(00:00-00:19) Find Your Leadership Confidence Podcast
Welcome to the Find Your Leadership Confidence Podcast with Vicki Noethling. You are about to discover impactful lessons that help you grow as an individual, grow your confidence, and find the positive and good within you, so you powerfully and authentically become the best version of yourself.

(00:19-00:37) Find Your Leadership Confidence Podcast
Be sure you visit our website at www.findyourleadershipconfidence.com. While you're there, subscribe to us via your favorite network. Now tune in, get ready, and enjoy the journey of emerging as a leader of exception in the 21st century.

(00:40-01:02) Vicki Noethling
Welcome, everyone, to the Find Your Leadership Confidence podcast. I'm your host, Vicki Nettling, coming to you from Roswell, Georgia. The goal of this podcast is to bring topics and guests that will empower you to become that confident leader and take your business and your life to the next level. Today, I'm very excited to have with me Daria Rudnik. And let me tell you about Daria.

(01:02-01:19) Vicki Noethling
She is a team architect, executive coach, and author of Clicking, a team building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team trust, better results, and more time.

(01:19-01:35) Vicki Noethling
Her book was recently featured on multiple major U.S. outlets, including Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the Associated Press affiliates, because it addresses a problem almost every team faces.

(01:35-01:54) Vicki Noethling
how to not just survive change but lead through it she brings a truly global perspective having lived and worked across the u s russia and israel and supported clients on six continents

(01:54-02:12) Vicki Noethling
As a former chief people officer in fast-growing tech and telecom companies, she led companies through high-stakes mergers, built teams across borders, and transformed cultures from the inside out.

(02:12-02:40) Vicki Noethling
I love this topic that we have today because I truly think it is something that every leader needs to address to be prepared for and start to creatively think about. And that is remote hybrid global. Here's how to make any team click. Please join me in welcoming my guest, Daria Rudnick. Daria, such a great, great topic.

(02:41-02:54) Daria Rudnik
Well, thank you, Vicky. It's a great pleasure to be here. And I mean, I love talking about teams. I think it's now the time of great teams. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things, reasons why I

(02:56-03:19) Vicki Noethling
came out of retirement to do what I do today, teach leadership in public speaking is because of just this subject that after COVID and during COVID, a lot of what I did as a region advisor for Toastmasters was to help teams click. And I was in Georgia and they were in California.

(03:19-03:44) Vicki Noethling
And as a project manager for over 20 years with UPS, I had teams that were never, you know, very few were in my office in Georgia here. Most were around the world. And so this whole idea of remote hybrid and global is really important for us to to be able to understand, to work with. And as I said, be innovative and creative as we work.

(03:44-03:53) Vicki Noethling
But before we get into this really great topic, I'd love for you to share two things. First, tell everybody, where do you call home? Where do you live right now?

(03:54-04:18) Vicki Noethling
I'm originally from Moscow, Russia, but now I'm based in Israel, in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv. All right. And then the second is I gave all of these wonderful things about what you do today, but share your journey. What was the pivotal moments that changed what you think, how you think and informed why you do what you do today?

(04:20-04:50) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks. It's a very interesting question for me personally to kind of look back and see where it's all coming from. I was lucky in my career. I studied my career in Deloitte, which is an amazing company, and you learn a lot while working in Deloitte. You can guess that. And then I moved to kind of growing in my HR, in different HR roles, taking learning and development roles, and then up to chief people officer for mostly tech and telecom companies.

(04:51-05:06) Daria Rudnik
And I've been through and helping companies going through various crises. Like I was working for a bank and it was 2008. And like the banking system was like just in a major crisis. Yeah.

(05:06-05:28) Daria Rudnik
And there was also a local crisis for the bank I was working with. And what I saw and what I've observed is how strong teamwork and culture can be and how powerful it can be in helping an organization going through hard times. Like, for example, in this bank I was working for,

(05:30-05:59) Daria Rudnik
what the culture was that strong that, and we were talking about the values, why we're here together, even through the, like going through those hard times, what makes us a team. And by having those conversations, kind of bringing them to the surface so that people like think about values, think about culture, talk to each other. We haven't lost a single person like through that crisis that we had. And it was a huge accomplishment. We're really proud of that.

