The Not So Hidden Costs of Undertrained Leaders with Jennifer Dulski

Michael speaks with Jennifer Dulski, founder and CEO of Rising Team, about the hidden costs of untrained teams and how leadership development can be improved. Dulski shares her background across nonprofit work, teaching, and leadership roles at Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and change.org, plus lessons from being a rowing coxswain. They discuss why traditional training often fails to translate into behavior change, the downsides of a “common denominator” approach, and how AI can enable personalized growth plans aligned with company principles while preserving human connection. They cover impacts of weak leadership—unclear expectations, rework, low morale, quiet quitting, attrition—and the value of shared struggle, honesty, trust, and consistent team investment, citing measurable ROI improvements from regular team-building.

Timestamps:
00:24  Welcome and Setup
01:28  Meet Jennifer Dulski
02:56  Sports Teams Lessons
05:26  Why Training Fails
08:57  Personalized Growth With AI
10:44  AI and Human Strengths
14:40  Hidden Costs of Bad Teams
17:59  Shared Struggle and Honesty
21:27  Trust and The 10 Percent
25:38  Building Foundations Early
27:51  Proving ROI of Training
30:13  Leadership Breakthrough Story
32:11  Three Key Takeaways
35:30  Closing

Connect with Jennifer:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdulski/
https://risingteam.com
https://www.purposefulbook.com

Michael's National Workforce Study on Change Management:
https://www.michaeljlopez.coach/research

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Top Voice Podcast, where each week I sit down with leading voices in business, leadership, and transformation to unpack the issues that matter most. Together, we explore fresh insights, bold ideas, and real-world stories from people shaping how we think about change, culture, and what's possible. Hello and welcome to the Top Voice podcast. It is June 30th, and I'm excited to have on with us today Jennifer Dolski, who's going to talk to us not just about her incredible background, but I think a problem we've all encouraged or encountered in our lives, which is the costs of untrained teams. We are all part of many teams in our lives, in our families, and we understand directly what that looks like when we don't have what we need to succeed as a group. And so I've been waiting for this conversation for quite some time. I'm a big team guy. So everything I learned about being a leader and a teammate came from playing college football. So we'll talk about some of that. Jennifer, before I give you a chance to introduce yourself and your background, for those of you who are on with us live, please do let us know where you're watching from. Leave us a question or a comment. We love that. It's a great way to open up the conversation. For those of you who are listening on whatever podcast platform you enjoy, please do subscribe. It's the best way to support the show. Jennifer, please tell us who you are and tell us a bit about the work that you do.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Sure. I am Jennifer Dulski. I am the founder and CEO of a company called Rising Team. I also, since we're live, realize I need to turn off my Slack, which I just did. And uh I have a long and sort of winding history of my career, as many people do. I actually started off, I was the founder of a nonprofit and I taught high school for four years, which is a sort of atypical start to a career in tech. Um, and then I have spent the next 25, almost 30 years working mainly in big tech, 10 years at Yahoo, several years each leading pretty big groups at Google and Facebook, and five years as president of change.org. And so I have a lot of experience, startups, big companies, nonprofits, B Corps, full corporations. And what I would say is my biggest sort of my purpose has been about amplifying the potential of other people. I that's what my life has been about. And that's why I feel excited to get up every morning.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

I love that. And we've all got to have a purpose that gets us out of bed beyond our family and our loved ones. And I think that's a that's a great one. I we we let's let's jump into a little bit here, but I want to maybe start with something within your background that I guess I'm interested in, as you just brought up, which is which is teams. And we've all been a part of multiple teams. I'd love to know about the teams that shaped you as you've been on this non-traditional journey in some ways, and how does that inform your purpose now and what you've started to build?

