Your career doesn’t have to follow a straight line to have a clear purpose.
Lisa talks with Jennifer Dulski on this week’s episode of How We Future. Jennifer is an entrepreneur, Stanford Business School Professor, and author of Purposeful.
Jennifer’s own career has taken her from teaching and nonprofits to Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Change.org, and her current company, Rising Team. But what all these roles have in common is that Jennifer has been devoting her life to amplifying the potential in other people.
Together, Lisa and Jennifer explore what it means to build a purposeful life and career, how to make an impact even when you feel too small to make a difference, and why sometimes the best career strategy is simply to just add value.
They also get into what Jennifer learned as a college crew coxswain about leading teams, knowing when to push and when to ease up, adapting to different people’s motivations, and being willing to “take one for the team.”
In this episode, we explore:
Finding the thread of purpose across a winding career
Why high expectations + support can help people reach their potential
How teaching can make you a better learner and leader
And because the future of leadership is changing fast, Jennifer shares how she’s experimenting with AI to help people practice difficult conversations. You won’t want to miss this episode.
Purposeful by Jennifer Dulski
Jen’s company, Rising Team
Want to contact us? Email hello@howwefuture.com
Jennifer Dulski: “The people who are the most successful in their careers and in life are the ones who just add value. They just see things that need to be done. They raise their hand. They bring ideas to the table. They help other people. They don’t get too focused on, what’s my job? What am I getting credit for? They just add value. Honestly, when I look at my whole career, that is probably the single most important thing I did.”
[music]
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow, starting today.
How do we infuse purpose into our lives in ways that create positive change? This week on How We Future, I’m talking with Jennifer Dulski, entrepreneur, educator, former president of Change.org, CEO of Rising Team, and author of the bestselling book, Purposeful. Jen and I talk about the three C’s of cultivating purpose, the four H’s of being helpful, and why we all could use a personal leadership coach. Jen also happens to be my former college roommate, so you might hear some fun stories from the way back machine. Let’s get into it with Jennifer Dulski.
Jennifer Dulski, I am so excited to have you on How We Future. This season, we are exploring big themes. One of the things that tees up so beautifully across the extraordinary career you’ve had that we’re going to get into is the theme of purpose and being purposeful. You are, of course, the author of a much doggier book called Purposeful, which really encapsulates so much of your experiences, your life experiences, your career experiences, about how all of us, not just a select few, can really make a difference, can be more intentional about how we are creating meaning in our lives and making a difference for others.
Maybe I just want to start, before we get into principles of the book and, of course, what you’re doing now, just a brief overview of your extraordinary background, which started in nonprofit education and has gone startup, big tech, teaching again. Just talk a little bit about how purpose shows up in your own life and how you’ve thought about that across the extraordinary leadership roles you’ve had.
Jennifer: Thank you. I have a bit of a winding career. It’s true. It looks very different than many people’s who are more straight-line. There is a thread that goes through it all, which for me has been about amplifying the potential in other people. It did start early on in teaching. I actually taught in the summers at a great program called Breakthrough when I was in college. Then I started one of the Breakthrough sites in Pittsburgh when I graduated. My career moved from education into tech as I thought about how do I scale the impact that I’m able to make.
I have spent the past 25 years or so working in a combination of big techs like Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, and startups, a couple of my own, including Rising Team, which I run now, and five years helping to lead Change.org. It’s been a bit of a journey, but to me, there was always that throughline. As it turns out, the other thing I’ve found about myself is that I love learning. I love learning new things. Part of the reason I changed a lot was because it was just really exciting to be at the forefront of what was happening and to learn about each of those different spaces.
Lisa Kay: What a great summary of an extraordinary career, truly. I think as part of that, one of the things that’s really amazed me is how you’re able to interweave different disciplines and frontiers into the meaning-making that you’re doing. It strikes me there’s always been on the edge of where technology is going, but you’ve always kept humans at the heart. That idea of amplifying talent and potential and creating the environments to do it, starting with the classroom. I would say I’ve learned so much from watching you as a leader.
One of the things I’ve noticed, regardless of if you’re in a startup of two, a classroom, or working with tens of thousands of people, when inevitably your startup gets acquired by big tech, which seems to happen again and again, is how you lead with values and how you start with what really matters to your team, to the org, before what the product is, before what the features are. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about where that comes from.
Jennifer: It’s a really good question. I’m not sure where it comes from. I do live my life with a bit of what I think of as backward-looking perspective. There’s a really great set of research and thinking, writing from people who are hospice nurses. They look at what people say in the final days, weeks, moments of their lives. It’s rare. You just don’t hear people at the very end saying things like, “I wish I had another car,” or even, “I wish I was on another board,” some of the things that we obsess about in the day-to-day.
