Sena
00:00:04 — Some leaders wait for calm before they lead. Others learn to find calm in the storm. In today's world, listeners, disruption isn't a surprise. It's the setting. Markets shift overnight, teams are global and remote, and the next big innovation is already rewriting your playbook. But what separates leaders who merely survive chaos from those who use it to transform their teams and cultures? Welcome back listeners to this episode of the Bizblend podcast.
00:00:43 — I am your host Sana and this is the space where business meets human. Now, today's conversation is with someone who has mastered the art of leading through uncertainty. Daria Rudnik, team architect, executive coach and author of Clicking, a team building strategy for overloaded leaders.
00:01:04 — Now let me share a bit about Daria with you. She has helped companies across six continents turn pressure into purpose and disruption into direction. So we are going to explore how to build teams that think for themselves, adapt fast, and even drive change when everything around them is changing faster than ever it could.
00:01:31 — So let's get into it. And Darya, welcome to the show. And it's really an honor to have you here with us.
Daria Rudnik
00:01:37 — Thank you, Sona. Thank you. It's an honor to be here. And it's a great pleasure. Thank you.
Sena
00:01:42 — Super, super. That is so, so relevant right now. And it's very natural sometimes to be quite overwhelmed. Right now, we are seeing a lot of changes around us technologically, and in terms of how people behave, how people interact. Now, when it comes to leaders, like most leaders, they see chaos as a threat, something which has to be controlled or avoided.
00:02:11 — And you talk about leading through chaos. So we all are very curious to know, Daria, what does it look like in practice and how do you help leaders reframe disruption as a creative force instead of a destructive one?
Daria Rudnik
00:02:29 — Well, that is a very good question, Sona. And I like that you said control, and I think that's the key for most problems. Well, we used to have times when business and entrepreneurship looked like a heroic leader who saved the world or saved the company or who led through uncertainty and who kind of helped the whole organization survive.
00:02:55 — And that era is gone. I mean, the era of heroic leadership is gone. And now it is time for teams because no single individual, no single leader can control everything that's going on right now in the world. But what can help instead is having teams that support vision, that know what they're going to do, that can collaborate together, create, like collaboratively make decisions.
00:03:25 — And that makes them strong and resilient towards the uncertainties of the world. And I can give you an example. I mean, I just want to show an example of a team. That was an organization that was going through a major financial crisis. I mean, they were really, really in a bad situation. And they really needed to save lots of money and to cut costs. I mean, what would traditional organization do?
00:03:51 — In traditional organization, they would say, okay, we need to cut costs here, here, here and there. And those people need to be let go. This like processes, we're removing them, we don't need them anymore. Leaders will make those decisions. What happened in in this organization where they had really strong culture of teamwork and collaboration is that CEO actually came to one of the units that was the contact center unit.
00:04:21 — He came to the contact center department. He said, Hey, we're going through hard times and we need to save like millions of dollars. I'm like every minute that you talk to customer costs us lots of money. I know how you value human connections with our customers. And. I know how our customers value this connection. So I'm not going to tell you how you're going to handle those conversations.
00:04:49 — What I'm asking you is try to keep that connection, human connection, and if you can, make those conversations shorter, because that will save our money, that will help us survive. And since they had this culture of teamwork and collaboration, and they all shared the vision, and they all shared the same values of helping the customers, Well, they did reduce the time of conversations, but not every conversation was shorter.
00:05:22 — Some conversations were still long when clients needed that, but some were drastically shorter. And overall, the company had saved tens of millions of dollars because of that act. The act of CEO coming to people, not imposing anything, no control, no requests, but kind of asking for help and collaboration.
00:05:48 — And that's what resilient teams can do when in crisis and in chaos.
Sena
00:05:57 — Understood, understood Daryan. I think that perspective, it feels, it actually feels liberating because and also it could be uncomfortable for many leaders who actually thrive on control or follow, would follow the authoritative approach here. And, you know, sometimes because As humans, our brains always fear change.
00:06:23 — Our brains are always working on protecting, shielding us from something that is contrary to what we believe or our belief systems or what we think that always works. So when any leader for the first time they get to realize or they get to know about this, how do you help them find trust not just in systems but in their people, you know, when things are breaking apart?
