Monark: Harnessing AI-Enabled Technology To Help Companies Transform Their Indispensable Middle Managers Into Super Leaders
We met with the co-founders of Monark, Kelsey Hahn and Amanda Julian to hear their founding story, learn more about their team, and share their journey as one of our Fund II portfolio companies.
For nearly every one of our behaviours, there's tech to complement it. Fitbits and smartwatches track our activities. Apps help us monitor our health, food intake, heart rate, sleep patterns, and menstrual cycles.
But we don't have an intuitive tool that helps leaders with their performance or tracks data around their team and engagement.
Kelsey Hahn and Amanda Julian founded Monark to venture into new frontiers of leadership performance, development, and optimization, and have created a solution that helps new and emerging leaders unlock their potential.
“We’ve leveraged technology that is intended to be interactive and engaging, designed to pull people into their development instead of pushing it onto them or being a passive experience.”
As a high-performing athlete growing up, Kelsey’s passion for leadership started from a young age. Shaping her path along the way, she studied organizational behaviour and eventually came to oversee the research arm of a family office in Calgary, where she met Amanda in 2014. With Amanda’s background in industrial organizational psychology (completing a PhD in 2021) and the same drive for leadership, the rest is history.
As colleagues running their own consulting practice, Kelsey and Amanda did a lot of traditional, bespoke work with C-suite executives and gained a deep understanding of the challenges in the leadership development space. As they conducted 360 assessments measuring leadership and organizational health and effectiveness, they saw how learning and developmental recommendations at senior levels weren’t trickling down—middle management and front lines were struggling.
Recognizing the demand for a solution that could permeate entire organizations, Kelsey and Amanda leveraged their organizational research backgrounds to build a digital product that could scale.
Enter Monark: a proprietary on-demand learning and performance optimization tool with integrated engagement activities and reminders to drive real and lasting behaviour change.
Designed to fit into busy leaders’ lives, Monark uses a hybrid approach, combining live cohort-based learning with a robust, machine learning powered platform that adopts nudging, personalization, micro-content, assessments, and opportunities for feedback. The facilitated cohort learning—called mastery sessions—are often done among teams of leaders, setting leaders on a social learning path, crystallizing lessons for more practical and applicable takeaways.
“We're trying to disrupt this 15-year gap that we know traditional high-touch solutions, courses or business schools can't solve.”
According to a Harvard Business Review study, the average age a person becomes a leader of other people in organizations is 30, yet the average age they would receive leadership training—if at all in their career—is 42.
Monark’s modern approach aims to be the antidote to old-school, ineffective (sometimes nonexistent) training.
With content developed by leading scientists, practitioners, and organizational psychologists, five-minute micro-lessons prompt leaders to practice real behaviours, making learning much more accessible for busy, growth-oriented leaders. Layer that with smart nudges, immersive engagement, and cohort-based learning, and you’ve got a system that doesn’t just teach skills but makes them stick.
The development doesn’t just stop there. Organizational and 360 assessments, automated feedback, intelligent calendar integrations, and real-time behavioural analysis and insights using generative AI, all help to identify real performance, inform future learning, and understand growth over time.
“We're not here to capture all this data and then give it to your organization so they can get the absolute most out of you. It's intended to empower you to be the best possible leader that you can be.”
With Kelsey and Amanda’s deep passion for leaders and helping people reach their potential, it’s important to emphasize that Monark is a developmental tool over anything. The goal of the tech is to empower leaders and democratize access to growth and development for transformation in the truest sense. Unlike traditional 360 assessments or performance management tools, Monark protects user data and assures that top leaders/C-suite do not have access to individual data or scores.
The team of 9 is currently working to increase the quality of the training by extrapolating data from real moments, meetings, and behaviour. They’re also excited about implementing more gamification elements for a more fun and engaging experience.
Monark's plans for the near future are to take the product to the next level, integrating more machine learning and artificial intelligence and becoming fully enterprise enabled. Supported by the recent raise, Kelsey, Amanda, and the team also aim to expand into new markets—particularly pushing into the U.S. toward the end of 2023.
“Great leaders have the ability to do amazing things—from getting a four-year-old to bed to solving climate change. Great leaders come in different shapes and sizes; they look different, they act different, and our role in that is to empower and bring out the leader in everyone.”
Learn more about Monark at https://www.leadwithmonark.com.