Founded in 2019, qChange is a leadership enablement solution that utilises meeting environments to help develop leadership skills. It is built on a unique premise – leaders can use meeting experience to introspect, collect feedback, self-assess, and grow, gaining from data-driven analytics insights. The startup has held two funding rounds, raising $395,000 in pre-seed investment in November 2020.
Importantly, qChange acts as a digital meeting coach built on the Leader Experience Action Dimensions or L.E.A.D framework. Users can select their “influencers” (people who inspire or shape them as leaders), and the platform collects feedback and generates data to help track their leadership development. qChange is designed as a meeting add-on to effectively hone your leadership skills and decision-making capabilities in a collaborative environment.
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The qChange Leader Experience solution is designed to encourage a bottom-up approach to leadership development, where the opinion and perception of every employee matters.
Interestingly, qChange is designed keeping in mind the needs of the Microsoft Teams platform. The qChange Leader Experience app for Teams was launched in July 2020. It is a meeting extension that allows you to grow in 45 behavioural areas.
Inside qChange Leader Experience for Microsoft Teams
You need to have an existing qChange license to use this Teams app. Pricing starts at $459 per year, and there is a 30-day free trial in case you want to try out the Teams experience first before investing. Download qChange from Microsoft AppSource or the Teams application store, accessible from the platform’s left navigation pane. After you install qChange, you will be prompted to choose from the 45 L.E.A.D areas to personalise your leadership development experience. Here are the other key features to expect:
- AI-based recommendations – As mentioned, you will be asked to select your preferred development goals from a list of 45 possible traits. Based on your response, qChange’s AI technology recommends the specific behavioural areas you need to focus on. It also auto-recommends a list of influencers to help you on your journey. You can always add more traits and influencers as required.
- Pre-meeting nudges – qChange helps you conduct focused and inspiring meeting sessions to finetune your leadership skills based on real-world conditions. It will analyse your chosen behavioural areas and the purpose of the meeting to send you tips and guidance on how to act during the meeting.
- Automated feedback gathering – After the meeting, qChange automatically asks your selected influencers to provide you with quantitative and anonymous feedback as per pre-configured leadership traits. Based on this honest feedback, you can better understand how you were perceived, confident that the influencers could share their real opinion thanks to the anonymous format.
- Leader score generation – The qChange app also generates a leadership score so you’re always informed about your performance. You will be asked to self-assess out of 100 points, and your self-assessed leadership score will be compared against influencer feedback to highlight any gap in perception. The app also maps leadership scores over time.
- Optional manual feedback – While qChange will automatically ask influencers to rate you against a list of quantifiable parameters, you can also request for open feedback. This allows your employees and peers to explicitly mention their thought processes and reasoning via written statements in addition to a quantifiable score.
- Relevant and topical skill-building – qChange supports a variety of skills that are extremely relevant for leaders today. For example, when you start your leader experience, you will be asked to select a theme, including remote leadership and leading through COVID-19. Your personalised recommendations will be based on the Theme, a Dimension, and an Area of your choice.
- The qChange bot – The qChange bot is how you receive nudges and notifications. The bot will remind you before a meeting starts, the perception gap if any, and nudges to focus on/act on during the meeting.
Why the qChange Leader Experience App Makes a Difference
qChange offers a truly unique capability – it leverages anonymous feedback from meetings to shrink the gap between how you perceive yourself as a leader vs. how your team members perceive you. It also covers interesting and highly relevant topics for managers today.
What We Think
When implemented meaningfully, the qChange app for Microsoft Teams can significantly help develop the next generation of leaders. Download it here.