Daria Rudnik
00:06:51 — Well, that's a good question. And what do you say about uncertainty and that kind of fear of change? Honestly, I don't think people are afraid of change because we make changes all the time. We go to school. We make families. We marry someone. We have kids. That is a lot. There's a huge change, I can tell you. We constantly relocate. And people make changes all the time. The difference between, like, the change that we fear is that when the change is forced upon us, that's when we become resistant.
00:07:25 — But when we want to learn something, when we approach this change with curiosity, when this change promises us something good, like, most people love change. They love change for something better. Well, same thing for for newly for new leaders. Yes, one day. Join a team. It might be scary cause they have a new role.
00:07:48 — They they they're real and they're not clear about what to do. And the best thing would be to let go of control and to start talking to people and get the people can get people together and ask them what is it you want? How do you want us to work together? What are the values that we are sharing? What is our mission? Asking questions is the best way to start building trust.
00:08:16 — Not saying things, but asking.
Sena
00:08:20 — Got it. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. I couldn't agree more with that. I'm not talking about your book, Clicking. You focus on leaders who are overloaded mentally, emotionally, and operationally.
00:08:37 — What's usually at the root of that overload? Like if I could guess, is it like the pace of business or is it something personal or is it something deeper about how we lead today?
Daria Rudnik
00:08:54 — Well, that's a great question. And there are many aspects to that. And from what I see over time, leaders become more and more stretched and thin. And because of, again, the rapid changes, lots of disruptions, economy, AI is a huge disruptor, demands from the market.
00:09:17 — But the one thing that I see in every well-intentional lead, every good leader who wants to be like really good for their team, who wants to support their team, who wants to grow their team, they all making one mistake. They're taking too much. They're trying to protect their teams when teams don't need protection. They need freedom to act. I once was working with an organization and there was a cybersecurity team and there was a leader of the cybersecurity team and she wanted to be a good leader.
00:09:55 — She had one-to-ones with their team members. She had team sessions and retrospectives. She really cared about people. She cared about them so much that she actually took all the conversations outside of the team on herself. So she was doing all the conversations outside of the team. She was communicating with stakeholders.
00:10:16 — She was solving problems. She was like kind of smoothing conflicts if there were any. And the team members were mostly talking to each other. And she thought that she was protecting them, but she was actually isolating them from a big organization. And that led to drop in engagement for this team. The team became disengaged. And she didn't understand why.
00:10:43 — And when she saw that, when we looked at how team members communicate, and when we looked at who is communicating outside of this small department, She realized that she's the only person who talks to everyone in the organization while her team members talk only to each other. And she was overloaded. She was stressed. She had lots to do. And her team members were disengaged and unmotivated because they didn't have that connection.
00:11:10 — So once she changed that and she let her people go out and talk to stakeholders and solve problems and ask questions and be more visible and take risks, make mistakes, and the situation has changed. They became more engaged and she could breathe because, well, she didn't have to do all the job that she was doing for them.
00:11:35 — So many good and well-intentional leaders, they take too much, while they need to let go.
Sena
00:11:45 — Yes, I think this is such an overlooked aspect, you know, especially, it kind of becomes, you know, how skeptics would address about leaders having emotional intelligence or being an empathetic leader or intuitive leader or a servant leader, they will say that, you know, you shouldn't take everything, especially when you are interacting with the team members or handling teams, you shouldn't be very personal or very, you know, entirely human with them.
00:12:15 — I think this really, really, you know, calls for a balanced approach. And. I think that's exactly that, you know, the middle part where leaders, they would definitely need mentoring or guidance. So I think that is something that you know, you have really well addressed here in your book.
00:12:42 — That's what I think.
Daria Rudnik
00:12:44 — And I mean, I just wanted to share the five key pillars for the like high performing self sufficient teams. That's why it's not click. That's why it's a clicky. So for any self efficient team, they need to be a clear purpose, something that is shared by all the team members. There's got to be linking connections, connections both within and between the team members and, like in the previous story, with the wider and bigger organization.
00:13:16 — There's got to be an integrated work. So how do you decide? How do you work together? How do you hold your meetings? How. Do you communicate with each other? What channels are you using? Like, how often do you want to have your one-to-ones and things like that? Collaborative decisions. What are the decisions that team members can make themselves?
