Jennifer Dulski’s Better Manager Movement Aims To Change The Way We Lead

In today’s Covid-driven remote and hybrid work world, it has become more critical than ever for companies to improve employee engagement. After more than 20 years as a top executive at Change.org, Facebook and Google, Jennifer Dulski is applying lessons learned to her new leadership and team building platform for managers, Rising Team. The company’s signature product, the LeaderKit, is a once-a-month “management skills digital toolkit” that not only teaches managers new skills, but also how to implement what they learn so that they can be better leaders and empower employees.

In March 2021, Rising Team successfully raised a $3 million seed round. This month, they launch a new version of the product based on proprietary assessments and tools Dulski created for use with her own teams during her 25 years of leadership and management experience at the world’s biggest tech companies. Building Rising Team during the pandemic, Dulski launched with a fully remote and distributed team and has employed 63% women and 54% BIPOC staff. The company’s two largest investors are female venture capitalists.

Before founding Rising Team, Dulski was the first woman entrepreneur to sell a company (Dealmap) to Google in 2011. While COO of Change.org, she wrote a bestselling book, Purposeful, about how each of us can be movement starters on the ideas and causes we care about. In addition, Dulski teaches management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“I am passionate about empowering people to reach their full potential, and one of the primary levers to do that is through people’s work,” says Dulski. Each monthly LeaderKit includes training, an interactive exercise to use with the team, and a fully guided teambuilding workshop on the theme, plus access to a support community and weekly leadership tips to continue the practice. “It’s like HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) for managers—a fast and effective way for managers and their teams to build trust and grow together.”

According to Dulski, Rising Team aims to solve two problems with traditional management training and leadership coaching tools:

1)   They don’t provide any way for managers to implement what they’ve learned with their teams. LeaderKit aims to help managers bring concepts to life with the people on their teams.

2)   They either are centered purely around fun or require expensive facilitators. The LeaderKit teambuilding session tool guides managers through everything from ice breakers to ground rules, and built-in team assessments and exercises.

Dulski credits serving as a coxswain on her high school and college rowing teams with her first introduction to leadership. “It was my job to bring out the most in everyone, as individuals and as a team, even when we were physically working up to the limit. I realized the power of understanding and inspiring people based on their unique needs and talents.”

Later, she founded the Breakthrough Pittsburgh program to help motivate students to be the first in their families to go to college. “There, I learned the power of believing in people’s potential and supporting them to reach high expectations,” Dulski says.

Today, she feels grateful to be able to spend the majority of her time working on a cause that she is passionate about. “I feel like Rising Team is the company I’ve been meant to build my whole life,” Dulski says. “If you ask me about my favorite days at work, they are always when I’m leading teambuilding meetings or offsites to help teams build trust, connection, and improve how they work together. Now I get to box that up and give those tools to every other team leader!”

Among the many ways the pandemic has been challenging for people and businesses, one of the major disruptions has been the rapid changes in the workplace. Many companies had to turn on a dime to have their teams work remotely. Now we’re heading to a world where some teams are remote, some are hybrid and others are going fully back to the office. This transition can be hard on employees, and especially on managers. People are also feeling more disconnected from their teammates and their managers. The Rising Team LeaderKit is designed to help teams rebuild trust and improve how they work together – whether remote, hybrid or in the office.

“I firmly believe that each of us has the power not only to find purpose in our work, but also to start movements about those causes that matter to us,” Dulski says. In her book Purposeful, she highlights three things people need to be successful on this journey:

1) Have Courage – the courage to move forward, even with a very small step, which is how all movements start.

2) Build Community – the ability to pull in others around us to form a community that will support us along the way.

3) Demonstrate Commitment – the determination to stick with whatever you are pursuing despite any challenges in your way.

“With these three capabilities, people can successfully pursue any purpose they choose,” Dulski says.