About Colleague
Colleague was built by Jim Canfield after 10,000 hours of coaching CEOs… and one nagging piece of research.
Over the last two decades I've had the privilege of working closely with more than 300 CEOs and their leadership teams. Some days that looked like helping a founder work out whether to fire a close friend. Some days it looked like a full-day workshop with a room of executives working to see their business more clearly. Through the process, CEOs went from clients to friends. Every one of those coaching conversations kept pointing me back to the same piece of research.
The Gallup question that started this. For decades, Gallup has measured employee engagement with a set of 12 questions. It is Question 10 that is the one business leaders always want to skip:
“I have a best friend at work.”
They call it “too personal” or “irrelevant to business.” Gallup calls it the most predictive item in the entire survey. Employees who strongly agree with this question are 7× more likely to be fully engaged. For the ones who don't have that person, the odds of being engaged drop to 1 in 12. Only 2 in 10 people ever get to say “yes” to Q10. The rest go to work every day carrying more alone than they should: a bad meeting they can't decompress from, a hard decision no one outside their role truly understands, a moment of doubt with no one to bounce it off. This is exactly what Colleague is trying to help with.
A body of work behind the app. I have founded, built or led five companies. My workshop CEO Tools 2.0 has been delivered more than 500 times in six countries. My book of the same name, CEO Tools 2.0: A System to Think, Manage, and Lead like a CEO, distills the frameworks I've used with over 300 CEOs. My newest workshop, The Value Creation Formula: How to Build the Business Everyone Wants to Buy… And You May Not Want to Sell, is helping company owners build businesses that are more scalable, more valuable, and easier to run. Colleague is the natural next step, the same frameworks available on demand, on the days they matter most.
A few kind words along the way.
Three times my peers at Vistage Worldwide named me Speaker of the Year in Canada, the UK, and Worldwide. I served as Chief Learning Officer at Vistage, where I recruited and trained 500+ CEO group leaders and developed content for more than 11,000 CEO and Key Executive members. I've had the joy of building programs and content alongside people like Tony Hsieh, Chip Conley, Marshall Goldsmith, and Jack Stack.
Why an AI app, and why now.
I know what Colleague isn't. It's not your therapist, your HR department, or your lawyer and it's not meant to be. It's not even a real best friend at work, no software is. But on the day you'd otherwise have no one to think out loud with, a colleague designed by someone who has spent 10,000 hours in coaching rooms is better than nothing. This is my attempt to make that kind of coaching available to everyone, on the days it matters most.
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