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Leaders at All Levels: How a Leader at Fidelity Supercharged Productivity
In this video interview, Lauren Dreyer explains how she increased her team’s productivity by 60% — by letting go of control and embracing shared decision-making.
When a top performer confided that she was experiencing an intolerable level of burnout and was job hunting, it was a wake-up call about team leadership for Lauren Dreyer. The 20-year veteran of Fidelity Investments had had no idea that burnout was an issue for anyone on her team. And only later did Dreyer realize that in asking the employee how she could improve the situation, she was “giving her one more task to figure out” instead of developing her talent.
The conversation sparked a painful insight for Dreyer, who leads a channel and strategy transformation team in Fidelity’s tax-exempt participant experience organization: “Everything that I learned about being a successful leader was wrong.” In this episode of Leaders at All Levels, Dreyer reveals how she went from questioning her own leadership style to boosting her team’s productivity by 60% and eliminating chronic team burnout. Her method? Shifting to distributed leadership, where team members share decision-making and accountability for results, which are achieved through quick sprints.
In this video interview, Dreyer explains how she and her team made this dramatic shift happen.
Dreyer’s Playbook: Borrow These Strategies
- Iterate your way to success. Teaching your team to own decisions takes time. It also feels uncomfortable for people who are accustomed to traditional top-down dynamics, but it’s a crucial, often-skipped step in building real autonomy.
- Have employees create work plans. They will surprise you with what they bring to the table.
- Make “no” an acceptable answer. Help your team members get comfortable with pushing back and having tough discussions about capacity.
- Eliminate territorial thinking. Help your team reorient around shared goals rather than individual wins.
The shift wasn’t easy, and it’s one that Dreyer and her team are still refining. But by the end of the first year, staff members had flipped from spending 80% of their time on overhead and planning to spending 80% on actual execution. Today, Dreyer’s employees report greater satisfaction, and so does she, noting, “I feel much more like a mentor supporting their career growth than I do a manager.”
Listen as hosts Kate W. Isaacs and Michele Zanini dig into the practical details of how Dreyer accomplished this transition to a distributed leadership style, and uncover insights that other leaders can immediately apply.
