Adopting AI and Staying Committed Through Change

Starting the conversation:

Commitment is your real accelerator. Your level of commitment influences the forward-looking lens that drives change management readiness. La Tonya Roberts, Fractional COO at Harmony Consulting Group, shares about believing in yourself and staying true to your commitment — especially when it feels like no one else sees your vision.
Product market fit matters, even for existing businesses, because the needs and perceptions of customers change. Curious probing questions keep you tuned in to where hidden steps exist or quickly-realized gains occur in your operations. Can you constantly challenge your thinking?

In this episode, you will hear that documenting processes helps find complexity to simplify, the biggest issues you face today as a CEO, and the depth of decision-making that data brings. Jess Dewell talks with La Tonya Roberts, Fractional COO at Harmony Consulting Group, about why it is BOLD to stay committed to your vision through change.

Host: Jess Dewell

Guest: La Tonya Roberts

What You Will Hear:

05:40 Connecting technology tools is valuable, but intention — not just automation — matters most.

• La Tonya avoids falling into the “shiny object” trap by carefully considering which tools genuinely improve client work instead of adopting every new technology.
• Chooses solutions that make processes easier to implement and share, rather than just automating for automation’s sake.
• To capture their unique voice, customizes AI tools to deliver relevant and efficient outcomes.

10:30 Strong partnerships require clear communication, respect, and leveraging each person’s strengths.

• Focusing on your strongest skills; for La Tonya, that meant operations and process.
• Success scaling to over $1 million came from building simple, sustainable systems and clear definitions of service delivery.
• The collaborative environment enabled them to quadruple individual revenue through structured processes and leveraging complementary talents.

12:05 Finding market fit and being in the right place at the right time is often a conscious strategy.

• Deliberately chose DEI as a business focus in response to the heightened attention and demand during 2020.
• Drew on both their professional experience and personal sense of purpose, combining empathy, coaching, and strategic thinking.
• Tackling DEI meant facilitating self-reflection for everyone, especially as social events made these issues unavoidable and highly relevant.

21:00 Each choice is powerful; intentionality shapes the direction and options available for progress.

• Having a sense of direction, however broad or narrow, is empowering; it clarifies what fits and what does not.
• Keep a visual reminder to reinforce the idea of moving with intention toward a chosen direction.
• By being intentional with decisions, you can quickly eliminate distractions and focus on progress that aligns with core goals.

23:15 Consequences — good or bad — are the result of commitment and risk, not just luck.

• Consequences aren’t always negative; they can be positive outcomes like financial independence from taking bold action.
• Both small day-to-day wins and significant milestones as important results of your ability to take risks.
• By intentionally facing challenges and opportunities, be mindful that each decision brings its own set of consequences.

31:20 AI integration is an urgent challenge and opportunity for CEOs to upskill themselves and their teams.

• CEOs must personally educate themselves about relevant AI technologies and decide how to apply them so their companies do not fall behind.
• Integrating AI requires not just knowledge, but also the ability to guide teams through adoption and ongoing use.
• Proactively learn about AI, knowing that the workplace will soon expect these skills as standard.

37:45 Decision data is only valuable if there’s clarity and true commitment to seeing it through.

• Without a high level of commitment, even the best data and clarity about next steps will not lead to action or meaningful results.
• Realistically assess their willingness to dedicate time and energy to a course of action before moving forward.
• Measuring and aligning clarity, data, and commitment helps ensure that plans are actionable and sustainable.

42:05 It is BOLD to keep going even when nobody else sees your vision.

Resources

• La Tonya on LinkedIn
• From Chaos to Calculated Success: A Framework for Scaling Your Business Without Sacrifice

Transcript

Jess Dewell 0:00
It’s our job to have intentional choice because we can easily find out what’s not going to help us stay within the edges of what we could call progress.

La Tonya Roberts 0:12
I think that’s one of those things that you learn as you get older. You’re just a lot more bold. You set those boundaries. You understand what you’re willing to accept and what you’re not willing to accept, and that includes the consequences of your actions.

Jess Dewell 0:25
I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for stopping by. At the Bold Business Podcast, we are normalizing important conversations.

Yes, there are tips. Yes, there are ways to solve problems. More importantly are going to be what do you need for yourself to be able to solve those problems and make the most of the education, the training, and the programs that you are already using?