They say things like, “I wish I spent more time with the people that mattered to me,” or, “I wish that I had built closer relationships with friends,” or sometimes things like, “I wish I had done something that left a stronger legacy or made more impact.” For me, the values of how I want to live my life have always stayed at the center. My experience has been that teams have their strongest performance when they also are oriented around values that people believe in and live out every day.
Lisa Kay: That’s so amazing. I will say, full disclosure to our friends that are listening, I got to see that play out literally in college. Maybe this is the reveal moment of us saying just how long we’ve known each other. Jen, I will say I remember meeting you and being like, “I think we had very different high school experiences.” Picking up on the comment you said earlier that you love learning, I’ve never seen a learner quite like you. Because I love you so much, I got over the frustration of watching you drop into our major, crush the course, and then move on to something else. We’re like, “What just happened here?”
Jennifer: Wow. You were quite an impressive college student as well. It’s true, I have known Lisa a long, long time.
Lisa Kay: Thank you for that. Although I think it is worth revealing, since we’re now in the reveal stage, that we were both varsity athletes. We should talk about that in a minute because I know that’s been a huge part of both of our lives. Plus, you’ve just learned, and I’ve learned so much from your experience as a coxswain on the crew team, that I did not stay a varsity college athlete. I ended up leaving that role and bartending. You not only stayed on the varsity crew team, but you volunteered in the community with the Boys and Girls Club and firefighters and so many extraordinary things.
Speaking up on that context switching, but also in seriousness as well, connected to a very powerful conversation we had earlier on How We Future with Coach John Tanner, who is the women’s water polo coach that, among other things, has his players take time from the weight room in the pool to do TED Talks because he believes that when you become a better teacher, you become a better learner, and then you become a better teammate. It strikes me, as you talk about these different contexts that you play in, including now teaching at the Stanford Graduate School of Business while being an entrepreneur starting Rising Team, that those feed each other.
Sometimes we think we have to silo, but I think you are just a wonderful example about how staying in a learning mode makes you a better leader and teacher in that way.
Jennifer: I really do believe this is true for all of us. I think it starts for me with my experience at the Breakthrough Collaborative. I was exposed to it in high school, and I was a teacher in college. Actually, my daughter has spent several years teaching in Breakthrough, so it still exists. Yes, the premise is, first of all, if you take people and set high expectations for them, often higher than they will set for themselves, people are capable of achieving nearly everything. The combination of high expectations and support will do that.
The premise behind Breakthrough and also Rising Team is actually that we learn more by teaching. To be able to teach something to someone else, we have to learn it and integrate it enough into our own belief set and capability set that it makes us more effective. I learned that from Breakthrough and then also have incorporated into Rising Team. The idea is if managers are able to lead something with their own teams, they will actually learn it more themselves by bringing it to life with others.
Lisa Kay: Going back to the experience you had as a coxswain and where we learn leadership and where we learn to motivate teams and doing it in an applied way, I can’t think of a better boot camp than that. For those that are listening that don’t quite know what a coxswain does and how that manifests in supporting a team, can you talk a little bit about that and your experience and what you learned?
Jennifer: Yes. I truly believe that a lot of my best leadership lessons came from being a coxswain on the crew team. A lot of people do not understand this role. There’s a meme out there that they just sit there and say stroke, which would be ridiculous. The truth is, they’re like a mini coach. During practice, your coach is going alongside you in a motorboat, but in an actual race, the coach is not there. You leave from the starting block, and that’s it. It’s the coxswain and the team. My job was to coach everybody to work as hard as they could, push themselves harder than they thought they could, strategize the race, steer, and hopefully help us to win.
I have so many lessons, but I will pull three key ones that I believe are important and translate for any leader. The first is that people are really unique in what motivates them. We actually have tools for this built into Rising Team now. As an example, in a crew race, if people are not doing the right thing in the race at that moment, you will lose. I had to give people feedback in real time in front of each other. We would never do it on purpose in leadership, but I had to. What I found out is that the way they wanted their feedback was really different.
Some people would just want super direct. Like, “Speed it up. You’re too slow. We’re not going to make it.” Other people really like encouragement with their feedback. Like, “Just a little bit faster. You’ve got it. We’re almost there.” If I switch those two people, they would be infuriated because one would feel like I’m talking down to them and the other one would feel like I’m being too mean. That has translated through the whole rest of my career. Not just feedback, but appreciation and working style preferences. The better we know our teammates, the better we can collaborate and work together. That was lesson number one.
Lesson number two: the crew has a pace. Part of my job was to keep the stroke rate of how quickly they were going. There’s a concept called a Power 10, which is like you’re working really hard, but you have to do 10 strokes as hard as you possibly can. It’s the coxswain’s job to decide when and how often to call a Power 10. What I learned pretty quickly is that if you never call a Power 10, you’re less likely to win because the other boat may. If you call too many, your team will just be so exhausted they can’t keep up their regular pace.
