#37: Improving Team Dynamics with Jennifer Dulski
Jennifer Dulski is CEO and founder of Rising Team, a SaaS company that equips managers with the tools and training to build engaged, connected and successful teams. She has a wide range of executive experience in leadership roles at technology companies including, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo!, and Dulski was also president and COO of the social enterprise company Change.org. Dulski writes about leadership and the future of work for LinkedIn Influencers and serves as a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her first book, Purposeful, about how each of us can be movement starters, was published by Penguin Portfolio in 2018 and is a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.
Top 3 Takeaways
- Give people what they need. Employees are looking for the three PsâPurpose, People, and Path. Team leaders need to understand how to help them connect these dots.
- Teams need tools. Managers are already overwhelmed. Expecting them to be comfortable kicking off people-centric conversations is just one more thing. Tools like Rising Team can help.
- Think beyond the tech. Generative AI and ChatGPT are performing seemingly human tasks but they wonât ever perform the most deeply human aspects of a team leaderâs work.
From the Source
âWhat I wanted to do was create tools that would help leaders actively practice and bring back the skills that they're learning with their teams.â
"When you look at the data, people really care about what we call the relational elements. Of course people care about their salary and benefits and so forth, but they want to feel valued by their company and their manager. They want a deep sense of care and trust with the people they work with, and, all of that lands on managers to deliver and it's hard. It's hard to deliver those things, especially without any help.â
âPeople are not willing to just sit in jobs that they hate at companies that don't treat them well.â
âThe C-suite tends to overestimate employee satisfaction around their wellbeing by 65%. They think, well, we're happyâŚthey must be happy too. And it's just not true.â
âWhen you ask remote workers, a lot of them feel more connected to their team than they did before [the pandemic] at places where they are being intentional about it.â
âRecognition and appreciation are incredibly critically important. Consistency and frequency is important, and also individual needs really matter.â
âAfter having done those motivator charts with thousands of people over decades of time, I can tell you that the three things that are most common are purposeâdoes what I work on matter to me, peopleâdo I like and respect the other people I work with, and pathâdo I have a growth path in front of me here?â
âWe just don't give managers the tools to deliver those things. It's not enough to tell them to do it.â
âIt is true that ChatGPT will be able to replace all sorts of writing tasks and coding tasks and so forth. The one thing it will never be able to replace is âHow do we get people to understand each other and care about each other and work well together?ââ
Connect with Jennifer
Website: http://www.risingteam.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdulski/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dulskijen
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jdulski
Links
Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter (book): http://www.purposefulbook.com