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Yeah, so like you, you said that your all of your experience came from college football. I also uh was a high school and college athlete. I was a coxswain on the rowing team. I don't know how many people are familiar with crew or rowing as a sport. The coxswain is the person who sits in the back of the boat, steers, strategizes the race, and coaches the team. I say I was an athlete, although some people may disagree, but because in order to earn the respect of the very large, you know, men and women, I was coxing in the boat when I was the teeny person next to them. I had to do every workout outside the boat to earn their trust and respect. And, you know, it it was an amazing experience to be part of a team and in particular to be part of a winning team and also to learn how to be part of a team that sometimes loses and how to come back from that. And most of my leadership lessons in my life have have come from that experience. And you know, the the coxing experience is a little bit unusual too, because it's more it's more like a coach than a player. So I, for instance, had to learn how to give feedback to people in real time in front of each other and you know, all of those lessons. And when we started Rising Team, the premise was that great managers and great leaders are a lot like great sports coaches. And so all there's like a sports analogy set of metaphors running through everything we do at the company. Our values all have sports words in them and so forth.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

We we would, we, we will, we would get along in that regard. My my team's always everything's a sports analogy. I don't know much about rowing. I just know that if you catch a crab, that's a bad thing.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Don't catch a crab. That's right. There are so many metaphors, like you know, another good one, and then I'll stop on the cruise stories, but um, there's something called a power 10 where you know you're rowing really hard, and then you take 10 of the absolute hardest strokes you possibly can. And it's up to the coxswain to decide when to call the power 10. And it's very similar to the leadership we see inside companies, right? Teams, they can take they're capable of a power 10. You just have to decide how often and how many, and they can't go on indefinitely. So, anyway, lots of metaphors here that care about.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, let's I I I think it's a great metaphor. I did know about that one. And let's let's talk about what started this conversation between the two of us was a comparison you made in a post article a while back about training leaders like running for a triathlon, but but sitting in a classroom. And you and I share this view because the number of times I've seen employees go to a 30-minute training about something in their company, and then the company leadership thinking they're going to magically be different. No one ever changed because they watched a video for 30 minutes. Tell us a little bit about what made you realize that the way we approach training is so fundamentally broken in the way companies go about it.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Yeah. So, you know, I was, as I grew up in my career and I became an executive inside these companies, I was very lucky to be the recipient of a lot of that training. And some of them were 30 minutes, others of them were multi-day trainings in person. And I thought they were terrific. I am that kid, I also teach at Stanford at the GSB, and I'm that kid who like loved school and loves learning and so forth. The challenge was, as you said, both translating it into real behavior and also spreading it beyond the people that are lucky to be in the room. So as an exec, I was in the room, but then I would go back to my team and I had so many managers working on my team that I couldn't send to the training. And I say a lot that it was like being taught to fish and then being sent to the lake with a binder instead of a fishing pole. It was like everything was in my head. I had no way to translate it. And then so I started thinking about how to create something that would scale not only the learning but also the behavior change. And that was the Genesis of Rising Team. The personal trainer analogy came about because I realized that even if we could scale the idea of the training itself, the problem is that everybody starts at different starting points. And I said it's like if you imagine you take a room full of people and you want them to run a triathlon, if we imagine for a moment that best in class leadership is like the outcome of a triathlon, some people in the room are going to be great runners, some are going to love to swim and hate to run. And what traditional leadership development does is start them at the same place at the same time, which means some people are getting something that they really don't need, and other people aren't getting what they need at all. So that was the idea of each person needs a personal trainer instead of group cohort-based training.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah. I again, you you and I share a lot, and I mentioned this before the show, but for those who can see the screen, there's a study behind me called Rethinking Change Management. And this is one of the big conclusions, which is this uh what I call common denominator approach that happens a lot within companies, which is we treat at least cohorts of people, all managers, all executives, maybe everyone in a region the same. And and those then get paintbrushed with a certain set of skills and training. How what have you seen around this? I think we all can understand the downside of that, but where where and how do we get this right if we're going to do it differently? Because you can't also maybe customize everyone's unique experience. There's a there's a balance in there. So maybe let's just talk about that for a second, and then we'll talk about some of the some of the costs of not training people well. But let's just start with how how do we do it better if if the common denominator approach isn't really working?

