In this episode, we explore how great leaders balance creating culture, building relationships, and executing work. The discussion highlights the importance of trust, psychological safety, and clear communication—showing how making clear requests empowers teams and prevents micromanagement.
Kristi Dooley is an accomplished organizational development consultant and executive coach specializing in building high-performing organizations and effective leadership teams. With over two decades of experience in the human resources field, she partners with executives to design and implement tailored strategies that drive communication, alignment, and performance. As the owner of True Purpose Leadership, Kristi provides consulting in organizational assessment, change management, leadership development, and executive coaching. Her results-oriented approach empowers leaders to navigate complexity, foster growth, and achieve lasting organizational transformation.
Sean Riley: Hi, and welcome to unPACKed with PMMI. In this episode, we explore how great leaders balance creating culture, building relationships, and executing work. The discussion highlights the importance of trust, psychological safety, and clear communication—showing how making clear requests empowers teams and prevents micromanagement.
So, with all the fancy introductions out of the way, welcome to the podcast, Kristi.
Kristi Dooley: Thank you so much, Sean. It's good to be here.
Sean Riley: The pleasure is all ours. You gave a presentation for the Young Professionals, and it was wonderful, about leadership. And I wanted to hit on some of the topics for our podcast, and one that really stuck out is the three most important things that we get paid to do as leaders, and how does that conversation play into each of them?
Kristi Dooley: It's something that I bring up in my executive coaching work all the time, and it's just the thought that as leaders, we're getting paid to do three things: create culture, develop relationships, and execute the work. For most of us, the one thing we tend to emphasize the most is executing the work. So, one of the things that I talked about with the Young Professionals group is reframing our minds to acknowledge that those are like the three legs of a stool. If we're over-emphasizing executing the work to the detriment of the other two, we're going to have a wobbly stool, and we’re not going to get the best from our teams. As leaders, no matter where we are in our career—early on, or very senior, having been in the role a long time—we need to be super cognizant of what we’re doing to build relationships and interact with others in ways that create engagement and productivity, and what we’re doing to build the team so that we’re getting the best from people.
Sean Riley: Yeah, it feels like that would be a very American thing; the work is the most important.
Kristi Dooley: 100%. We are hired into our jobs for our technical expertise. We got out of school, we graduated with our engineering degree, whatever the thing is. And so, that gets us in the door, but it's our ability to relate to people and collaborate and do the other two that enables us to move up in organizations. It’s a different skill set now to be successful—we’re not so much the doers anymore, but getting work done through other people.
Sean Riley: One phrase that you said that really stood out was, “Leaders bring the weather.” How does a leader's presence influence team performance when you're leading people who, at one point, were your peers and now you're "above them"?
Kristi Dooley: Yeah, such a great question. And I love that quote too, “Leaders bring the weather.” You’ve probably worked with and for people who were very reactive—you knew when they were stressed out or they brought tension with them. But those sorts of reactive ways of showing up, what did they do to the people around us?
Sean Riley: Pins and needles.
Kristi Dooley: Yeah. And so people are worried about taking a risk, or “I don’t want to screw up,” and so this is really at the core—it’s about creating psychological safety. It doesn’t matter whether we’re managing people who were previously our peers or people who are older than us; without having a sense of safety within the team, people aren’t willing to be vulnerable, make mistakes, or admit they don’t know something. The more psychological safety I can create, the more I can really connect with people, the more trust we have in one another, and that’s when teams really thrive.
Sean Riley: It’s interesting, it seems very simple when you explain it, but it is a hard thing to remember every day because we're humans, and that's just the way it goes.
Kristi Dooley: For sure. And guess what? We're not going to be perfect at it, and I don't think any of us are. So, then what happens when we're not? Then it's about being the bigger person and being able to say to people, “Wow, I really lost it back there, and that is not how I want to be showing up. I'm really sorry, and I'm working on that.”
Sean Riley: And I would think that some leaders would see that as a weakness.
