Career Conversations with Ryan Seamons

2 Cent Dad Podcast

Ryan Seamons is a father of 5, the founder or Groove, and also a friend. They make physical products to help people have meaningful conversations about work and their careers. So much of that carries over to life at home and how we think about the paths that we are on. A great conversation about making time to have conversations with each other and ourselves to craft the best future.

Where To Find Ryan

• Twitter https://twitter.com/ryanseamons
• Blog https://ryanseamons.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanseamons
• Company https://meetgroove.com/
• Study Mentioned in Episode https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/

Transcription below (may contain typos...):

[00:00:00] Ryan: [00:00:00] regret, number one, she said this was far and away.

The biggest, the most common regret that people had, and it was, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to me, self, not the life others expected of me. And so when you talk about the stories, you tell yourself what, in listening, we hear advice from others all the time, right? People think they're coaching.

What they're actually doing is giving advice. Giving advice is not coaching. Coaching is helping you understand what you want and people aren't good at that.

Mike: [00:00:25] Careers and kids, how do we talk about our own careers? How do we talk about careers to our kids? What are the stories that we tell ourselves about our careers and what we like and dislike about them? that's a conversation I had with Ryan Siemens who runs a company called groove. They actually make physical cards.

, that facilitate conversations. About careers. And we talked about careers. We talked about schooling. We talked about education and ukuleles and how to get your kids to do. Anything you want them to do using ukuleles. [00:01:00] So let's jump into the interview

well today on the podcast, Ryan Siemens joins us. Thank you for being on the show, Ryan. Welcome.

Ryan: [00:01:10] Yeah. Thanks. Glad to be here.

Mike: [00:01:11] Yeah. So Ryan runs company called groove.

I was previously with LinkedIn. He's a multi startup kind of guy too. Um, But groove is a really interesting company. Um, and maybe I'll have you explain it because you'd explain it better, but I will say, I should say you are a father of five as well, which is one of the key reasons I wanted to have you on this podcast, um, to share wisdom there.

You're also a friend. Um, so Ryan tell us what, tell us what groove is all about.

Ryan: [00:01:37] Yeah, well, excited to be here. And so groove, this is a recent, um, recent company has started and the idea behind groove is we are creating physical experiences to help people be more fulfilled in life. And so we're, we're building a series of, of physical experiences, uh, that are, uh, conversational.

Most of them in nature, and they are centered around work. Around education and then [00:02:00] around family. So our we've really just released our first product for work. It's called career conversations, and it is a card deck. And soon to becoming a career roadmap guide that you can fill out with, uh, to help you think about what's important in your career and where do you want to go?

Uh, so that you can not just have a good path ahead of you, but find fulfillment in work.

Mike: [00:02:20] Yeah, no, that's great. I think it's a huge need and I'm actually holding the physical cards right here in front of me, your career cards, which I wear are very well done. They're very well designed. Tell, tell us a little bit about how the tell, tell me how the, the idea came about.

Like how, how did you identify this need and how, how did the whole product come to fruition?

Ryan: [00:02:41] Yeah. So the, the, for me, the idea of guidance experiences has always been an interesting thought in my mind. And this started actually when I was at LinkedIn. So we designed, I got hired at LinkedIn to design the first learning system internally.

At the time we called it learning today, you'll know that as LinkedIn learning, right. Um, and as we [00:03:00] design that, the piece that resonated most with people as we were building that out was something we called at the time. The transformation plan sounds pretty cliche now, but the idea behind it was a walkthrough experience kind of step by step to help people identify, well, what skill do I want to learn?

What content could I learn about and how do I take steps in that? And people just really like that right there. There's naturally we all want to know what's the next step. Like, what's the next thing. So I've liked that idea of telling people the next step fast forward then to about a year ago. Uh, we got introduced to some other companies that were doing, uh, then card decks out there.

One is Stanford. There's something they call the values deck. They don't sell it externally. Another company called Instructure, created something called the drivers deck, which is similar to this. But again, they don't, they don't sell it. They use it as lead generation for the product. Um, we, we ended up looking at 12 different products that all kind of touched on this point.

But for me, I wanted to find something that an individual could pick up and could use in conversation with their manager up here, or even a spouse, and that they could get [00:04:00] the help beyond just the, the cards themselves, the values sort. Um, and that just didn't exist. So we started. Started asking lots of questions.

We ended up doing 200, I think about now we're up to 230 personal interviews that we've done, where we've walked through and gotten feedback on the words, the mechanism that the deck, the approach. Um, and so we feel really good about the feedback that we've gotten and, and finding a set of words that resonate with people that are, uh, that are wide enough for people to identify with and then thinking about, okay, how do we go from.

Someone saying, I don't really know how to have a career conversation or yeah. As a manager, I know I should have this, but I don't know really what to say or people that start with what we think is actually a bad way to start a career conversation. The question where do you see yourself in five years? I actually think that's a horrible way to start a career conversation.

I instead

Mike: [00:04:43] you should. Why is it a horrible way to start a

Ryan: [00:04:45] company? Great question. It's a horrible way to start a career conversation because it skips over all of the why. It says cool. Jumped to like, where do you want to be an artist too often? It's easy to slip into normal scripts. [00:05:00] So we say, well, where do I want to be?

Well, I want to get promoted. I want to make lots of money. I want to be famous. It's just easy to think we want those things. But instead when you start by exploring, well, what do I care about? Today. Uh, and, and why do I care about that? And you started consists of the conversation guide that we share has a couple of questions about your past.

What led you to hear about your future? Where do you think you want to go? And then your present? How do we start now? And this is i...