This is a supplement to that. It can sit on top of it, fuel your soul, fuel your mind, and most importantly, regardless of where you’re at on your journey. Maybe you’re starting out. Maybe you’re ready to scale. Maybe you’re going through reinvention. The conversations we are having will help you at each of those stages, so hang around, see what’s going on, and I look forward to seeing you engaging with our videos.

Announcer 1:17
You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast where you will hear firsthand experiences about what it really takes to ensure market relevance and your company’s future.

Jess Dewell 1:29
I’m excited to share my conversation with La Tonya Roberts today. At the Bold Business Podcast, we’re always talking about decision-making. What’s the right thing to do right now?

And while this conversation is no different, there are three overarching themes that I know you will want to consider the next time you are doing your deep work sessions. The first is, the complex things in our business can be made simpler, if for no other reason, than documenting them. What are we actually doing?

That is a key takeaway because it leads into the biggest issues that we’re facing today as executive management teams, CEOs, and managers. We are in a place where there are so many choices of technology to add that the implementation becomes difficult because we’re not quite sure what we want it to do. So that issue is, how do we upskill our knowledge so that we know what skills are necessary for our team so that we can use emerging technologies and existing technologies like AI for the betterment of our business process?

Yet at the same time, if commitment to that decision is low, it is more likely to fail. And so how do you align those? Those are the three areas that we’re going to be talking about.

And I’m super excited to introduce you more to La Tonya Roberts, who is the founder of Harmony Consulting Group. She works with growth-focused organizations and turns them into high-performing businesses as a fractional COO and HR consultant. She brings us 19 years of experience across 30 countries, and she’s helping companies scale operations, build inclusive cultures, and develop leadership that drives growth.

What technologies are you using today that you’re trying out?

La Tonya Roberts 3:23
I love Perplexity for my research. Because you get to see all the sources, you can go a little bit deeper. And I have the pro version, so I can really dig into what I need.

And then Cloud. I play around with Cloud quite a bit, too. More so in chat, just because I’m always building out the GPTs in there.

Anything that I know I’m going to use on a regular basis, I’m like, can I create a GPT for this? And you can use Cloud projects, and you can do the same thing, too. But it just really depends on what your output is.

I think I have chat pretty trained. So that was my number one tool. And then how you connect a lot of these things together, whether using Make or Zapier or something else.

I try not to do this shiny object thing, which is what I used to do before. And now I’m like, what are my main things that I can go in and I can create, make things easier? What is something that would be easy to share with my clients and help them to move faster, even though I may be the thought leader behind, how do you put all this together?

If they say, hey, I need something that will help right in my voice, no problem. I know I’m going to go into chat. I’m going to upload, whether it’s emails, transcripts from a talk that they did, or even some of their meetings or whatever.

I’m going to create these knowledge sources, and I’m going to go in, and I’m like, here’s your project. Here’s your own little GPT train, and it’s going to help you do what you need to do. That’s pretty much where I’m at right now with a lot of my stuff is just really helping people to streamline their processes from the simplest thing to help me create my social media, just our blog, and just get it out there to help me write a proposal that is 90, 95% done, or help me analyze this report that I give to my assessments.

And that’s the first step of our process. I need something that’s going to quickly say, okay, here are the main areas that this client is challenged with. Here’s some possible solutions.

Here’s how it applies to your particular framework, or just whatever knowledge sources you’re uploading in there to help them get to what may have taken them four or five hours. How can we do this in five minutes?

Jess Dewell 5:38
And there’s so much opportunity. It’s not just automate to automate. It’s not just make it simpler to make it simpler.

It’s actually, there’s a thought process that you bring. What are some of the core things that you’ve learned over all of the years that you have been working with companies and building companies that you find necessary to take complexity and make it simple?

La Tonya Roberts 5:59
Most people don’t document their process, right? They just get used to doing whatever it is that they do, and it’s second nature to them. So if I tell someone, go document your process for me, they’re going to get, I think I do this, I think I do that.

So what I do is I hop on a Zoom and hit record, and I just start asking questions. I think that’s one of the things that has really helped not only me do the work that I do, but help my clients get very clear on what it is they do, is asking questions to just pull out those little things. Okay, so you did step A, and then you got to step D.

Were there any challenges? Have you ever had to find a workaround? What was that workaround?

What if you didn’t have this particular resource or this particular supply? What would you do in this case? Has somebody ever asked you this?

And just figure out all those different ways. And the way that my brain works, I am very process-oriented, not just naturally, but also trained as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. So I’m just trying to figure out what’s the quickest way?

How do we get to A to Z? And how do we do it without any distractions? What are those key steps that you need to do?