00:13:39 — What are the decisions that a leader is making? What are the decisions that they need to make collaboratively together? And finally, knowledge sharing. How do you learn? How do you learn as a team? How do you get feedback? How do you give feedback? So those five pillars, clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing, that makes a team click. So that's what my clicking book is about.
00:14:06 — Oh, wow. I love that.
Sena
00:14:08 — I love it. Oh, that's really powerful. That's really powerful. And now, of course, we are in the tech age and things are rapidly changing, advancing. So so you have mentioned hybrid intelligence which you know where human systems and AI systems they amplify each other absolutely love that idea and how
00:14:35 — does this change the way teams collaborate Daria like you know especially when leaders are still figuring out how AI fits into the human workflows I mean first of all not even considering considering this but you. Right now, we are seeing leaders contemplating about reducing workforce or getting AI chatbots and agents and all that.
Daria Rudnik
00:14:59 — That's a very interesting time we're living in and like for now, AI is just a toy we're all playing with. No one knows exactly how to use it right. We ask, I mean, it's an amazing technology and like most people use it for what, write an email or give me a recipe for my cookie, chocolate chip cookies or whatever. I mean, this is, these tasks are so simple and AI is, I mean, that's the most that AI is doing right now, those simple tasks and asking, answering some simple questions.
00:15:37 — But when teams starting to use it, and we don't know how to use it right, but we do know that there are ways of using it wrong and it's called cognitive offloading. It means when you offload too much on AI and you kind of take the output it gives you for granted as a final decision without critically evaluating it.
00:15:59 — And this phenomenon we had that it was called like the Google effect when you kind of Google something, you read it, and then the next minute you forget about it because when you know that you can find it anytime on Google. And the kind of similar thing with cognitive offloading with AI, we stop thinking we stop processing and that makes teams disengaged and I was once working with the with the customer success team and and they were they
00:16:26 — were really very active users of AI they created meeting notes with AI they created kind of main insights next steps they uploaded information to their CRM but the thing is while they were doing it they were not processing it they were discussing it as a team. They were just generating some output from AI, uploading it into the system and forget about it.
00:16:53 — And they became disengaged. They became unmotivated because they just became operators of AI. They were not engaged. They were not active. They lost the agency of their work. So, what they did instead to kind of get this agency back is instead of taking everything that AI gives them for granted, they started to meet together and discuss the results.
00:17:21 — What is it that we're taking? What is it we're not taking? What does it mean for us? What does it mean for our clients? Is it really important? So, they started having meaningful conversations around that. And, surprisingly, it's not only helped them with their business and engagement, they also started to know each other better because, well, they started to talk to each other.
00:17:46 — When you talk to each other, you build connections, you build stronger relationships. So these conversations really helped the team not only use AI in a more productive way, but build stronger trust and psychological safety and stronger spirit of collaboration on their team.
Sena
00:18:05 — Totally, totally. And before we wrap up, Tarya, I think a very, very interesting part of this conversation, I think, and this is such a relevant one right now, like you have worked across six continents, you have led teams through mergers and cultural transformation. And I'm really, really curious to know, like, what have you learned about trust?
00:18:32 — Like how forms, breaks, rebuilds, whether it is possible or not, especially in multicultural, fast-moving teams?
Daria Rudnik
00:18:44 — That is a very important question, because trust is everything. I mean, we can't survive without trust. And what I've noticed is we're all human beings. And when we talk about a team, like how many people you have on a team? Eight.
00:19:03 — We're talking about a small number of people, and when we talk about multicultural teams, I don't really like going into, well, this is like Western culture, this is Eastern culture, this one is kind of more Nordic, and they were kind of more reserved, and I don't like doing that within the team framework, because learn the person, I mean, you can learn about this individual, because there were only 8 or 10 of them, you can learn each and every one of them without applying any labels of the culture.
00:19:41 — So and usually what I like when I work with teams, I tell them about the five levels of team trust. And those five levels of team trust start with emotional connection. So first you kind of build this emotional connection with another person, you start liking each of it. And that's the first level of trust.
00:20:04 — The second level of trust is when you trust that this person is actually professional. They will deliver what they promised to deliver. They will do their work right. So I can trust this person as a professional. The next level is more trust that I can share my emotions and my feelings with this person, that I'm not sure of how to do this, that I made a mistake. That's the part of our psychological safety starts to happen in a team.