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Yeah, the amazing thing about the world we live in right now is we actually can individualize now for every person. That genuinely was not possible even five years ago. But now with AI, um, you know, it's funny, I've been in the AI world a long time. My first startup was actually an AI company back in 2010, and we literally trained the models ourselves. Like my whole team would stay up late at night and you know, teach it like big burger is good, big bill is bad, like crazy. Um, but now all of us have access to the power of these large language models. And um, you know, what we do at Rising Team is essentially create a personal, it's like a personal fitness trainer, but for your leadership muscle. And the first thing it does is start by taking an intake, like a personal trainer would. What are your challenges? What are some problems you're having? What are the things that come easily to you? How much time do you want to spend on this? And everybody gets a completely personalized, custom to them, no one else's looks like it, growth plan that's going to check in with them, practice conversations, teach them things, et cetera. The thing that is exciting about it is companies, because companies don't want their leaders to be all over the place. You know, you want it personalized, but you also want it the way you want it, right? So now you can combine the best of both. The the companies, when they decide on things like their own leadership principles or behaviors, that can be built into the system alongside each personal, each person's starting point and needs to get. So the sort of outcome can be the same, but the pathways can be different.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Yeah. I I'm glad you brought up the the values and principles piece because values, at my personal opinion, is values have never been more important. And uh particularly just given what we're going through economically, uh, if anything, there's also a lot of other social things going on as well. But the challenge with AI right now, and you see this maybe in the tech space, and we'll we'll talk about the posts you did about Meta yesterday, because they've become a bit of a whipping post for this conversation, is that so much of the AI performance index has been around efficiency, not around personalization and training and customization and unique pathways to growth. What does that look like and where are you seeing that tension play out? Because I think we're we're maybe missing the moment in terms of what we have opportunities to do, but a lot of companies are are maybe starting in the wrong place in terms of their incentives. I don't know. I'd be curious about your it's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Yeah, AI can be used in a lot of really amazing ways. And the key thing is how to harness what it's uniquely good at and what, and then think about what humans are uniquely good at and try it's you know, we have I have an exercise I built called natural talents, and people take it to find out the things that I mean, it should be obvious, but it you take it to find out the things that bring you energy and joy at work, and everybody gets a spider chart, and it's not necessarily what you're good at because you can be good at things that drain you, but you get this chart of like these are the things that come easily that make me want to jump out of bed every day. AI, if we were to do it, you know, sort of the way to think about it is how to get support and help on the things that drain every ounce of your energy so that humans can spend more time doing the things that they uniquely love and are good at. And that is different for every human. So the first fallacy is to say everybody in our company should use AI in the exact same way because that would just be a mistake. We, you know, each person, you know, I have some like I now myself and other engineers can get help from AI on design. I also have amazing designers in my company who don't want AI to do their design work. And my daughter, she's an artist, like they she does not want to remove all her creativity through AI. So the key is how do we get it to do the things that we don't like doing that are repetitive and can be automated? And how do we help it have it help us do the things that can take us a level higher? Like I am great at making a slide deck and I really enjoy it. It's so weird. I don't know. A lot of people may be the last person on earth that enjoys it. Exactly. But now that I have the help from AI, what I can do is make complete, I can start with a template I think is great, and then I can make completely customized versions for every presentation, every customer, every person I'm talking to in a way I never could before. And that's this similar to what I was saying we can do with leadership development now. The plan can be totally customized, but at the end of the day, the there still needs to be what we call a human native piece, right? It's fine to work with your AI coach. At the end of the day, you still have to go back to your team and be a human being and understand them, value them, you know, all of that. And so it's the combination, we say it's the intersection of AI and deep human connection that will lead to success here.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Yeah, I resonate with that. I have a client, I've done a lot of work in the nuclear space, which is a unique industry in and of itself. And I've said on more than one occasion to people on those teams, there is no, they have a lot of safety checklists as you would expect. And that is important for all the reasons that you can immediately think of. And what I've said to them is there is no checklist that will ever remove your responsibility to interact with another human being. You you have to have and build relationships. So let's talk about relationships and maybe let's let's talk about bad teams for a moment, because the the title of this episode was the the hidden costs of poorly trained teams. I think we can understand maybe some of the natural tension of a team that's not working well interpersonally, but what are the other things that happen when we don't have really high performing teams?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Yeah. Well, I think it's it does start with the the leader, right? So if we think about poorly trained leaders and what the impact then is on the team, sometimes really high-performing teams can withstand a bad leader, right? They perform even amidst a challenging manager and so forth. But generally what happens is when you don't have strong leadership on a team, you have um, first of all, much worse productivity because there's a lack of clarity around what's actually expected. So one of the biggest mistakes I see teams make, and I've seen this in all the places I've worked and also all the customers we work with, when a leader or anyone who's making a request is unclear about what the request is, then someone goes off to do it and often it's the wrong thing, and it turns out that it just wasn't clear, the expectations weren't clear to begin with. And that, so a huge cost is like the redoing of work that could have been done the better the first time if someone was just clear. And ironically, that's um in the age of AI only being amplified because the less clear you are with your AI agents, the worse they perform as well.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