And then how do we make sure that we’re not making any mistakes along the way? So my secret sauce, and especially because I work with visionary leaders for the most part, so they’re not thinking stuff. They’re used to talking.

They talk as they think. So I’m like, let’s talk to me. Let’s just have a conversation.

And it’s great, because I’m like, all right, you said these things in the last five minutes. I have 20 ideas for you. I’m not going to give them all 20.

And I’m like, choose this or this. Which one works for you? Okay, if you’re going to do it this way, here’s an option for you of how this can be done.

And it depends on are they a little more detail-oriented? Or they’re just like, just tell me the end product. I get to learn my people.

Some people are just straight shooters and just tell me the end game. And so I’m like, I want to know a little bit more about that. We just have a conversation with them and figure out what it is that they need.

I like to go beyond the business too, because I want to know what’s the impact of this, right? So if you come to me and you say, well, Tonya, I want to streamline this process, because I continue to have this challenge. And I’m not getting the results that I need from my clients.

I’m like, okay, great. If we were able to solve that problem, what does that mean for you? And that can be several things.

From the business standpoint, that means they can take on more clients, or they have more time for strategic work or networking, or they’re able to bring in income to hire more people. Great, that’s on the business side. On the personal side, that means I’m not working 60 hours a week anymore.

Now I’m working 40, or I’m working 30 hours. And I get to spend more time with my loved ones. I get to actually take a vacation, or I know I should be working out, but I’m so daggling exhausted from running my business every day.

If I just had a few hours a week to actually focus on my health, make sure that I’m meal planning, or eating healthy, or getting out of the house to take that walk, I know that I’m going to actually be around to realize the results of my hard work. Right? So taking that holistic perspective of it’s not just let’s streamline the process.

It’s what is the impact of that?

Jess Dewell 9:32
You’re speaking from experience. You built a company and got it over a million dollars in one year. I want to know two things from that.

The second is hindsight. What were all the pieces that came together in the right way to allow that to occur?

La Tonya Roberts 9:52
So I would say the original goal was to, it was three women that came together to go to market and sell. At the time we focused on diversity, equity, inclusion work. Right?

And everyone has their own individual gifts. And yes, we wanted to make some money, but I was still working in corporate. I wanted to be able to make enough to walk away from my job, but still have enough income to take care of my family.

And they had their own personal goals too. So yes, getting to at least a million dollars was probably the goal that was in the back of our head, right? Make as much money as possible, make as much impact as possible.

How we did that was really a lot of trial and error, right? You have three different people, three bosses coming together. What worked was the respect, the communication, and really allowing each other to lean into their gifts.

Mine happened to be the process, the organization, the operation side. So I naturally took on that role. And coming from at the time, 15 years in consulting and working for big companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, like Deloitte and smaller companies, I had that experience and that exposure to what do these systems look like on a big scale?

And what do they look like when you are small and lean? And how do you make that work? And so creating a process that was simple, it was sustainable.

You could put systems in place and you got really clear on who it is that you serve, how do you serve them? What is the process that you’re going to take them through? And then what are the results that you want to have?

And so by doing that work, we were able to scale to over a million dollars, which was 4X the revenue of the one person doing it.

Jess Dewell 11:44
It also sounds like there was market fit for the product and service. Timing of market also was a big part of that. And I want to understand then that other piece, was it like secondary or was it unconscious that it was, we’re in the right place at the right time. We figured out the need that our customers have, and we actually have a really good solution for them.

La Tonya Roberts 12:05
It definitely wasn’t unconscious. It was a very conscious decision to focus on DEI. This was in 2020.

There was a lot happening in 2020. We had the pandemic, we had DEI and George Floyd and all the things around that, right? So that was the topic.

That was what people were paying attention to. They’re paying attention to your health and what’s going on with the pandemic, or you’re paying attention to the impact, or sometimes those things merge together and you’re like, oh my gosh, now I’m realizing the impact of my situation, how that affects my health, how I’ve been dealing with all this trauma. And now all of a sudden, I can’t unseat it.

It’s in the media news, social media, my friends, my family are talking about it. And if you are someone who has, whether you grew up in the South or you grew up in incorporating and you’ve been the only, or you are connected to someone who has been discriminated against, it was someone that meant something to you. And I think what was a, not just a passion, it was purpose, being able to lean on our experiences and us as HR professionals, but using empathy and coaching and strategy and saying, okay, I can impact a small circle or I can go to companies that need this support and help people figure out how to do it.