(05:59-06:17) Daria Rudnik
But like looking back, I see that it was because we had strong culture and strong teams. And throughout my career, like working with going through mergers and acquisitions, organizational transformations, what I've observed is when you have a strong teamwork and strong culture,

(06:17-06:38) Daria Rudnik
Most of those changes come, well, I can't say easily, but at least like more smoothly, where if you don't have that, if you have some leaders who want to take charge, who want to control, even if they have like good intentions and great experience, but they're kind of taking everything in their hands, it's just starting to fall apart. So the

(06:38-07:05) Daria Rudnik
That is my story so that I truly believe that the era of heroic leadership is gone. I mean, no organization can survive with one single hero who can save everyone. It's time for empowered teams. Yeah. And you see that in successful companies that the founders had the dream, the idea, but they knew they couldn't do it alone. And it's those people that they brought in that had the strengths

(07:07-07:35) Vicki Noethling
where they didn't that had the and that leader had the I guess the ability that said I'm open to other ideas that I don't know all the answers. And I think that's really important. One of the first mentors that I had said he his advice to me was never be the smartest person in the room.

(07:36-07:50) Vicki Noethling
So that I carried with me. And I always thought, well, that's easy for me. But he's like, no, no, no. It's not what you mean. You just want to make sure that there are other people that can do things you don't know how to do or maybe don't want to do.

(07:51-08:11) Vicki Noethling
So those are our two easy questions. Let's get into all of this about teams. What makes teams click and why do so many teams really fail to start at their release? They fall short of their potential.

(08:14-08:37) Daria Rudnik
Well, the thing that I see in organizations is we use the word team too often without understanding the meaning of it. Every functional unit, we call it a team. Any work group, we call it a team, which is not. The team is defined. To call something a team, they need to have a shared purpose.

(08:37-08:52) Daria Rudnik
They need to have a clear structure that these are the people on the team and they need to be interconnected. So you cannot just divide tasks and everyone just doing their task and then you combine the results together and you have something. That's not a team, working group, project group, whatever it is.

(08:52-09:22) Daria Rudnik
But if some people working together and have the same edge, again, it doesn't make them a team. So we're using the word team too often. So only when they have a shared purpose, only when they're very interconnected, they can be a team. And to build that kind of team, that's when I use my sort of click framework where you need to have a clear purpose. So what is it you're doing together? Why are you here together? What is it that you cannot do individually?

(09:22-09:44) Daria Rudnik
Then you need to have linking connections, how you connect with each other, how the team members are connected. But together with that, how are you connected with the stakeholders? So it's not just the manager who's going out there, understands the stakeholder needs, takes the blame for mistakes. So that every team member needs to understand the wider organization, who are they working for? Mm-hmm.

(09:44-10:07) Daria Rudnik
And then there is integrated work. And again, I see a lot of teams that don't have rules of how they work together. They kind of assume that they need to reply to emails every 24 hours or they assume that their manager expects them to call back within five minutes or they assume something. But there are no clear rules or norms what is considered to be good or bad behavior.

(10:07-10:23) Daria Rudnik
And then there is collaborative decisions. Again, as a manager, you don't have to make all the decisions. And you need to be absolutely clear on what decisions are for the leader, what decisions are for individual contributors, and what decisions the team needs to make collaboratively.

(10:23-10:41) Daria Rudnik
And the fifth one is knowledge sharing and feedback. How you learn as a team, how you grow as a team, how do you do your retros, how do you get feedback? So those five pillars, clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing is what will make your team click.

(10:41-11:02) Vicki Noethling
Absolutely. You know, and and it really does. I was a project manager for most of my career, and it just really falls into the basics of project management. But a lot of times, especially when you're working with stakeholders and whatnot, they want to rush to the results and rush to getting things going.

(11:02-11:31) Vicki Noethling
and not giving a team time to really gel and form and take the time to set the ground rules and get to know each other well, you know, which makes hybrid and remote teams a little bit more challenging because, again, we may spend time with people that we see face to face, but we forget sometimes that those people in other countries and other cities need just as much attention.