And then people take the first answer they get back and return it and without checking it, and that becomes a bigger problem.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Exactly. Exactly. So that sort of worse productivity, lack of clarity of expectations. The second thing is morale really suffers, which hurts performance. When people don't feel valued or understood, they check out. This is where the term quiet quitting came from, you know, years ago, which people still do. So both sort of quiet quitting, the checking out of your day job, and also real quitting. Attrition, you know, increases by a lot when leaders are not properly supporting their teams. Um, we do believe we're we're in a shift right now towards what I call super managers, which is like, you know, you see every company flattening their management hierarchy, especially due to AI and lots of excuses that AI is allowing that. And that is, I believe for the first time ever, it is possible to manage larger teams. The key is what where you get help. So A, just don't, if you do it badly, it will amplify everything I just said. A lot, you know, managing a larger team in a bad way, everything gets worse. If you can get support and help both from both in a leadership development sense and from AI to help on the manual stuff, then if the best version of this is the time spent is really on the deep strategic work and on the valuing and connection with people. That's the way it works. If you don't do that, then it's really a disaster.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

So I want to talk a little bit about, as you brought that up, this one of the things I believe about teams is the power of shared experience and group struggle. And you've been on sports teams, and sports teams are the best example of this. I worked with the military for years, and that is another feature of people who firefighters and first responders and military professionals who are going into harm's way. They it builds incredible bonds among teams. That's that's harder to do in the work world, uh, maybe a little bit easier in startups where things are a little bit more high pressure. But you we've been talking a lot about training, I think, from a skills perspective. But I'd be curious to know and think about your perspective of the value of shared experience and shared struggle and where that relates to good teams or bad teams. And and if we don't have it, how do we how do we manufacture it? How do we create it?

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Yeah, boy, shared struggle. It's it's hard and it's really important. Um and yes, my husband is also a veteran, so I I know this from the military side and the sports side. The um the other thing that is interesting is in the research, there's some some team-based research that says the best teams, and I heard this from Frances Fry recently, she said the best teams can discuss the undiscussables. And so that's in a little bit the shared struggle too, because sometimes struggle, we avoid the struggle if when we don't tell the truth. And you know, the the first way that leaders can effectively get their team into shared struggle is just by being honest with them about what's really happening. And that is true whether you work at a startup or a Fortune 10 company, you know, we we work with customers like Google and Hershey and HP and you know, all these huge companies. The number one thing that people type into their trainer is they need help with leading through change. And so everybody is going through these massive transformations. We call it the workplace tornado. And if we just start by telling our team, like I had one of these with my team the other, like a couple of weeks ago, where we said, you know, we hit some challenge at work and I debated, should I say something? Should I not? After I told them, one of them said, you know, I'm really fired up now. He said, This reminds me of the time in college where I had a professor who said, You'll never pass this class. And he said, I said, watch me. You know, because like just giving the sheer challenge and the truth about the challenges we have to face can bond a team together in the struggle. In fact, I and talk about shared experiences. So when we were talking about this challenge that we're facing, we talked about the timeline that we have to face it. And I we we used a piece of string. I don't know if you can see this as a metaphor. And everybody tied a piece of string around their wrist as the metaphor for the time we have in front of us to solve this challenge that we're working on. And I literally have had this string on for a month. I think I have one month to go to fix the thing we're trying to fix. So, yes, experiences, I strongly believe in this.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

You talked about honesty, and I think what relates to that is the concept of trust, because you have to trust each other in order to get there. And I want to talk about that in just a moment, but I but I want to go back to your your comment about honesty because I think so much of our, even I would say our cultural narrative around leadership and parenting has been has really been about being a shield and and and keeping things away from our workers, our kids, uh, keeping them safe. And you're talking about a very different opening. How how do we, other than just Saying it out loud, how do you talk to leaders about both the value of that honesty? But it's got to be for someone who's been a shield for a long time. This is a very different experience and one that strikes at their own ego. Do they think I'm not doing my job because it's hard? Uh, they're uncomfortable, all of these things. How do we start to bridge that conversation?