That is true, as we know, in work; dramatically true as well. We all have moments where we’re sprinting, and the team is on fire and you have some tight deadline. We just cannot do that to people all the time. We have to pick the peaks and valleys.
The third lesson, and you probably remember this, is what I call take one for the team. When you are the leader, it is important for you to also make yourself vulnerable and a little bit exposed. That builds up that same kind of muscle in the team. In crew, there is a tradition that if you win the race, the team gets to throw the coxswain in the water. I have been in many of the most dirty, disgusting lakes and rivers up and down both west and east coast, which was pretty brutal, but it was worth it because it really bonded me and the team together. There are many ways, less literal, more metaphoric, to take one for the team.
Lisa Kay: Since you’ve won at least one national title that I know, that’s a whole lot of drop-ins in the water.
Jennifer: Yes, that’s true. I will say, because I know you’re from Philadelphia, the Schuylkill is the one body of water they will not let crew teams throw the coxswain in because it was too dirty.
Lisa Kay: Too gross.
Jennifer: That was a long time ago, so maybe it’s been cleaned up since then.
Lisa Kay: I don’t know. We seem to be pretty prideful of our grittiness. We literally named a mascot Gritty for our hockey team. I doubt it, but I can go check when I go back. Just taking a step back, I love that it’s such a visual, concrete image that you’re painting for us about the coxswain and the crew team. I think we can all understand that, even if we’ve never set foot into a rowboat. Again, it speaks to how you think about leadership, if I interpret it at that first point about understanding the unique motivators of individuals that sits within a boat, that sits within a context called competition, that sits within a unique river.
That already is a lot of altitude switching: the micro — where does it sit, how are we feeling that day? The macro — a huge leadership trait. This other around when to know how to flex a Power 10, so much about judgment and discernment right in that moment and no perfect answer, which again, I think leaders find themselves in a lot. The take one onto the team is going back to purpose; like a larger purpose. Yes, you want to win, but as much, you want to bond and you want to build connections for the next race, even if that means being thrown in the water.
I’m so glad that you share that because so often, first of all, when we’re trying to get to know someone, we don’t ask the questions of like, “Tell me more about where some of these ideas might have come from,” but you can really see your values. I want to really talk for a moment about Purposeful, and I know that people have loved this book. I read it when it first came out, of course, and even in preparing for this, even though I’ve known you for so many wonderful years, I’ve just loved seeing the appreciation and adoration for the book. It feels like you named something and you provided guidelines for so many people.
Jen, the other thing that struck me, looking at it, is that you published it in 2018, before COVID. Which blows me away because it really was like the blueprint for how everyday people, not just folks at the top, could make a difference. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what motivated you to write it, and maybe now, with some years later, like reflections on some of the key messages that you hope are still alive and well for all of us that I think are really wanting to do meaningful things in our life.
Jennifer: If we go back to what we talked about at the beginning, which is-- Not to be too morbid, but thinking about deathbed metrics, the thing is all of us have people or causes in our lives that we care a lot about that are really meaningful and important to us. Many people think that they are too small to make a difference. That I can’t, by myself, do anything about those causes that matter to me. The truth is-- and I saw this so clearly in two ways. One is, I grew up essentially in Silicon Valley. I was born in San Francisco. I grew up in the heart of it, and then I have spent most of my career working in tech. I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs create something out of their vision out of nothing.
I was thinking a little bit about how does that happen. Then I spent five years as president of Change.org, and I saw the same things happening. Essentially, regular everyday people creating these campaigns for change in the world. I had like an aha moment, which is that the skills are actually the same. Between what makes a successful startup entrepreneur and what makes a successful movement starter, the overlap is like 90-something percent. I just thought, what if I could break down those skills into more understandable pieces so that more people realize that it was possible? The truth is, it is possible for any of us, as you said.
There are, I think, seven chapters in the book, and there’s a lot of different pieces. I have since then given so many book talks that I have realized it comes down to what I now call the three Cs. This is literally a recipe for anyone who feels like they want to create something out of any idea they have or any cause that matters to them. The first C is what I call little C courage. It’s not big C courage like you have to bungee jump off a giant bridge. It’s little C. Every single one of these movements or companies starts with a single idea. A single idea that’s followed by a single small step.
For instance, a lot of people, the first step is just reaching out to their friends and asking them what they think of the idea. When I started Rising Team, I just wrote an outline. It’s just a Google Doc. I didn’t even show it to anyone. I just wrote it for myself. Little C courage to just take that first step. Sometimes I compare this to the feeling of starting a standing ovation. You probably do this a lot, I would guess. Do you start standing ovations?
Lisa Kay: I try, but I can’t.
Jennifer: You are exactly the prototype of a person who would. I explain that it’s like starting a standing ovation for a show that’s just pretty good. It’s not like I stood up at Hamilton where I know everyone’s going to stand up, but it’s like I stood up at my local community theater, and I don’t know if anyone’s going to stand with me. I might be there for 30 uncomfortable seconds before a second person stands up, and that is what the little C courage is. Like, am I willing to be out there by myself for a minute?