Because when you’re doing that type of work, it’s a lot of, oh, I got to put the mirror up and I got to look at myself and figure out what are my own biases? What are my own blind spots? I’m dealing with all this stuff right now, but I also have a team to support, right?

So we can look at it as DEI, but really it’s how do you lead through chaos? How do you lead through times of transition? How do you still create a culture where people can feel like they belong and it’s inclusive?

And how do you have some challenging situations, conversations, and still be vulnerable, but still show up as a leader? People can turn it around and say and weaponize and what have you, but that was the work. And that’s what companies were paying for, not because necessarily the leaders were saying we want it, it was the employees that had an uprising saying, we need this, pay attention to us.

And we started to see the shift in the power dynamics and how decisions were being made in companies. We capitalized on that.

Jess Dewell 14:44
Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below. I thrive on your feedback and engagement. You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast.

I’m your host, Jess Dewell. This is your program for strategizing long-term success while diving deep into what the right work is for your business right now.

Announcer 15:04
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast hosted by Jess Dewell, a nationally recognized strategic growth consultant. She works with business owners and executives to integrate just two elements that guide business through the ups and downs of growth. Number one, know what work is necessary. Number two, do all the work possible. Schedule a complimentary consultation to find out more at reddirection.com.

Jess Dewell 15:33
My first company was also a product of the right thing at the right time, change and forethought. Now I was in college and I was going to be a scientist. Turns out, I think I would have been a really bad scientist.

I’m really glad the universe put me on a different path. Let’s just be real and call that out. But I do believe that things happen for a reason and the timing when we are willing to open our eyes and be curious, even if it’s just neutral curiosity, it gives us a whole different perspective versus why do I have to defend where I’m coming from?

Or what do I have to convince because I really think mine is the right way. I’ve put all this thought into it. I don’t know if somebody else has put all the thought or work into it that I have.

And those are just dynamics of conversations personally, professionally, within our households, within our friend groups, within our communities that we are a part of. And I really can understand that. The first company that I was a part of as an owner, I think it was like a field of dreams, build it and they will come approach.

And an expectation of we, there were some patterns in place. The person whose idea was, his name is Ben and he was starting to build it. And he grabbed me as somebody who is in science.

And he grabbed my boyfriend at the time, now husband, who was an English major, who is now a full-on programmer, a software architect specifically these days. And we’re like, why not? Why not?

Why not now? If not now, when? Questions.

And I know that those are commonplace and we hear them a lot. I will tell you, I don’t think we really thought about it all that much. We’re just like, this could be fun.

What’s the worst that can happen? Oh, okay. It just didn’t.

Okay. And it turned out to be a really good experience with really good relationships with people that to this day, I know and appreciate and are either actually integrated into my life, even though it’s into the people that in my community right here locally, or in my community globally. And I really appreciate those connections all those years ago.

And I’m not sure about you, but if you were to go back to the people who knew you when you first started and you showed up today, what would they say about you?

La Tonya Roberts 17:42
I would hope that they would say, I’m proud of you. I would hope that they would say, I knew you always had it in you because when I started out in consulting back in 2006, I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew I was really good at solving problems and I loved a good challenge and I’m deeply curious person.

If you ask my mom, I always had a book with me and always had a question to ask. And it just so happened that when I was in undergrad, my dad was preparing to retire from the army and he had gone back to school to finish his undergraduate degree. And he was in the, we were stationed in the Washington DC area and he happened to go to work for Booz Allen Hamilton.

He graduated two years before I graduated. And that’s, that was my first introduction to consulting. I had never heard of this.

What do you mean consulting? Oh, okay. I think I want to do that. And so I graduated and my dad set me up with a informational interview with someone and she just showed me around. We’re still connected on LinkedIn. She showed me around the company and I was like, oh my gosh, this is wow. I’ve never seen anything like this. Now I’m walking into the big building and people are in suits and they’re saying all these words and I’m like, oh my gosh. I guess this is what work is like outside of school.

Eventually, I ended up there and spent almost seven years there and learned as much as I could. I experienced everything that I could experience, found out what I like to do, found out what I didn’t like to do. And what always remained was I love solving problems.

I love helping people. I don’t necessarily need to be in the front, but I like being a resource to someone. And while my focus has changed over the years, I’m still a problem solver and I still lean on those gifts.

Jess Dewell 19:50
That’s fair. I look back and I crack myself up, right? I look at who I was.