SPEAKER_01 22:21

I really deeply understand this because I too, I believe I've um I sit in the shield zone a lot of the time. Um, I actually wrote a post about this also um recently because my CTO, who was our founding CTO, when we first started the company together, I said to him, How much do you want to know about what's really happening? And he said to me, I said, you know, some, do you want me to tell you the things that are worrying me? And he said, Why don't we create a worry list and you can just share it with me and I'll help you carry the worry list. And I was like, Oh my God, that's amazing. And I will say, I probably, you know, since then, that was five years ago, it's probably like 90% of the worry list. I had there's always that last kind of 10% that I probably haven't shared. Every once in a while, I go into the 10% zone and it's hard. And I recognize why other leaders may find this difficult for all the reasons you described. What I will say as a reminder to myself and others is that usually when you go into the 10% zone is when you probably earn the most trust from your team because it it shows that you're human and it also gives them permission to be human and to show all the things that they um that that they are really feeling. And those are the safest spaces and the highest, most productive teams. And this is true with our family as well. And it's it's funny that you say this because I had a very similar conversation with one of my daughters recently where I said something about, you know, something I was struggling with, and and that was it. I kind of left it at that. And later she said, you know, I realized I didn't, I didn't support you in that moment. And my first reaction was, it's not your job. Like I'm your mom. It's not your job to support me. And then she can't, she's an adult already. My kids are in their 20s, and she's like, Why not? You know, we're all here for each other, and it's just it's complicated. Uh beautiful. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yeah. There's a comment in the chat that I want to get to in a second, but I want to keep poking at this a little bit because I think so much of what we think about when it comes to training and team performance is the group dynamic. And what you're describing is a bit of the individual responsibility for how we show up in this balance between one of my favorite debates is responsibility versus accountability and how do we think about that as a team? We've talked about shared struggle. We've talked about how, in order to hold that space and create somewhere where someone could share that last 10%, you've got to both have trust. But in some cases, discussing the undiscussable creates conflict. It creates a reaction in somebody else. And, you know, great teams. So, so, so how do you how do you talk to teams about that piece, which is all right, we've opened the can and now we're in the middle of the conversation, and we're all humans, and somebody might be having a reaction or bad day, a bad moment. And, you know, all this other leadership training sounds great until you get real people involved.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

So so how do you think about that piece of it?

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Yeah, so my belief is that the best version of this starts with a really solid foundation. And actually, the core of Rising Team, when we first built it before we launched the long before the AI trainer existed, we started with software-guided, interactive team building sessions. They range from 10 minutes to two hours and they're on any, you know, all sorts of topics. Some are pure connection, like, you know, what are life experiences that shaped who you are, and others are work skill-related topics, like there's one on navigating change or appreciation or giving feedback. And my belief is that if we start by building that foundation in the early stages of a team, or really at any point when you enter a team, understand each other's working styles, how you like to be appreciated, all the individual preferences, the life stories, the habits and things that energize each other. Then by the time you get to the conflict, it's much easier to get through those moments because we know who we are as humans. And so the key is to, you know, the number one pushback we get is I don't have time. And I get that. And I regularly hear reference the movie Maverick, which Top Gun is one of my absolute favorites. But you know, there's this moment where, you know, Tom Cruise takes the team to the beach to play in the second one to play flag football. And the admiral comes and he says, We have this critical life-saving mission. We have no time. What are you doing? And Tom Cruise looks at him and says, You told me to build a team, sir. And like there is, it's just a huge fallacy to say I don't have time to invest in my team or my own growth, because those things are what pays off and spades later, avoids conflict, avoids mistakes, all the things that we know about. And so, yes, I would say invest early, little bit, little short bits are enough as long as you are consistent.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Yeah. We are already kind of getting close to time. I could I could do this all day. We might have to make this a longer episode. But well, uh another question on that, and then I'll I'll address the question that we got in the chat because I think it's a good one. The investment versus time equation that companies think about when they get to training, and certainly AI can allow you to, as your products do, allow you to accelerate some of those things in a very personalized way, but it does take time. It does take investment. You can't, there's some things that you can't make go faster. And I I've spent a lot of time in the past convincing leadership teams that this is worthy of their investment. How do you think about that? And how do you get leaders to really listen and appreciate the nuance of what you just described? Because it doesn't always show up in the ROI equation, at least not initially.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