The second C is community, because the truth is that nothing really succeeds until we bring other people in to help us grow it, make it real. That is the part where other people start to join you in that ovation. It might just be one; maybe it’s two. It might not be the whole room at first. How we welcome and give roles to those first few joiners of our movement, or in my case, a company. The first few people you hire, that becomes your community. The more energy and love you put into that community, the more it will grow, and the bigger your cause will become.
Then the third C is commitment, which is-- man, it’s tough to do these things. We can talk about this, but I have started many successful companies. I’ve led really large organizations. I still have really hard days. In fact, for the first time since I started Rising Team six years ago, I actually cried in front of my leadership team a month ago. It is hard. Let’s just be honest with each other that it’s hard. The third C, commitment, is just the ability to keep getting up. Just keep getting up. Or my favorite Peloton coach, Robin Arzon, is my favorite. She says forward is a pace. We don’t have to be running all the time. We just need to keep moving when something pushes us back.
Lisa Kay: Thank you for sharing all of that, including the reality of how hard it can be. It can be lonely. It can be frustrating. You have the best idea. The market’s not responding. It takes a lot of commitment. That’s why I think lessons from athletes are so important. You’re not going to play your best every game, every match, every race, and you have to keep going. In that spirit of commitment, one of my favorite chapters is Don’t Drink the Haterade. That’s so good. That’s so good because the other thing is that even if you’re successful, you’re going to get haters, particularly now, or you’re going to get folks that are not happy about it.
The ability to stay focused, to stay committed amid the noise, that takes a lot of practice as well.
Jennifer: Yes. I believe it is important to, I would say, qualify the hate. The idea is not to let it affect you so much that it drags you down, and at the same time, maybe not to ignore it entirely. Feedback is a real thing. What’s important is to qualify who is it coming from? What is their intent? What can I understand about them? Where is the value I can learn from, if any? Where are the things that just don’t have value, and I should put them to the side and move on? There are a lot of strategies I outline for how to get past that, a couple of them that might be helpful for people.
One is creating a group of allies. Who are the people that you know believe in you and you can go to at any point to bring you back up? In my class, one of the exercises we do is we talk about all the different ways that you might want support, sometimes referred to as the four H’s. I think I invented the fourth H, but I’m sure you’ve heard this. The idea is, when you’re down, do you want a hug? Do you just want support? Do you want to be heard, just have someone deeply listen to you? Do you want to be helped? I actually want your advice and ideas. The fourth one I added is humor. Sometimes you just need a distraction. You want someone to take you to a comedy show or just get your mind off of it.
Each of us have people in our lives who play those different roles, as well as people who might bring us down even further when we’re feeling bad. It’s helpful to be intentional, both at work in terms of who on your team or which of your colleagues can bring you up in different ways, and which ones bring you down and to spend less time with.
Lisa Kay: I love that fourth one. When I’m doing mothering better, I pause when I get a phone call, like, “Okay, do you want to be heard? Do you want help?” My go-to is just help. Then it’s like, “Ah.”
Jennifer: That’s the go-to for most of us. I remember a distinct moment. One of my daughters is very natural, born therapist. When she was eight years old, she was telling me a problem. I was talking to her about ways she could address it. She said to me, “You know, Mom, you could just listen.” I was like, “Argh, my eight-year-old just schooled me in how to parent.” Yes, it’s true.
Lisa Kay: I love that fourth because I do think we could just use more humor in general. Again, these conversations are meant to be as joyful to listen to as hopefully helpful. Building on all this great work that you’ve done and then the extra hard work of writing it up, which is another whole process, I feel like Rising Team just builds on all that. I wonder if you could take some time to talk about why you created it, how it’s evolved, and what makes you so excited about it? The more I learn about it, the more I think we all need Rising Team. We need it. It’s so good.
Jennifer: First of all, I believe it’s the culmination of everything I’ve done in my life and career. Each of us probably has the thing we know we were really meant to do. For me, this is that thing. I built a lot of it out of my own pain as a senior executive inside big companies because I had a lot of support. I had executive coaches of my own, and I was trained by incredible people. Then I didn’t have either the budget or the bandwidth to get that kind of support out to my broader team, especially as they got larger and larger. I both saw it in myself as I was coming up as a manager, how hard it was, and also could see it in the people in my org just how much they were struggling.
Rising Team was meant to build a tool that leaders at any level could use to get high-touch support in a scalable, affordable way. What’s amazing is that the tools have evolved that we are able to use to build this product in a way that just wasn’t possible when you and I were coming up as leaders. Essentially, what it is, we call it an AI leadership personal trainer. It hearkens back to both of our days as athletes. The idea that if you want people to achieve an outcome, a best-in-class outcome like an athlete would, the truth is that they all start from different places.
