Jennifer Dulski has loved building businesses from scratch since she started her first nonprofit right out of college. Thirty years later, she's worked for some of the biggest names in tech, and has sought ways to ensure her ideas highlight the benefits of feeling valued.
"[My first nonprofit] was an academic enrichment program to help motivated middle school kids become first gen college graduates, and I also taught high school for four years," Dulski says. "I loved teaching, I loved being able to create a positive impact. If people feel valued and motivated and connected to each other, then everything works."
That's a lesson she was determined to prove outside of the classroom, too: Dulski, who now lives in Palo Alto with her husband, wanted to "create impact on a larger scale," so she transitioned out of education and into the tech industry. After stints at Yahoo, Google and Facebook (now Meta), and launching several startups of her own, she created leadership development and employee engagement platform, Rising Team, in 2020.
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Managers at all levels can use the platform's various tool kits to improve their skills, be it running more effective meetings, increasing connection with their teams or learning leadership skills. The software offers interactive AI experiences that walk leaders through each step of an effective team experience, then will measure the success of each interaction so managers know how they need to improve. Members also have access to employee engagement surveys to receive feedback from their teams directly.
"For me, the through line has been people and teams," says Dulski, who recently spoke with EBN about why managers need access to higher-level tools and how she's learned from her own mistakes.
Why was building a tool for managers that helps create strong teams so important to you?
Companies with highly engaged employees perform better, and this is what ultimately led me to build Rising Team. I'm essentially building the product I wish I had as a leader of teams in my career. I had executive coaches and I was lucky to have been trained by some amazing people, but I still felt like no matter what I learned, that information was still just in my head. And those kinds of coaches and fancy training are usually reserved for leaders at the most senior level, so I only got them when I was VP and above. I wanted to build something that I could scale to the managers that worked on my teams.
How has hybrid and remote work escalated the need for better communication and connection between managers and their people?
We now live in a workplace where 75% of all jobs are hybrid. We have return-to-office mandates that are on-again, off-again; we have an economy that's challenged with layoffs, and managers have to handle way more. We have Gen Z entering the workforce with much higher expectations of feeling connection and belonging in the workplace. And now with AI coming in, we have a more pressured, more overwhelmed workforce than we've ever had before.
That means they need these tools to help them more than ever. The core of making that successful is the combination of deep human connection, plus the AI tools we now have available to us to make us faster and more efficient. But it doesn't work without the human part.
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What have you learned from your past mistakes that guides your philosophy for Rising Team today?
There are two core core tenants to how I lead that are tied to what I believe are also the biggest mistakes that managers make, and probably mistakes I made early in my career. The first is that managers often think, "Everybody's just like me." So I know how I like to receive feedback and how I like to be appreciated and what motivates me and matters to me. But the truth is, we are all unique individuals. And the key to being a great leader and manager is understanding each person and what makes them tick and how they're unique.
I once had a woman on my team who came to me and said, "Hey, if I ever do a good job, just pay me more money. I would prefer a spot bonus over public recognition — that stuff doesn't matter to me." And I was totally caught off guard by that, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized if she hadn't told me I never would have known, and I would have done exactly the wrong thing for her.
At that moment, I created a tool I called "the motivators pie chart." It's basically an empty circle and [team members] share the things that motivate them and weight them and color code them red, yellow or green based on how satisfied they are with those motivators right now. I have used it for 20-some years with my teams and I also use it for myself to think about why something will matter to me more than others. It is an amazing way to make sure you are valuing and retaining your team — not just the motivators chart, but all the ways that we can find out about their unique individuality — and this is the core of how we built Rising Team.
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The second big mistake managers make is saying they don't have time to focus on their team. But when they don't take time aside to spend with and understand their team, that's what makes the team not feel valued. Early in my career I was like that too, and later on I realized that I have to do things like team building sessions. You cannot create a team and make people feel important and valued and therefore engaged in their work without taking time to be intentional about how you do it.