The interesting thing is now we have tons of data on the ROI side. So I can prove that if you spend uh two to three hours a quarter in some total, broken up however in whatever pieces you want, with investing in your team, just getting to know them, understanding them, that it will drive up to 2x improvement in manager effectiveness, that it drives 20% or more lift in your ENPS and your engagement scores, that it will move employee retention up by 30%. It is crazy how much the numbers move if you're able to measure them. That's the thing, is most people don't have, we just haven't over time done the longitudinal test versus control measurement of this stuff. So my guess is it's been working all along. We just couldn't measure it. And now that you can measure it, we can prove it, which is really nice. The other stat which is really interesting is when you ask individuals. So part of our trainer intake says, How much time can you would you like to invest in your own development? And we give people the option 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or 45 minutes a week. My initial hypothesis was that everybody would choose 20 minutes a week. And as it turns out, 60% choose 30 or 45 minutes a week. So people actually want to do this. The senior executives assume they don't, but they actually do.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

Yeah. And two to three hours a quarter is is nothing.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

It's less than 1% of your time of a 40-hour work week.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Yeah, that's that's that's really staggering. Um, let's address the question that we got in the chat from Ross, which is a great one. It's a it's a little bit of a way to get to know you personally. Uh, can you share a moment in your past as a teacher or company leader where you had a breakthrough regarding your own leadership style? And how did that change or validate your existing approach?

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Yes, I have one big one here, which is, I mean, there are lots of little ones, but the one big one that strikes me. So I used to early in my career, I used to say, if you're going to bring me a problem, bring me at least three solutions. Because I really, in fact, there's I was interviewed once in the corner office in the New York Times, and this is like the headline of my piece. And now that I look back on it, I think it's like really shameful a little bit. But um because it was so exhausting as a leader to have people bring me problems all the time and just be like, this isn't working, and this isn't working. And so I just said, could you at least have thought about how we might fix it and bring some ideas? And I learned over time that that attitude was causing people to stop bringing me the problems. And that was a really big deal. Like I needed people who would tell me the truth and tell me things weren't working. And so I took away the three solution rule and I say you can bring me any problem you want. And hopefully, people still, you know, feel like we can collaboratively ideate towards a solution rather than just dump the problem on me. But that was a big takeaway for me.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Yeah. I I think every leader, I every leader that's risen to anywhere, even those that are still on their rise, have could probably tell five stories about places where they have made mistakes or approach things. And I think that's a really, really good one. Uh, Jennifer, we could, you know, teams have been discussed and studied since the beginning of time, and teams will always be essential to who we are. We're a social species. Uh no one ever succeeds alone. And we've talked a lot about teams here today. What are what are two to three things that you want people to take away from not just the costs of poorly trained teams or undertrained teams, but now the tools and opportunities we have to think differently about how to train and build that kind of trust that we've been talking about.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Yeah. So if I had to say three summary takeaways here. The first is investing the time in yourself and your team is worth it. It doesn't need to be a lot of time, it needs to be consistent time. That's what creates behavior change, that's what drives the results in the business outcomes. The second is that, and we didn't talk about this very much, but the second is that everybody has unique motivators, talents, preferences, working styles. The better we understand each individual, the better the team will work together. And the amazing thing about AI is it has the perfect memory I never had. So as I learn people's preferences, I can now remember them and use AI to help me call those back. And the third is yes, we should be using AI to do the things that drain our energy, that don't come as easily to us, and that amplify us in a way to make each of our each of the things we do more personalized, et cetera. And we should not use it as a replacement for human connection. We still need to spend the time with each other. Teams only work when people have real trust and connection as humans.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Yeah. I I I love those three things. And trust you, I'm so glad you ended on that because I was thinking as you were talking about the unique skill sets and coming from a big team, everybody's good at something, not everyone's good at everything, and that's the point. And I think teams that trust each other value your strengths, but also value your awareness of your weaknesses in ways that say, hey, we're not gonna ask Michael to do the thing that he doesn't want to do, and we're gonna find someone that complements those skills, as opposed to to maybe holding it against you. I think a lot of times leaders or teammates are expected to be everything, and that's not realistic. And I think, you know, great teams just they understand the collective and individual skills of their group, and I just think that's great. And the other, you know, the other you were sharing stats about trust, and I just I would be remiss to say it's the post I did yesterday. One of the big uh stats that came out of the study that we just did around trust, which is so compelling, is is 59% of the thousand people that we interviewed have lost trust in their company because of the way they approached change, which really means I lost trust in my leader and the people right next to me. And then I extended that to the rest of the organization because my immediate experience was so poor. And and I, you know, I maybe it goes back to the phrase that people don't leave companies, they leave managers, they leave bad teams, and and that's our most immediate experience.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