If I was taking a group of people and I was training them for a triathlon, I’d have some people like you who love to run and some people like me who are okay with running but don’t love it, and other people who love to swim and some who hate to swim. Right now, traditionally what leadership development has done is we put leaders in cohorts, and we teach them all the same thing at the same time. That is helpful to a degree because at least we’re teaching them something, which is better than nothing. I attended many of those things and I got a lot better because of them.
The truth is, though, if we could teach every person based on their own unique starting point and the goals they’re trying to achieve, we would be much better. That’s what personal trainers do. They start with, okay, what’s the outcome we’re trying to reach, and then which muscle group are we going to target today, and let me show you what good looks like. That’s what Rising Team does. Our trainer does an intake with each manager or even IC, understands their goals, where they’re starting from, where their challenges are. It takes the context of each company and customizes to what are their values and frameworks they use, and then it combines things that we could never do before.
AI coaching, where it really gets to know you, asks the smart questions that a human coach might ask. It gets you to find your own answers and way forward. It does voice-to-voice role-play, like I do in my class, but at scale, where it acts as another person. It practices with you on hard conversations and then rates you, just like I do in class. Finally, it actually incorporates real team building. The early stages of Rising Team, we built a bunch of these things we call kits, which are basically team-building sessions around different topics that can be done by managers themselves without an outside facilitator, and already now integrates all of those sessions and then learns about your team.
It is not only your personal trainer and coach, but it’s one that deeply, intimately knows your team and can give you custom advice about each person. We could just never do that before. It’s incredible how quickly people learn, grow, apply behaviors, and drive real business impact with those kind of tools.
Lisa Kay: It’s extraordinary to hear about the kind of impact you can have for less money in less time. In part, it’s reframing our relationship with the technology. You and I are situated in Silicon Valley, so I think we’re particularly steeped in the AI conversation. I feel like if I had my AI bingo card, every hour there’s something posted about, well, humans and technology need to collaborate. We need to work together. We need to work with, not for. I have yet to see any real examples of that, truly, that are about unleashing human potential, as opposed to another layer that actually ends up being frustrating or not really connected.
What you have shared and what you’re doing just really feels to be delivering on that promise on the upside of what this technology can do for us.
Jennifer: You make a really good point here, too, because there is so much changing. I have lived through, and so have you, many tech evolution eras. I got into the internet in the dawning ages of the internet, which felt like, oh my God, it’s going to change everything. Then we went through messaging and mobile and streaming and all these things that we thought would be world-changing. They maybe were, just not in the way that AI is. The change we’re in the midst of now is like nothing we’ve ever seen. That’s because, first of all, it is spread out to everyone so quickly. If you think about it, when we first got the internet, it took so many years for people to actually get internet access.
Then even smartphones were faster than that, but still took a while. Now everyone with a smartphone, which is almost everyone, has access to AI overnight. The point you make about it changing every day is 100% true. This is like 10x faster than Moore’s law, the rate that it changes. It’s overwhelming and scary. It’s amazing and fun and overwhelming and scary. I see it because they talk to Arti about it. They are overwhelmed with the pace of change and leading through that change, and how to manage their teams around it. The great thing is if we use it well, it can actually help solve the problems it’s creating, too.
To your point, everyone talks about humans in the loop, but really it’s just a lot of humans working with AI, and teaching it and judging it and prompting and so forth. What we haven’t figured out is how to use AI to get humans working better together, and that’s the piece that Rising Team is trying to solve.
Lisa Kay: I really think you’re on the forefront of that. When you talk about Arti, which is the personal leadership tool, what’s interesting is that you get the individual benefit, but also you get to learn from what’s happening in the culture. My colleague, Rae Ringel, who has been on the show, has this great phrase. When culture breaks down, she talks about that there’s usually an audio-video gap where it’s like the audio is like, “We’re creating safe places,” and the video is like, “Did you see what just happened in that meeting?”
We believe our own exhaust about the beautiful values that we put on the wall, but if you actually watch the behaviors of what people do, it’s atrocious, or there’s this huge gap, which of course breaks down trust. I feel like you’re really able to get real data at the meta level to help people really turn their organizations into learning organizations and into human potential organizations, particularly around this thing that I’d love for you to talk about around change.
One theme that’s also come up a lot in our conversations is how poor we are at change management. Real change management, not like the fatty thing that we called some leadership transition a while ago, but what is it like to wake up and feel like the day has more new things coming at you than your nervous system and that you have been just practiced at handling? I feel like you’re really doing work to help us understand how to get support in that in a new way.
