BetterUp, the San-Francisco-based life coaching app has hired Prince Harry as its first "chief impact officer"
Credit: POOL/ REUTERS
What’s your Growth Mindset power level? Mine is at 85 out of 100. It’s my best quality, handily beating my Empathy score of 68 and my Cognitive ability of 55.
My other statistics could do with some work: Self-Awareness 35, Nutrition 31 and Physical Activity a risible 14.
These ratings might sound like character statistics from some office-themed Dungeons and Dragons game. In fact, they are the measure of my workplace personality according to BetterUp, the San-Francisco-based life coaching app that has just hired Prince Harry as its first "chief impact officer".
BetterUp has an impressive Silicon Valley pedigree, having just been valued at $1.7bn (£1.2bn) in a $125m investment round led by Iconiq, an "ultra-secretive" and prestigious wealth management firm said to handle Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune. Its pitch: to use artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver personalised coaching sessions designed to nourish "the whole person", to the benefit of both workers and employers.
"My goal is to lift up critical dialogues around mental health, build supportive and compassionate communities, and foster an environment for honest and vulnerable conversations," the Duke of Sussex said. "We can and will elevate the global conversation around our mental health. What we’re doing is about equipping people to thrive."
BetterUp's leadership team includes CEO Alexi Robichaux, COO Eduardo Media
So what can you learn about yourself from Prince Harry’s new gig? I summoned up my self-improvement mindset and attempted to find out.
Mental fitness vs mental health
Given the Prince’s words, it may surprise you to learn that BetterUp is not a mental health app – at least not for individual users. Instead, it is wholly focused on performance and wellbeing at work, and seems designed primarily for corporate use as an employee benefit (which can include a "mental fitness" service called Care).
This is less Californian mysticism and meditation than high-flying Business Wellness, with TED talks about "empowerment" and "strategic planning" and a personality assessment that frames your high scores as "strengths" and your weaknesses as "development areas".
When entering your details, job title is a mandatory field – not that it would necessarily be very useful in Silicon Valley, where business cards might bear sobriquets such as "hacker", a "ninja", a "Jedi", a "Sherpa", a "wizard" or even "security princess" (no relation).
In the past, BetterUp only sold its services to companies with more than 10,000 employees, with past clients including Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Logitech. Nasa and the US Federal Aviation Administration. Today lone individuals can try it too, getting one free coaching session before being asked to subscribe – and so I jumped in.
My first speed bump appeared within the first few minutes. BetterUp begins with a brief set of questions designed to match you with a coach. The company makes much of its AI algorithms, which it claims can match coaches to clients with "over 97pc accuracy".
Yet at this stage there was no explicit mention of mental health and no place to note disabilities such as ADHD and autism. Consequently, none of the three coaches offered by the app – and there seems to be no way forward without picking one – listed expertise on those topics, at least beyond general allusions to "health and wellness", "mindfulness" and "stress".
BetterUp begins with a brief set of questions designed to match you with a coach
Credit: BetterUp /BetterUp
For many users, this is a potential dealbreaker: a coach who does not understand your specific disabilities is unlikely to be as helpful as one who does, and at worst might be a hindrance. I requested more options via a manual email form and got similar options again, albeit with a little more "wellness".
It makes for a rather more common problem than the one faced by Prince Harry himself, who found that BetterUp’s questions did not easily fit with his history as a working royal.
Perhaps the limitation exists to avoid being classified as a healthcare app, which in the US comes with heavy regulations. BetterUp’s website is at pains to distinguish coaching from therapy, and to note that its services are not eligible for healthcare tax breaks. Still, it’s not what I would call "whole person".
What you do get, once you’re in, is a mixture of goal-setting tool, educational library and gamified life tracker. The first assignment is a 157-part "whole person model assessment", which asks about everything from your feelings towards your colleagues through your sleeping habits to your out-of-work friendships.
Do you surround yourself with people you can depend on? (Yes. I mean, I think so.) Do you often criticise yourself? (No, and it’s disgusting.) How much attention do you pay to the ingredients in your food? (Less than I should!) Do you gravitate towards tasks that push you outside your comfort zone? (What do you think this is?)
The personality test
Some questions feel oriented towards managers (do you "express confidence in coworkers’ abilities to successfully manage their own work?). Others do finally get to the matter of mental health (is your job "emotionally draining and exhausting"?). Others attempt to assess the health of your workplace itself (is there "a high degree of interpersonal conflict on [your] team"?).
If this really were Dungeons and Dragons, my character class would apparently be "The Encourager". Rather like a cleric or bard, the Encourager views their work as "personally meaningful" and excels at supporting others and learning new skills yet struggles to manage stress. Not that my fate is immutable: the verdict is described as only for "today".
BetterUp has appointed Prince Harry as Chief Impact Officer
Credit: BetterUp/BetterUp
Once your role is assigned, BetterUp will begin to recommend articles and videos, as well as algorithmically suggesting possible goals and simple ways of working towards them each day. You can set your own objectives, with specific deadlines to meet them, and the app will prompt you to rate your progress regularly then turn the results into a chart.
The heart of the app, though, is clearly the coaching. After selecting your initial personal coach, many more are available: nutrition coaches, communication coaches, "navigating uncertainty" coaches and "working parents" coaches. You browse options via a Tinder-like swiping interface; one coach had turned her own surname into an empowering acronym ("Transforming Others to Realise…").
In the long term, BetterHealth plans to use the data you give it – as well as huge studies conducted through its research arm, BetterUp Labs, and online gig services such as Mechanical Turk – to turn self-improvement into a science. Its founder and chief executive Alexi Robichaux, who is about Harry’s age, survived his own workplace overload and is now on a mission to "improve improve human existence".
How much will it cost?
As I went through the process, I could feel green shoots of productive self-examination begin to break soil. The problem is, can they survive here? The company says users will get real results after multiple sessions, but it is strikingly opaque about how much this will cost.
Neither in the app itself nor on BetterUp’s website could I find any clear information about subscription pricing. A special offer by Visa tags it at $2,350 per user, though this seems to be a corporate plan. Coaches on the business review site Glassdoor describe it as paying "very little", "below average coaching rates" and "almost no pay". What this means for individual users I could not tell you.
For me, it felt as if I was being coaxed into investing in the system, getting used to it, setting goals and developing hopes – perhaps even making a connection with my coach – only to be hit shortly afterwards with an unknown price. A request for comment with my journalist’s hat was not immediately answered.
Clearly, coaching is an investment; but those of us not sixth in line to the throne of the United Kingdom would appreciate some "honest feedback" about how much it will cost. Might I suggest a TED talk that I found in the BetterUp app? The title is "Know your worth, and then ask for it".
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