I could do anything and whatever it was, I did it with confidence. Turns out in my family, this, and they noticed it first. And I’m pretty sure people who work with me early on also would agree with this.

And that was whatever she says, you don’t know if it’s true or not because she’s got such confidence that she could totally be making it up. And by the way, I actually think I was using the context around me and the life experience that I had to say, this is the way that I see it. So what now?

And you heard me wrong. Exactly. Like, well, cool.

So let’s stick it on the, let’s stick the stake in the ground and see how things settle around it. Or do we have to pick the stake up and move it and put it someplace else and see what happens over there? I’m all about that.

And I would probably say that, of course I did it the way that I did it. Never knew that being in college and deciding not to be a scientist was going to be the coolest thing that I ever did and the best journey that I could have ever wished for. Each action that we take every single day, every single moment throughout the day, it’s our choice.

Whether we choose to claim it as a choice or not is what’s our power. How cool is that as the person that designs our goal? Why can’t we design our goal with every action?

Does this move us closer or farther away? Who do I need to talk to make sure that we’re in the general direction? One of the reasons I like this, for those of you listening, I have a painting in my office and it’s from the thirties and the forties, that concept of that style.

And I look at it as like those rays of sunshine, the way that light moves, that’s just the direction we’re going. So many options, even with the direction we’re going, at least we have a direction because we know what doesn’t fit there first. And we can get rid of so many ideas and opportunities.

I heard you say this earlier. I might have 20 ideas for somebody, but I’m only going to give them the best ones for them. That’s what I like this painting for.

It’s a reminder, a visual reminder of that. When we put ourselves out there, when we say we want to do something, it’s our job to have intentional choice because we can easily find out what’s not going to help us stay within the edges of what we could call progress.

La Tonya Roberts 22:07
You go through so many different things and you start to become more bold in what you say and bold in not caring about the reaction that you’re going to get, being bold enough to say what you’re truly thinking. Right. So back to your question before, what would people say about now is she’s a lot more bold.

I’ve always been confident. I actually had someone, I remember it was the last week of class of undergrad, right before we graduated. And I was in the honors program.

When you go through the honors program, you have your cohort that’s with you the whole four years. So they see you from, I was 17 when I first started college to 21 when I graduated. And this guy says, you’re so smart, but I would never want to work for you because even when you’re wrong, you’re going to convince everyone you’re right.

Jess Dewell 22:58
I love that we share that in common. Let’s go together down this path that may not be the best one.

La Tonya Roberts 23:04
But now I make sure I get back in my head. And I’m open to being proven wrong. Oh, I learned something new.

Welcome it. Yeah. I think that’s one of those things that you learn as you get older, you’re just a lot more bold.

You set those boundaries. You understand what you’re willing to accept and what you’re not willing to accept. And that includes the consequences of your actions.

And sometimes those consequences are big and sometimes they’re small, but you’re willing to take that risk.

Jess Dewell 23:34
And I’ll remind everybody, consequences can have positive, neutral, or negative impact. So I know when I was growing up, I was conditioned that consequences were always associated with bad things. I became financially independent because I went out and believed in myself and had the ability to withstand and face that risk and the challenges that came with it.

And so that was a real positive consequence. One of the things as we go along, just in the day-to-day, I got in the right room today to have the conversation I’ve been waiting to have with the person who needed to hear it the most. I think that’s as powerful of a win, whether it’s a big exit or a big milestone or a completion of a big project or a goal, a multi-year goal.

Those little things can be as powerful because they set us up for what’s next.

La Tonya Roberts 24:26
Absolutely. And that conversation, which seems small at the time, can be the one thing that unlocks something for someone and allow them to give themselves permission to take a chance, take a risk, bet on themselves or whatever it is, or even unlearn or stop the story that they’ve been telling themselves over the years to say, oh, maybe that wasn’t right. Maybe I can’t do this thing.

Jess Dewell 24:49
When we have new information, if we hold on to what we did believe in the face of new information, then we are a disservice to more than ourselves. We are a disservice to our people that work with us on our teams, in our companies, in our communities, in our households. I do believe in evolution.

Instead, I do also have a good dash of revolution. Let’s just be real. And data can be both of those things and support both. And in business, what would we call that? We’d call that what? Iteration versus disruption.

And if we look at our past five years, there has been a lot of disruption in a lot of industry. And if you look back, all of those industries that are disrupting right now may have or may not have been in a cycle of business that had disruption with the same group of industries before. However, every single industry always will have a point of disruption.