Jennifer: It’s so interesting. If you think about historically how organizations have listened to their employees, the traditional version of doing that has been engagement surveys. There are many companies that offer that tool, and virtually every large company runs engagement surveys, sometimes once a year, a lot of times once a year. Sometimes pulse questions every few weeks to a few people. That has been sort of the listening arm, and I have experienced it in my role as an executive. You take this survey. It takes a couple months to get the results back. You get the results back. By that point, you’re not sure if anything is relevant anymore, and you don’t know how to move anything.
You see these numbers that dropped, and it’s like, “Oh my God, I need a tiger team to do this.” By the time you put the tiger team together, what you need to work on has changed. It’s disastrous. That has totally changed now, completely 100%. When people turn on Arti and individual leaders inside the company, or again, individuals, start doing their intake, they start saying where they’re struggling and so forth, all of a sudden, you get a totally real-time picture of everything going on in your organization. You can see the percentage of people who are dealing with navigating change, the people who are still struggling giving feedback to their team.
The ones who are frustrated because leadership messaging is not clear enough and they don’t know how to translate it. All the trends are there, and they’re there in real time. Then you know that every single person who reported a challenge is getting support on that exact challenge. You can see the results coming in. Like, 9 out of 10, that was awesome. I just saw one come in yesterday. Let’s schedule the next one. This is fun. When’s the last time someone was talking about a challenging performance conversation and said, “I want to do more of that. This is fun.”
Yes, it’s completely turned upside down. That is so great both for the individuals inside companies who can get support and for the people in the leadership roles whose responsibility is to bring that change across. To your audio and video thing, the real problem is the audio, it really happens top-down. We know even top-down, the research says you have to repeat it like seven times or something for anyone to get it. If that’s true at every layer, you know it’s getting lost. It just has to get lost. Whereas if you build it into everyone’s coach, the exact language-- I saw one of our customers the other day. They have a pillar around trust and someone--
Again, anything I’m talking about here is anonymized. I don’t want to suggest we’re looking at anyone’s coaching conversations in any way. All of it’s confidential, but we see the trends that come through. Arti will say things like, “Yes,” because when we say trust, we mean X, Y, Z, because they took it from the company’s language. We can be sure that those messages are filtering down in the way we want. It’s like the first time ever we’ve been able to really do change management at the ground level.
Lisa Kay: I just think you’re at the beginning of the cascading. Having this summer emceed a couple of conferences for HR leaders that are really perplexed about not only how their role is changing, but the expectation of how they’re supposed to help their business partners change. It is very complex. I think it is a moment to reimagine what great looks like, and then to figure out what the systems behind it can support. If you’re someone that is like, “You know what great looks like? Everyone in my organization is feeling really empowered and supported to do their best work and feel awesome about it.”
That’s a pretty good combination as opposed to the headlines we often see now. It’s been around for a while, like quiet quitting, burnout, all the stuff that are lagging indicators of poor behavior months earlier. I just feel like it could be transformational. As you said, if you think about all the time it takes to do a performance review, you have to have the conversations, then you write it up, then you have the meeting, da da da. Who doesn’t want those hours back, and, by the way, are usually delivered poorly? I just think it is really exciting opportunity for people to unleash potential. I’ve said that a few times. I think that’s at the heart of what gets you and I up every day, and I’m just really excited.
Jennifer: You and I both teach at Stanford, which is a fun thing to have in common. I’ve seen dramatic change in the past five years. I think I’m now six years into teaching there. When I first started, there was no AI. Then the first couple of years, it was, well, you can decide as an instructor, as a faculty, whether you allow AI. This is at least in the business school. Then two years ago, it was, “Nope, you can’t decide. You have to allow AI for everything except in-class exams.” Now we’re at the point of how do we really leverage AI to make our instruction better? I’ve been really thinking about how to bring that in a way that can be meaningful. I have two examples.
As I mentioned, my class is all role-play based. It’s actually mortifying, this class. We write cases based on CEOs. The most challenging situations they’ve faced. The CEO whom the case is about comes to class as a guest, and the students have to role-play as if they were that person, in front of that person, and in front of their whole peers, what they would do, all their peers. I am glad I never had to take it, actually, because I think it would have been really frightening. I have done some A-B testing. I try having them prepare for the role plays in advance, and I break them up into three groups.
One group that is told to practice just on their own, which is, I think, how most students have been doing it over the years. A second group is told to practice with a friend, so find someone from class and practice the role-play with them ahead of time. A third group is told to practice with AI. Then they come in, and we do the role-plays, and then they talk about how they felt with their version of practice. Then a different day, they get assigned to a different group, so they all get to try all three.
It’s been fascinating. I would say both the friend group and the AI group are better than the practicing-yourself group. In some ways, the practice with a friend has still been stronger than practice with AI, although it depends how well they use the AI and, honestly, which models they choose, because I don’t dictate. I let them choose whatever they want. The thing that’s been the most helpful about both AI and the practice with a friend has been trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. That’s the interesting thing. It’s like play the other part of the role-play has also been really helpful.