Kristi Dooley: It's the whole vulnerability argument, right? People often—particularly in our culture, in the U.S.—see or have seen in the past vulnerability as a weakness, and actually, it enables us to connect more deeply with other people.
Sean Riley: We're all working on it.
Kristi Dooley: We're all a work in progress for sure.
Sean Riley: Yeah. Okay. Touching on a work in progress, you said that there are five core human needs out there, and you referenced how understanding them can help leaders reduce drama, which we all want. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Kristi Dooley: The thought is that we have five basic needs: approval, control, security or safety, the desire for uniqueness or specialness, and belonging. Once I can have awareness about what might be driving you, what might be a threat for you—once I can hypothesize that as best I can or figure it out—then I have a better ability to adapt how I'm going to address the issue. So, let's just say, for example, I make a management decision that I want to reorganize some of the work that we're doing in the team, so I'm going to actually move or transfer parts of your work portfolio to someone else on the team. If I can tell that for you, it’s tapping into your threat for control, then I might approach the situation with you differently. So, let's have a conversation about what the things are that you'd like to be doing that we can add in—I want to make sure you know that you're valued here and your job is not going anywhere.
Sean Riley: Clearly, feedback and structured feedback to people under you plays a really important role. How do you toe that line between empowering the person and them feeling like you're micromanaging them? Like you said, you're taking work off their plate, but then they go, “No, I'm losing my job.”
Kristi Dooley: That's probably one of the biggest things people struggle with when they're mastering the skill of delegation, because they're like, “I want to delegate work, but I don't want to micromanage anybody.”
Sean Riley: No.
Kristi Dooley: The more clarity that we can create as leaders about what's expected, the more they're able to go off and do their thing. As a manager, I don't have to worry so much that I'm not going to get the end product that I want because I've been clear at the outset about defining what the desired end product actually is. In the workshop with the Young Professionals, we talked about how to make a strong request. As a leader, when I'm really clear up front with what work I'm requesting that someone do—I'm clear about it, I've made clear the conditions of satisfaction, what's the successful end product look like, I'm specific about the timeframe (“I need it Tuesday by 5:00”), here's the context for it, here's what's important about this—then we've got clarity about the task up front.
And then, up front, I can be clear about what would be a good check-in point for you and me to touch base about it. So, I'm not constantly emailing you and asking, “Did you get the thing done?” No, we've laid out an agreement—a commitment up front—and we're going to check in about five days from now just to see how it's going, if you have any questions, or need anything from me. If you're not getting what you need, then it's about giving clear, very structured feedback about it. Accountability is the antidote to micromanagement—so it's clarity and accountability. But feedback's so important so that people know where they stand, they know if I've gotten off course, let's get back on track. I don't have to be guessing, “Did I do it right? Did I give her what she needed?”
Sean Riley: Very interesting. I just wanted to wrap up and put a button on this great talk. You talked about four powerful tools: shifting drama, building trust, giving effective feedback, and making clear requests. So, if you had to pick one, which of those do you find most essential on a day-to-day basis, and how have you seen it make the biggest difference?
Kristi Dooley: If I get one pick, I'd probably make clear requests, because so many of my clients in all different sorts of industries and organizations really struggle with delegation. They struggle with it because they don't want to be that annoying micromanager that they themselves experienced earlier in their career. And so, as a result, they lob things out there to people, but they're not super clear about what they really want, and then they get back something that doesn't meet the need, and it sets this whole awkward cycle. Or people you used to be buddies with and go out to happy hour with—it just creates this whole weird awkwardness because you never were clear in the first place, and you didn't set them up for success. So, if I had to pick one, making really clear requests, setting clear expectations and boundaries, would probably be the one I'd go with.
Sean Riley: This was absolutely great. I learned a lot, and I'm sure our listeners are going to learn a lot, so I appreciate you taking the time to come on here with us, Kristi.
Kristi Dooley: Absolutely, happy to do it.