00:20:33 — And then the next level of trust is that when all the team members can like talk about everything that happens on the team, but how they feel about their goals, their fears, their mistakes, and this kind of a team synergy that helps team make better decisions and feel well together and perform well.
Sena
00:20:56 — That is so important and I think it's it's a universal truth like and it's definitely sometimes you know hard to practice under pressure and as you mentioned about this I think we also need to understand you know that when we can take the action or can we proactively prevent you know any kind of miscommunication or that emotion connection to establish that well-oiled team to work.
00:21:29 — So especially in a global setting, Daria, like where values and communication styles, they do differ. Are there any signals that can be caught, that trust is cracking, and how can a leader catch it early?
Daria Rudnik
00:21:50 — That is a very important question, and I love that you asked it, because for me, the most prominent signal, I mean, maybe not the earliest one, but the most prominent signal is when team members say, everything's fine. Everything's fine. And when everything's fine, it means nothing, I mean, there's something wrong. The people, are they afraid to tell that something's wrong?
00:22:20 — They don't care and for leaders not to let that happen it's very important to have team regular team conversations and when leader has regular team conversation they can see this dynamic and they can see when energy goes down and sometimes it's okay people need to rest people can be can feel blue it's alright but it is very important to see where is where it's going if it's a only thing that's okay.
00:22:51 — If not, if it keeps going on, then something needs to change. And then, again, it comes to conversations, building relationships, making sure everyone understands the purpose, making sure that the work processes are working for the team members, especially in remote settings. Something has changed. I don't know. My time of school for my kids has changed.
00:23:17 — Now I'm not able to join the meetings on time, I'm always late. So it means that the time of the meeting needs to change. So regular evaluation of how team was working, regular feedback, internal feedback of how team members are feeling together, that's what every leader needs to do when they want to have a self-sufficient, high-performing, well-oiled team.
Sena
00:23:47 — Thank you. Thank you for sharing that, Gladia. Very important, very much needed. How do you see the next generation of leadership? If we could design it like one who is built for this era of disruption, what would it look like?
Daria Rudnik
00:24:08 — Well, I have a vision of a leader who is focusing on elevating individuals from the team and team communication. Again, not the one who wants to stay up front and say I'm gonna save you all, but the one who actually is one of the team members who's ready to share leadership with other team members.
00:24:36 — In some situation one person is a leader, in other situations the other person can take the leadership role because they have more skills, they have more energy, they are more capable of doing that. So this is probably the future of leadership for me.
Sena
00:24:57 — Interesting, that's interesting. Oh, great, and I think this is definitely a challenge and an invitation as well, not being the loudest or the smartest in the room anymore. It's about creating a room that thinks smarter together. So it's co-creation. Yeah, yeah.
00:25:17 — And Darioff listeners, they would like to connect with you and also get a hold of your book, Clicking, what would be the easiest way?
Daria Rudnik
00:25:27 — Well, you can easily find Clicking on Amazon. It is available on every Amazon website for any country. And I welcome you to join me on LinkedIn, to follow me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on. LinkedIn. If you have any questions, send me a message there. And you can also go to my website, DaryaRudnik. Com.
Sena
00:25:49 — Wonderful. Listeners, I'll have all the links in the show notes. So go check out Darya's book, Clicking, and also just refer to the show notes along with this episode on your favorite podcast platform. And if I can summarize this entire conversation for you, let's try. Like, in a world that won't agree to slow down, let's just admit it is not going to slow down.
00:26:15 — I believe leadership isn't about controlling the storm. It is about learning to dance with it. So, first of all, Darya, thank you so much. You really, really helped us in understanding that chaos isn't the enemy of order. It is often, often the birthplace of evolution, for change, for inspiration. Thank you so much.
Daria Rudnik
00:26:40 — Thank you, Sena. I loved your questions. It was really interesting conversation. Thank you.
Sena
00:26:44 — Thank you, thank you. And to all the listeners, I think the next disruption might already be out there. So is your team as well. So is your capacity to lead. Until next time, keep building teams that don't just survive change, they drive it. This is Bisplend, and I'm Sena, asking all of you to stay curious, stay bold and keep leading forward. Thank you.