Yeah. And we're now in an era for where for the first time we have the tools to make everybody a great manager and leader if we invest in in them, in the tools and in ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

So I love that. And I think you all, you and your company are the place to start for that. Uh Jennifer, this has really been great. As you know, we have a closing tradition on this podcast, which is the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And it always tends to work out a little bit. It's kind of fun. I think you've answered some of this maybe, but we're going to go back even farther to your childhood here. So, uh, what did you want to be when you were a kid? And in what ways are you still chasing that feeling?

SPEAKER_01 35:47

Yeah. So I don't actually remember when I was a child what I wanted to be, but I found I found a journal that I wrote, the only journal I've ever written that I wrote when I was, I think, 18 or 19 on my semester abroad. I went abroad to the Amazon um rainforest, I did Amazon rainforest ecology in Brazil, which was incredible. And I read in this journal on one page, I said, I don't know what I want to do with my life. I'll probably either be a teacher or some kind of leadership guru. That's what I wrote when I was like 19 years old.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Spoke it into existence.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

I mean, I don't call myself a guru by any means, but I certainly I both started my career as a teacher and I still teach to this day. And I certainly spend a lot of time thinking about leadership. So I guess I was a little bit prescient.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

I love it. I love the way these questions work out. They work out every time. It's really, really fun. So you'll obviously get a question to leave your question or an opportunity to leave your question with me for the next guest. Uh, and we have one more comment in the chat that I just want to call out because it's from Charles Jordan, who said Michael definitely understands team and trust. Great discussion. Thank you, CJ. CJ happens to be a college teammate of mine. So he that he was not a plant. I didn't tell him to watch this, but at least he was watching. And uh so thanks, Chuck, for uh being a part of the show today. Uh Jennifer, where can people that are listening or watching learn more about you, learn more about your company? How can we follow you?

SPEAKER_01 37:21

So you can follow me. I'm at J Dulski, D-U-L-S-K-I, uh on LinkedIn and most other platforms. Risingteam.com is the company. I'm also I've been told that I need to do more videos. So I am about to start a new Instagram and maybe even a TikTok to follow me. So coming soon.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

But well, this is this can be your kickoff to that new video. So we'll use this as the motivation for you to keep going. We will put all that in the show notes and make sure that people can follow you. Uh, this has been a great discussion. I really do. We could make this a three-hour conversation. Maybe we're not far from each other. Maybe we need to do that on a panel somewhere and get a chance to talk about great teams and how to build great teams in person. Thank you, Jennifer, so much for your time today and for the work that you do. I personally have a lot invested in great teams, and I just I applaud anyone who is leading that charge. Uh, for those of you that tuned in live today, thanks for joining us. Thanks for the comments. And for those of you listening on your favorite podcast platform, please do remember to subscribe. It's the best way to support the show. And we'll see you next week on the Top Boys podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks, Mike.