The version of the role-play we built into Arti, you can also pause it in the middle and guide it. You can say, “Actually, be more defensive,” or, “Be nicer to me,” or you can pause and get coaching in the middle, which is a helpful thing that AI can do just like a friend. That’s one of the things I’ve been testing in class.
Lisa Kay: Oh my gosh. I mean, you heard How We Future. This is definitely going to be a research paper that future business school students are going to read about because I think you’re just on the cutting edge of how we learn. Earlier in this series, we had Professor Christopher Adkins talk about empathy and perspective-taking. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s this social component with a friend that just may be slightly different than in AI. It’s just really exciting to see what’s possible.
I’ve got one more question about this, and then we’re going to end with something we’ve never done before in How We Future, which is our acronym round. I’ve been so excited to play the acronym round and just let everyone know how powerful acronyms can be. I would love to, again, combine a couple worlds of yours, Jen, and ask you to comment about Rising Team in education. I know you’re also bringing it to educators and school systems in just early days, but I wonder if you could share any of that because I’m sure some parents are like, wait a minute. I need some Arti. I need some coaching.
Jennifer: That’s probably true. If you go back to purpose and my personal purpose of amplifying the potential of others, it’s funny because the statement you made earlier was actually the exact vision statement for Rising Team. I don’t know if you know that you did it by accident, but our vision has been to help everyone in the workforce feel deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. Part of the way we do that is we serve big companies at scale in a way they have never been able to do before. As we said, it’s very affordable for that. Like 1% of the cost of traditional coaching and facilitators.
At the same time, it’s still probably more expensive than what schools and nonprofits would do. We are able, by working with big companies, to subsidize the fees. Not entirely. They still pay, but much lower fees for schools and nonprofits. We launched something last year called Rising Team for Schools. We’re now in a large number of school-- maybe a couple of universities, but this is targeted to K-12 schools. They’re using it in a very similar way. They give faculty and administrators and staff the trainer. They do the team-building sessions together, and they practice their hard conversations. It’s just that what they do and talk about is different.
People will literally get in there and practice their parent-teacher conferences, or coaches will get in and say, “How do I deal with the tough parent on the sideline?” I know you talked about parents needing this, but school leaders and teachers need it just as much. The amazing thing about the AI today is it can adapt. One day it can be doing a parent-teacher conference, and then the next day it works with someone at the WHO who needs to talk to their counterpart in some different country, and the next day it helps someone with a performance review. Really incredible.
Lisa Kay: I often say the time to practice a high-stakes conversation is not during the high-stakes conversation. That’s not the moment. I think this idea that we could break down the stigma we have, that we should know how to do this, that we should be better at this, but actually just get better at it. Just do it. It’s just really exciting that that’s a big thread of what you’re doing. I thank you for that. Teachers listening, I want to encourage you to check out Rising Team for Schools.
Okay, Jen, it’s our time. It’s our time to turn to our acronym round for those that are new to acronyms and how they could be so powerful. Jen, for a long time in your family history, has had some ways of communicating with each other that were just really efficient that you have now brought into work and life. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the origins of leading by acronym?
Jennifer: It’s true. Growing up, we had a list of what were called the Huret family acronyms, which is my maiden name. They sat on the refrigerator and we added to them over time. For those of you who are not Gen X, this is before texting. All of texting is acronyms now, but this is before that.
Lisa Kay: LOL.
Jennifer: Although LOL is not cool anymore.
Lisa Kay: I agree with that. I agree.
Jennifer: You have to say ha ha. An example might be-- we used to say FHB if we were having people over for dinner and then more people came than expected. We would say FHB, which stands for family hold back, so that we wouldn’t eat too much and there’d be enough food for the guests. That’s an example of a Huret family acronym. The list kept growing. When we went to college, I developed a bunch with my friends, including our favorite, IMS, which stands for In My Sweats. If you would want someone to go out with you at night somewhere and they were already in for the night, they would say IMS, which again, not sure that stands up over time since people just go out in their sweats.
I have developed a series of acronyms. I use a lot in my class too to help people remember key frameworks. For instance, we use one in class. It’s not as short and handy, but there’s one we call EMFOSA, which is about how to give good feedback. It stands for expectations, measurement, feedback, obstacles, support, alignment. You would never, without the acronym, be able to really remember those, but if you have that in your head and as you’re drafting something or speaking to someone, you can go, “Okay, I did measurement. Now I’m moving on to feedback.” The acronyms really help.
On my last day of class though, I use a series of acronyms about life and work to share my lessons. I’m happy to share any of those if you need to.
Lisa Kay: Oh, yes. No, I want to ask you about a few of those for sure, but I just have to add a few of the Huret classics that have now become Kay Solomon classics because they’re just so helpful. FHB for sure. UCOC is honestly one of my favorite acronyms of all time. Do you want to share what it stands for?