(11:32-11:56) Vicki Noethling
So you've been the only woman in the C-suite at times. And I've seen that in my 40 some years a lot, sadly. What advice do you have for women that are shaping or trying to become that leader that can stand out in this male dominated world?

(12:00-12:25) Daria Rudnik
you'll probably hate what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say, be yourself. And I'll explain what it means because it's just a terrible way to say. When you're trying to be someone else, like contribute to more dominant or more kind of feminine and kind of trying to take some role, it takes a lot of energy. And instead of like using this energy of kind of trying to find the right mask,

(12:26-12:51) Daria Rudnik
It's better to use this energy to build relationships from the place that you're in. And I'll tell you what I mean. I'm not a dominant person. I took an assessment and someone said, you cannot be a leader because your dominance is very low. I said, what? There are different ways to be a leader. There are so many ways to lead.

(12:51-13:09) Daria Rudnik
And my way was to build relationships individually with various people on the board. And they're humans. And again, any human can connect to another human when you understand the pains, when you understand the goals, when you get to know them. So I did try to be kind of...

(13:09-13:38) Daria Rudnik
like showcasing myself, like showing myself, like I need to speak up at meetings, I need to be there, I need to be present. It was like, it was very tense. I wanted to do that. But when I kind of let it go and start building connections and relations outside the meeting room, that made things so much easier for me because I don't have to push through the meeting and kind of be heard. I can talk to them before the meeting, get everything, like discuss things, get their questions, concerns.

(13:39-14:08) Daria Rudnik
find answers to their questions and concerns. And then during the meeting, if I need to speak up, they're ready. I mean, they expect me to say something because we had conversations before that. They know that I'm going to share something valuable. So finding your way of talking to people, communicating, providing value to them is what's important. It's not that you're trying to be more like dominant or more feminine or like pretending someone you're not. Yeah. Yeah.

(14:08-14:30) Vicki Noethling
That's so very true. And, you know, I did in my early days when I was trying to get into just supervision, or I'm sorry, to be a manager after being a supervisor. And I kept on having these some old school managers say just that, you know, well, you're not this or you're not that. But anytime they needed

(14:32-14:55) Vicki Noethling
the people on my teams or other teams to be motivated or persuaded, they asked me to talk with them. I was like, I don't understand this. But, you know, finally, after getting my degree at 50, I realized that I did know stuff and that I was effective in just being me and I no longer cared.

(14:55-15:14) Vicki Noethling
And that might sound bad to people, but I really no longer cared what other people wanted me to do or how to do it. I just did it the way that my gut felt comfortable doing. And it made all the difference in the world. So what advice do you have for introverted people?

(15:17-15:43) Vicki Noethling
people, professionals who want to increase their influence and visibility without becoming, again, as we've been talking about someone they're not. And, you know, there is that, I guess, old school idea that you have to be that strong, as we were talking about dominant person, and an introvert can't be effective. But I think that we can say that is a myth for sure.

(15:45-16:14) Daria Rudnik
Well, absolutely. And I think it's pretty much the same as I mentioned before with the story. Because, I mean, being an introverted person myself, it was hard for me to push through other loud voices during the meeting. So, again, what I did, I was building relationships outside of the meeting room, outside of the boardroom, and kind of getting people on board before I go out and talk and say something. So I needed to have...

(16:14-16:37) Daria Rudnik
Some people who will advocate for me, who will support me. And when I had this support, it was easy for me to speak up. It was easy for me to show my ideas because I knew I had this people who will support me. And most of my clients, especially, again, especially it's very hard in remote setting because you have all those windows. Okay, how do I say? When do I say? Everyone is saying at the same time.

(16:37-17:05) Daria Rudnik
So even if you don't have an opportunity to speak during the remote meeting, you always have opportunity to speak before and after the meeting. You can go to the people you want to speak to, that you want to share something when you want to confirm something with them or ask them. So it's okay to talk to people before the meeting and after the meeting. Meeting is not the only time where you can show your value. So I think that's...

(17:05-17:15) Daria Rudnik
That's one of the most important things I want introverts to remember. You don't have to be loud at the meeting. You can build relationships outside of that space.