And there is a cycle if we’re willing to find it. And if we can tune in our instinct, if we can grow with the data we have and take where we’re confident and willing to take risk, that boldness that you were speaking of, La Tonya, then I really think we have the ability to be ahead of the curve, to help us go to recognize we’re in the right place right now to do this thing we’ve been waiting for. It’s the time.

Let’s be bolder here. Or it’s the time. We’re going to skip ahead to something we thought was two years ahead, but we’re going to bring it in now because it’s the time.

La Tonya Roberts 26:20
It absolutely is. And you think about AI, right? AI has been around for years.

Companies iterated on it, as you said, but now we’re in this period of disruption. And we’ve been there for a few years now, but it’s not new. So how do you figure out how to work with it?

Because it can really disrupt you and you can lose your business and you can lose your mind. You can lose it. Yes.

Hopefully neither. Or you can learn to work with it. And that’s what I work with my clients now.

Earlier, we started talking about, I was doing DEI because it was passionate to me. It was purpose work. It was a thing at the time.

However, that time for some has passed, right? It’s not the focus. I lost, unfortunately lost huge contracts last year because things were changing.

People get scared, whatever the reason is. So I had to make a decision, right? Where do I want to focus my business?

You know, how can I streamline? And that’s how I lean more into the operations side, not because it was, Oh, I’m going to try something new, which I’d been doing it for years. But this is where I can make the most impact.

And I still managed to get DEI in there when I’m working on the talent side of the house. But you use the information, you figure out how to make it work. Even with AI, working with companies to figure out how to integrate AI into their operations and their way of doing business and understanding.

AI is an iterative product as well. So you still have to have that human thought, that critical thinking to say, Ooh, there’s some bias here in the data. How do I go back in and change that? Is this correct? What do we do here?

Jess Dewell 28:04
There’s something to be said for looking for bias. And this is beyond just our relationships or how we show up in the world or patterns that have just existed because I’m going to air quote here, the way we’ve always done things. And I’d like to see the technology seems to be the catalyst for a lot of change.

And I’d like to be able to see technology and whether it’s AI, whatever comes after AI, how we’re integrating it into our world together, where we get to take this awesome piece of us as creative beings called humans and optimize, right? So wherever that power dynamic is, there is an optimization of being in or being out and how do you work in this? And is it the right thing, whether it’s the way we do it or not.

And those are questions that each of us have to face individually and choose to consider or not individually. And I wish we had a focus on that at the beginning of my career, because I did not realize that the dynamics between people in the high-tech industry, between just gender men and women were not normal. We’re not equal.

I felt the inequality, but I didn’t understand why until after I left the industry and could see more because I didn’t have a role model or a mentor that was also female to say, here’s how you might navigate this. So I was banging my head against all these walls, knowingly and unknowingly. I’m like, why can’t I get here?

Or this seems weird. What is actually going on here? And I had nobody to help me figure that out.

And if nothing else, the conversation existing, regardless of how it shows up in our world is the conversation to be had. And I hope we never lose that as our curious selves to optimize for the benefit of all.

La Tonya Roberts 30:00
I love that. And it’s so important. I actually got into coaching because of that reason.

In the beginning, I was like, I don’t feel like I have any mentors. And then I got some mentors. And as I became bolder and more self-assured myself and spoke up, I took ownership of my career.

I started coaching other women on how to own their voice, find their voice, own it, realize their power, and walk in it. And think that at any level, you can own your power, whether you are the manager or you are managing up.

Jess Dewell 30:34
I’m your host, Jess Dewell, and we’re getting down to business on the Bold Business Podcast. This is where we’re tackling the challenges that matter most to you with actionable and achievable advice to get real results that lead to your success. Don’t forget, press that bell icon so you never miss a program. And it’s time to subscribe as well.

Announcer 30:57
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Jess Dewell 31:14
What do you think the biggest issue is that CEOs are facing today?

La Tonya Roberts 31:19
One of those, I’m going to go back to AI and how to integrate it. Not only are you having to upskill yourself and become knowledgeable about what AI technology should we use. There are so many out there.

I don’t even know where to start. But you also have to figure out how to leverage it so you don’t get lost behind, and then how to lead your team members through it. Right?

So there’s a lot of strategy, but there’s a lot of tactical application behind it. You’ve got to figure it out, whether you go out and you do the work yourself to learn, or you decide to bring in a consultant to come in and teach and show the organization how to do it. I think that’s one of those things that you’ve got to quickly get up to speed on the role of AI in your company.

