Great Managers Are Like Sports Coaches (Jennifer Dulski, Founder & CEO - Rising Team‪)‬ Future Work

After working for Yahoo!, Jennifer became co-founder and CEO of The Dealmap. She joined Change.org as COO and president and played a leadership role at Facebook.
Jennifer founded Rising Team, a platform our teams at FlexOS and Dreamplex have loved using to easily run awesome team development sessions.
Jennifer writes about leadership for LinkedIn Influencers and Fortune and is a Stanford Graduate School of Business management lecturer. Her first book, Purposeful, about how we can be a movement starter, became a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.We discussed how managers can lead hybrid and remote teams successfully:
It’s still about good management. While many things are different now, the basics of good management still stand. For Jennifer, these are the four C’s:Clarify: Where are we going, what is the vision? How does your work relate to what we’re trying to accomplish together?Coach: Great managers know each person on the team as an individual. Your preferences, working styles, talents, and how you want to be appreciated are unique.Connect: How do you make the team feel like a team? This is what will make them effective.Consistently: You have to do all these consistently and frequently. Keep sharing the mission, and keep investing in coaching and connecting.Managers are more important than ever but struggle. Jennifer chose the identity and language because she believes great managers are like sports coaches. But managers are struggling the most; they’re the least supported.Companies need to support managers better. Companies also need to invest more in manager’s ability to lead well by:Setting the right high expectationsOffer the support to get thereRequire their action and deliveryFrom her experience in non-profits, Jennifer saw that managers can become truly empowered when companies provide these three elements.
Psychological safety is key in the future of work. Jennifer explains that psychological safety is when people feel safe to express their thoughts, ideas, and concerns without fear of negative consequences. Google’s Project Aristotle found that it directly creates high-performing teams. It has four stages:Inclusion Safety, Learner Safety, Collaborator Safety, And Challenger Safety. People feel safe for what they bring and are included in their preferences and talents.Some quick tips:Be vulnerable. Jennifer shares the importance of the team leader going first.Include all voices. Ask a question and let people write down their thoughts first so there’s room for everyone’s voice, including introverts.Ask good questions. You want to ask questions like ‘Is anything missing?’ or ‘What do you see that could be wrong here?’ Ask questions that invite people to point out.Traditions are critical in distributed teams. As Jennifer is now running a remote team, she highlights the importance of rituals.Practice F.O.W.M. People don’t lie on their deathbed saying, I wish that one more OKR. They’ll think about the people that mattered to them and the things they did that mattered. So forget about FOMO and focus on FOWM.