(17:15-17:40) Vicki Noethling
Yeah. So true. You know, whenever I, before I retired, I had spent over 20 years building those relationships. And so I was really, especially in the last projects of the years, very, very effective because I could call on all these people that I had relationships and I could get things moving very easily and overcome problems. And then the year later,

(17:40-18:05) Vicki Noethling
Two years after I was retired, I was brought back to do a very, very important project. But I was remote and my my managers were in Jersey. I'm here and they didn't choose to have me travel ever to meet them in person. Everything was remote and they didn't.

(18:06-18:26) Vicki Noethling
And it was really difficult because I've been out of the office for two years. A lot of my contacts retired. And so I had to start all over and they needed everything done yesterday. And I truly was frustrated because I wanted to try to do things the way that I knew I needed to do it.

(18:26-18:49) Vicki Noethling
But I I didn't feel that I was effective. And so I think it's kind of important for people on both sides of the fence to remember as that manager that's trying to work with your teams to be available to give them space. But as the person on the other side, you know, raise your hand, tell them.

(18:49-19:16) Vicki Noethling
Hey, I need to talk. I need to do this. I'm, I'm missing that. And, um, and, and don't be shut down. And I think that's one of the things that kept on being shut down. And as an introvert, you know, sometimes we don't stand up for ourselves. And, and, uh, so that, that was my story along those lines, but tell me a story that when a team came together under extreme pressure.

(19:17-19:46) Daria Rudnik
and what did you learn from it or what can we learn from it? Well, I'll tell you a story. I was working with a telecom company and they were going through some hard times. Again, the economy was down and they had to cut costs. What would normal organization do? Well, say we'll fire those people, we'll change those processes, so we'll save money like that. We decide how we want to do that.

(19:46-20:08) Daria Rudnik
But this company, they had a very strong culture. They had very strong understanding of their shared vision, that they want to serve their clients, that they need to provide the best service that's possible. And one of the most important things for this organization was their customer success team,

(20:08-20:28) Daria Rudnik
who were directly talking to people, helping them solve their problems. So what the CEO did is he reached out to them, he had a town hall with them and he said, I know how important it is for you to provide best service for our customers. I know that the value for that.

(20:28-20:38) Daria Rudnik
And I knew that sometimes it takes a long time to talk to them. But every time they call us and they have those conversations, we pay a lot of money.

(20:39-21:07) Daria Rudnik
If we cut this conversation shorter, that would save us lots of money. But I'm not going to impose any limits or KPIs on you. I'm not going to tell you that you need to cut your conversations to one minute or two minutes or whatever, because I know how important those relationships are for you. But I ask you to be mindful of your time and to try and cut those conversations, try and make those conversations shorter, because that's really critical for our success.

(21:08-21:37) Daria Rudnik
So he was not telling them what to do. He was sharing the vision. They were all aligned with the goal and they were all wanting this organization to succeed. And what happened is they did manage to save lots of millions of dollars by cutting those conversations shorter without losing this human connection because what they did is they had those longer conversations when needed, but when it was okay, they kept them really, really short.

(21:37-21:56) Daria Rudnik
So that is the story where a strong culture can actually save you millions of dollars because you've invested some time before that. You've invested money, your heart, you're building relationships, sharing this vision with the organization, with every team member. And that saved the organization.

(21:57-22:10) Vicki Noethling
Absolutely. I think that's why I coach leadership and communication, because I think, you know, a lot of times if you don't have those two married together, you're not going to be successful. It's really difficult.

(22:12-22:33) Vicki Noethling
Great story. You were a chief people officer during a major M&A. And what are the biggest leadership traps in times of organizational transformation? Nobody likes change. Yeah.

(22:33-22:51) Vicki Noethling
That was the toughest part of change of, of project management was to have that person that took on change management and some, some projects, the stakeholders didn't even want to have change management. It's like you have to. So talk about the, you know, those traps that we can fall into. Yeah.

(22:54-23:14) Daria Rudnik
Again, like we're probably raised and the stories we hear about leaders are some heroes who are saving the world. Some superheroes who can do anything, who know everything, who can jump out of the flying airplane and save the world. But when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, it's not like that.