I was reading a Forbes article this past week, and it was talking about how some colleges are starting to integrate AI into their curriculum. I love that. That’s great.

My two girls are in college now, and I’m always talking to them about AI. Even if your school isn’t teaching you about it, you need to go and learn about it yourself. Because the reality is that whether the company has adopted AI now, they will adopt it soon.

And it is going to be a part of how you work every single day. And you’re going to have a combination of AI employees and human employees, or certain processes that are led by AI, and then the human comes in and oversees it, and then runs with it after that. So I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that CEOs are having, especially those that aren’t as tech-savvy.

You’re not tech-savvy. Oh my gosh, I’m in mind blown. But even those that are tech-savvy, it’s figuring out what is the role of AI and how we do it.

Jess Dewell 33:16
Do you think we’re still on the early adoption curve of AI?

La Tonya Roberts 33:20
Yes. For many, I believe they’ve accepted that AI is here. And they are bringing into their business, they are using it.

And so we’re moving into that, okay, we accept it, we need to figure out how to use it, or we’re using it a little bit. And so it’s like the iPhone when it came, when only a few people were using it, right? You go back a few years ago, only a few people were using chat, GPT, or OpenAI.

Now, almost everyone uses it, or a large portion of people are using it. So it’s the newer AIs that are coming about where you’re able to do more complex things that are still in that early adoption phase. But the OGs, the open AIs of the world, the clods, I think people are very comfortable, or getting more comfortable with that article.

Jess Dewell 34:09
I would love to link to it in our show notes, because I think that would be a real good one to share out. Because I agree with you, the way, when we’re seeing disruption in the world of any kind, all across the globe, throughout time, it does make sense to really understand what can I do right now? How do I set myself up?

And how do I change my thinking, or expand my thinking to include new things along the way? And I’m curious for you, our worlds are similar in a lot of ways, yet they’re also very different in a lot of ways. So I want to know from you, how do you make sure that you are always staying open enough to new ideas, new information, and challenging yourself?

La Tonya Roberts 34:57
I am constantly learning. Even though I’ve been using AI for several years, I actually just enrolled in an AI certification course. Because you can just never know enough, right?

So I’m going through this course now, which I should be done soon, and finding out new ways to leverage AI, or not just how do I run my current business, but how can I use it in other businesses? Or how can I better support my clients? Later this month, I’m going to be starting a certification on AI strategy, and how do you roll it out across organizations?

I want to learn it from a big picture standpoint, but also continue to grow from a tactical standpoint. So that’s how I stay open. I’m constantly learning, I’m constantly reading, and I’ve always been that way.

So I start my day off, and I’m learning something new. I’m brushing my teeth, whether it’s a YouTube, or a course, or book, audibles. Every day I’m learning something new.

Again, I’m a very curious person.

Jess Dewell 35:58
What I work from is hard, because I’m already out into this really big place, and if somebody is very tactical, or is used to being tactical, I’m like, you got to hang with me just a minute. We don’t have enough dots yet to connect. There’s more here.

Hang with me, and we’ll get there. And it’s amazing how that ability to think out of that tactical once in a while, and I know that’s the way that one of the things that I do with my So if you’re not contextual, how can you become more? And if you are already contextual, how can you discern?

And for me, I know that’s something that I’m always looking to, and I also think is a really big deal, and a skill necessary for CEOs today, especially of large, small, and mid-market companies, is that discernment is the key. How do we sift out as much as possible that is not the right thing at the right time right now for us, so that we can actually look at what is, and understand our goals, our context, our cycle of businesses and industry, where we’re at in our company, what resources we have, so that we can get real clear on the right next step, which, by the way, is still, there’s a high probability the right step is actually not the right next step, but there’s a high probability there is. I love that about probabilities. It could be either way, depending on, in my case, and what I believe, is how much did you discern?

How committed are you? Are you really willing to do what it takes, and understand what that journey might look like to get to the more of what you want on the business side, and as a human, running and leading a business side?

La Tonya Roberts 37:43
I love that you said a few things, the clarity and the commitment is just as important as the data that you have behind it, right? Because the decision that you make is based on those things. How clear are you on the direction you had it, or what is it that you want?

What is the data or information that you have available? And then how committed are you to achieving that goal? If you’re just on a scale of one to ten, you’re at a two, the data means nothing.

