally think that's the last thing. It's important, but it's not anywhere up front at all. Because you can have all the authority, but if your idea is worse than your report idea, you should be using your report idea. So the authority just kind of helps to helps to prioritize things and organize things.

And maybe make some decisions along the way but it's it's a minor thing i think the major thing one of the main one of the biggest things is this thing i call drive where it's drive maybe some people will call an ownership but it's essentially it's essentially investing your energies into moving your area forward with initiative and that's what makes a leader and if you do that from any position you're at you're going to automatically get promoted before you like without even talking to anyone because that's actually what leadership is it's like you have an idea of how to make this bigger better faster you have an idea of how to make this more commercial you have to make you have an idea of how to make this more competitive yeah and and you want those ideas realized.

Is that. Gradient of i can see the better and i'm invest in it and i'm actively investing myself to get to the better without waiting for somebody to be like hey why don't you do this like that the initiative the drive that's i think that's so so crucial and i think that's where kind of the the genesis of leadership is and then it's just about then then it's up to the senior management in the company Of doing whatever they can To support you in your drive And guess what Giving you other people To help you do what you're doing That report to you That's one way we support that work So it's a very I think people kind of haven't flipped In generally thinking about it They think.

I made a boss of a team No, that's not it You have an area of ownership and you're driving that ownership, do you need people on your team to help you because there's ROI there? Sure. Here's some people. You need more people?

Great. You need a whole division? Awesome. If the ROI is there and you're driving it and you're good and you're getting to results, like you're going to become the CEO one day.

Why not? All right. That's the, why not, right? Like if you're driving, if you have a drive, you're making progress.

All I can do is like help you in any way I can with resources, support, tools, access, whatever it is, training, I don't know, right? Creating a work environment that you really enjoy, that doesn't hinder you and doesn't put friction. That's my job. But what I want are leaders who are drivers and then teams coalesce under them.

I really appreciate the way you said that and articulated all that. And it kind of reminds me of the beginning of our conversation about creativity, right? So what is creativity? It comes about in a lot of ways, but it's I have this vision and then I start to work to see it come about, right?

And so, and drive is different, but it's also that I see I have this vision, which is a creative endeavor. and it's innovation. And then I'm going to work to bring it about. And also, I think along with this drive is the ability to risk, right?

I might fail. I might propose this and it may not be the right thing at the right time, but it is still, I want to go here and I'm actively trying to get there, which how we do that, right? So then the leader of the leader, as you just said so wonderfully, comes along to assist and help to create those conditions so that that person will thrive and The people working with them will thrive, right? This whole cascading of having a healthy organization, which is good for everyone.

Which leads me to my last question, because our time has gotten away from us, and is this. As you look into the future of work, what do you think needs to happen so that not only will all workers be treated with dignity and respect, but that they'll be encouraged to thrive and flourish? I think that we don't have to wait for the future for that to be true. I think all workers should be treated with dignity and respect.

And I think we as leaders and organizations need to have our priority that our staff thrives and flourishes. Because those are the environmental factors that allow for great things to emerge. So there's two, there's probably many ways, but there's two kind of important ways that you can try to. Achieve something good or achieve some goal for your business one way is like a directive way where it's like you know you you put step one after step two step three after step step two after step one step three after step two step four after step three so that's one way to build okay so you you can be standing there and kind of pointing and like make this make this make this or you can create an environment that assembles these steps in that order due to the nature of the environment and i will always favor this other this this emergent approach i think the best organizations are where the set of factors create an environment where great products great services, great outcomes are emergent.

And one of the critical elements in those environments. Is caring about your employees and making sure that they feel that they're realized, they feel that they're heard, they feel that they can make an impact, they feel that they're thriving. I think when they feel that way, they will make amazing art, whatever medium that art for you is whether it's technology whether it's food science whether it's logistics whatever that art is if they feel like they're in a place where they're they love the fact that they're on this team that's when you're gonna get awesome right because then every opportunity they have to do awesome they will do if you create an environment where it's like you do one, then you do two, then you do three.

Until you say four, they're hanging out. That's a wonderful answer. Well, our time has gotten away from us. Thank you so much for the conversation and the work you're doing to help people and teams communicate with each other.

Thank you for inviting me. And I welcome everyone to try my product. I think it's really beneficial and useful. There's a one week free trial.

They can go to www.assembly.ai. And also from this interview, you.

If you use the coupon podcast 2026, you're going to get some percentage off. So try that out and I hope you enjoy it. That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much.

Take care. Thank you. Artem, thank you for that wonderful discussion about technology and indulging me a little bit of talking about its uses, its disuses, and thinking about how it, because it is around, right? Certainly AI is not going anywhere.

How can we take advantage of it so that we do have healthier work environments and that we're able to communicate with one another across teams, across organizations? And so Assembly AI sounds super interesting. I encourage you to check it out. Conflict Managed is produced by Third Party Workplace Conflict Restoration Services and hosted by me, Merry Brown.

You can find us online at 3pconflictrestoration.com. If you haven't had a chance to check out my latest book, which is called Winning the Generation wars at work making your age an asset you can check that out on amazon we have new episodes every tuesday so come on back and if you would like and subscribe wherever you are listening or watching this podcast it's much appreciated our music is courtesy of dove pilot and remember conflict is normal and expected let's deal with it until next time take care.