Jennifer: UCOC stands for unclear on the concept. We shortened it a little bit, but yes, when someone is-- it’s usually meant in joking form. You say someone is UCOC when they’re really not getting what you’re trying to explain to them.
Lisa Kay: No, we’ve adapted it where we’ll be in a situation that we thought was like a certain kind of party, and it’s like a whole other thing, and we’ll just look at each other and be like UCOC. We don’t know what is happening right now. I mean, SYU is another--
Jennifer: SYU is the most basic. It’s just since you’re up. You can say that whenever you want someone to get you something if they’re up, SYU.
Lisa Kay: I had a chance to look through your deck, which was so fantastic. I am going to ask you to talk about DMSU because I just think that is fantastic.
Jennifer: Yes. This is one that actually is relatively recent, probably 5 to 10 years old on the list. This is for use in situations where something happens. For instance, the day we invented DMSU, I was working on a big customer sale for Rising Team. It was just about to close, and the customer sent me an email, and he wrote, “Do you have 5 minutes to chat?” Instantly, in my head, I thought, “Oh my God, this deal is not going through.” If he just wanted to tell me something, he would have just emailed me. If he wants to chat, something must be wrong. I was just spinning like crazy in my head about it.
Then I talked to a friend, and they told me their mother-in-law is a psychiatrist. When they’re doing this, she says, “Let’s not make things up.” I, at that moment, invented DMSU, Don’t Make Shit Up. I use it all the time now. Anytime I start to spin, I just say DMSU because the truth is it might be bad. Maybe half the time it is bad, but half the time it’s not. I waste all my spinning cycles ahead of finding out what’s really happening. Now I just wait. The truth is it never helped me to get upset in advance anyway. I can get upset at the time if it turns out to be bad.
In this particular situation, it wasn’t. It took me two weeks to get him on the phone. He said, “Oh yes, there’s just one more person’s approval we need.” It was nothing.
Lisa Kay: I love that. DMS, that’s definitely going to be the rotation. Then, final one — there’s many more — but this is something I try to teach my students when they’re like, “I don’t really know how to show up in a new situation,” or, “I’m not qualified for a role.” I just try to get them to think about how they could be useful or be creative. JAV is the one that I just love so much. Talk a little bit about that one.
Jennifer: JAV stands for Just Add Value. At the end of the day — and this is what I tell my students too, even though they’re further along in their career than yours are — all the people who are the most successful in their careers and in life are the ones who just add value. They just see things that need to be done. They raise their hand. They bring ideas to the table. They help other people. They don’t get too focused on, “What’s my job? What am I getting credit for?” They just add value. Honestly, when I look at my whole career, that is probably the single most important thing I did. It looked different at every stage and every way, but it just was about how do I add value to the organization?
My dad, when I was little, he used to make us watch the interviews after sports events because he wanted us to see what the athletes said when they were interviewed. He basically taught us to look out for a type of response that said something like, “I’m just here to help the ball club.” That’s what my dad used to say. They don’t really say it literally that way, but that is just add value. It’s not about me. It’s about the team. It’s about the organization. As it turns out, when that is your approach, that ends up having the byproduct of making you personally more successful too.
Lisa Kay: I just love that. I mean, just add value. There’s always value to be added. Put your ego, put your nervousness, just figure it out. Be resourceful, just add value, and then you’ll get invited back, and that is everything. Then you can learn the next thing. I just love that.
Jen, I’m so appreciative of you and this time and all that you’re doing and continuing to persevere in the world with your courage, with the way you build community, with your commitment. With this book, with Rising Team, with being a treasured friend in my life, I love that. I maybe want to end with reading a passage of one of the many things that’s dog-eared in the book. See, I’m not making you read. I’m going to read it and just embarrass you.
This is towards the end of the book where you say, “Understanding that change is a process comprising multiple steps and stages that bring you from an ideal vision of a desired future to a sometimes imperfect present, full of ever-changing obstacles, requires a willingness to see setbacks and failures as potentially transformative moments. Persevering and remaining hopeful in the face of obstacles and finding creative ways to use criticism to advance your cause are crucial skills that all movement starters and leaders can master. When you’re on the dark side of the mountain, they will help you keep climbing.”
Thank you for all that you do to help all of us keep climbing towards something better.
Jennifer: Thank you. I love listening and watching your show and getting to learn from your wisdom.
Lisa Kay: I loved my conversation with Jen, especially her three C’s — courage, community, and commitment — and why starting a standing ovation may be a powerful lever for turning an idea into lasting action. Sometimes change in the world starts with one small step, one idea, or one person willing to go first. So here’s something to try this week. What’s one small step you could take towards something that matters to you? If you enjoyed this episode, leave a comment and tell us what that step is, and share this episode with someone who might need a little encouragement to take theirs. Thanks for listening to How We Future. See you next time.
[00:53:59] [END OF AUDIO]
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