The clarity means nothing because you’re not going to do the work to do it. If you come into it, and you’re like, I’m at a ten, I am totally committed to this, and I know there’s hard work ahead, I’m going to do it. No matter how long it takes, how hard it gets, I’m going to do it. And that’s actually where I started.

Jess Dewell 38:35
My conversation is, okay, I hear you. Before I say anything, how much time, energy, and resources do you have? Does your company have?

And what is the commitment of you, your management team? And let’s assess your culture just on a high level. Will they go with you, or will there be some dissonance along the way?

Is it change management to get to where you’re going, or is it, we’re already on board because our culture is built this way, and we can lean into those things, because we have, whether it’s intentional or not, it doesn’t matter. We know what we’re working with, and can get there.

La Tonya Roberts 39:11
How ready are they for the change, and what has been their experience with change, too? Yeah, some people are like, change fatigue. I don’t want to do another thing. I know it’s broken.

Jess Dewell 39:26
I get something. I’m with you on that. I’m always curious how people, so I’m going to ask you this, how do you take these ideas and the learnings you have, and what do you have deep work sessions where you’re synthesizing, discerning, choosing, preparing, and that’s all you’re doing, this deep work about strategy, about I am on the right path to do what’s next. I am leading this team this way intentionally, deep work sessions.

La Tonya Roberts 39:56
And I do this with my clients, too, but I go through the whole annual planning process, where I’m looking at the future, where do I want to be five years from now, three years from now, one year from now, and then I break it down into quarterly and monthly milestones. I want to get very clear, okay, if I want to introduce a new service, right, so for example, right now, I’m introducing the new chief AI officer, right? I have chief operating officer.

I have Chief HR officer, because I have all those experiences, but Chief AI officer as well. So what does that look like? I want to go through the certification process.

I want to understand from the tactical and the strategic side. I want to make sure that I have all the knowledge. So what are those milestones that I need to hit along the way?

What are those KPIs? What are the resources? How much money?

How much time? And I’m going through this annual process every year, and then I come back and I do a mid-year review or quarterly review as well. I use the EOS model, the Entrepreneur Operating System, is the model that I follow for everything.

So the big rocks and that quarterly business review, I go through that for myself, and then I put my own spin on it as well. How committed am I? I know this is a big new thing, and it has a huge financial or time resource.

Am I committed to doing this? And does it make sense for what I have going on at this time or in the future? What are some of those personal things going on in my life?

My daughter, she just left for college, so I knew, okay, April to June was going to be heavy. I couldn’t put anything heavy on my plate. I’m going to have to get ready for graduation at the end of May, and then she was leaving a month later to go to college.

So she was my focus, and I didn’t take on anything big. What that meant on the business side for me was I was supposed to start a podcast. That got pushed out because I didn’t have the time.

That wasn’t my focus, my priority, right? So I’m looking at all of those things and mapping out launches or new products or services for the whole year, and I do that in Q4 of the previous year, and I do the same thing with my clients.

Jess Dewell 42:07
What makes it bold to be committed to do what it takes to create your own success?

La Tonya Roberts 42:11
You have to unlearn a lot of things. It’s a lot of deconditioning of what you were taught success is and what it looks like and the steps to get there. The reality is the way that you’re going to achieve your goals is not the same way that someone else is going to achieve them, and you have to be okay with that.

You have to be okay with you being not only your biggest hype person, your biggest supporter, but sometimes the only voice that is saying keep going and blocking out all the noise.

Jess Dewell 42:55
Every single time I have a conversation, I take away something that I want to share with 25 people. I know when you’re listening to this podcast, you’re also listening for that and will have something that you want to share. In the comments, I would like for you to engage with us.

What is that thing that you want to tell 25 people from this program? Here’s why it’s important. It’s important because, yeah, there are going to be how-to’s.

Yes, there are going to be steps. Yes, you’re going to be like, oh, I wish I wrote that down. I wish I wasn’t doing this and I could actually take action on that right now.

But guess what? You’re not. So engage right now because that one thing you want to share with others will be the thing that you can figure out how to incorporate in your business, in your workflow, in your style tomorrow.

Announcer 43:46
Jess hosts the Bold Business Podcast to provide insights for building a resilient, profitable business by deeply understanding your growth strategy, ensuring market relevance and your company’s future. It is bold to deeply understand your growth strategy with your host, Jess Dewell. Get more information about how to drive solutions and reset your growth mindset at reddirection.com.

Thank you for joining us and special thanks to our post-production team at The Scott Treatment.