Kona is pre-trained on a combination of proprietary and established management frameworks:
- 18 Manager Behaviors — including giving specific feedback, setting clear goals, delegation, recognition, and other core leadership skills.
- Established managerial best practices — Radical Candor, OKR methodology, Psychological Safety (Amy Edmondson), Situational Leadership, Growth Mindset, Strengths-Based Leadership, Inclusive Feedback models, and HBR case studies.
- Aggregated manager enablement research — hundreds of hours of coaching patterns from 15Five's coaching team.
- Transform Content and Coaching Courses — company learning content from 15Five Transform is referenced contextually for coaching alignment.
Kona's behavior detection is contextual and semantic — it evaluates conversational patterns aligned to the 18 behaviors, not just keywords.
Custom training or customization of Kona's coaching model is not available.