(23:14-23:43) Daria Rudnik
But leaders still are trying to show that they're capable of solving the problems. Why? Because, I mean, what they want, their intentions are like, they're very well-intentional leaders. They want to make sure people feel safe, that they feel confident, that everything is under control. But they know that it's not. So when leaders, so the leaders choose like two things. They either, I'm not going to say anything because I don't know what to say.

(23:43-24:08) Daria Rudnik
Or I'm going to go out and say everything is fine without any details. Like, well, people talk, they know that it's not fine. And I've seen that. And I was coaching leaders to, okay, go and tell them that you don't have the answer, but here is what you're doing. Because you're doing a lot of things. You're doing a lot of great things to make this going, to make this successful. Yeah.

(24:08-24:25) Daria Rudnik
And I was working once with the leader. He was very introverted. He didn't like having all those town halls and kind of talking to people. And I get it. I mean, we're all different. But he found his way of delivering this message.

(24:25-24:55) Daria Rudnik
He had smaller groups. He had very intimate groups. He understood that, okay, instead of one big town hall, he would have to have like 10 meetings instead. But it was easy for him. He could see those people. He could answer the questions that they had. He felt good talking to smaller groups. So again, find your way of doing what you have to do. And that was very brave of him. And that was really helpful for people to understand what's going on.

(24:55-25:20) Vicki Noethling
And I think with each session that he had with those small groups, he got more and more comfortable and more confident and that would show up after those meetings, you know, then the others that attended them would feel, feel heard and felt and, and that. Builds trust and, and that really pays a lot of dividends.

(25:22-25:35) Vicki Noethling
You coach overloaded executives. What executive is not overloaded? What's the first mindset shift that changes everything for them?

(25:40-26:03) Daria Rudnik
Again, you're right. I mean, leaders are overloaded. And I think for the last 10 years, it became even worse because, again, the economy, the various changes and the AI is coming into the workplace. I need to be on top of everything, demands from the top, demands from the bottom.

(26:03-26:31) Daria Rudnik
Demands from the employees. You need to engage people. You need to motivate people. You need to make sure they know what they're doing. You need to make sure they've done what they expected to do. Like lots of lots of multiple demands. So leaders feel like very stretched thing and overloaded. So the first thing is all of them are doing and that leads them to kind of better life is take time for you to think like you need to find time to think.

(26:33-26:51) Daria Rudnik
And surprisingly, when you block some time to think, you actually use this time to think, and you're not responding to all the problems that your team has. Wow, they can solve problems on the road. Surprise, they are grown up people who know how to work well. And that builds...

(26:52-27:07) Daria Rudnik
Trust, so the leader starts to trust those people that they can deliver. But people themselves, they say, okay, we can do that. We don't need to go to a manager for every decision. We can make decisions. We can solve those problems.

(27:07-27:35) Daria Rudnik
So on both sides, it works for both sides. The leader becomes more confident in the team and the team becomes more confident that they can do it. They can solve problems. And so that creates, well, first bad engagement because when people are motivated, they know that they can do things, they're not helpless babies. They become more engaged and more motivated. And leader has more time for strategic work, for thinking, for coaching people and building real team work.

(27:37-28:00) Vicki Noethling
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things in there. Whenever you say, have time to think, it doesn't always necessarily mean you sit in on a chair in a room by yourself and think because, you know, I know for me, a lot of times when I had problems to solve and whatnot, I would, and especially working from home,

(28:00-28:22) Vicki Noethling
Um, I would just scrub the floor or, you know, take a walk where I was concentrating on something else. And then my mind actually was free to start to solve that problem easily. So I think that's something that you need to think about. You know, it doesn't mean that you, um,

(28:23-28:46) Vicki Noethling
can't do something else take your mind off of of that problem and you'll find the answers and the second thing is too that um you know it it's time to delegate to see as you said be uh have some self-regulation about what you should do what should be given to someone else you can't

(28:46-28:57) Vicki Noethling
You can't have this ego where I'm the leader, I'm the boss and I should, this is what I should do. But, you know, is it really what you should do? Yeah, it's true.

(28:57-29:18) Vicki Noethling
Yeah. Give up control. Well, one last question. What is the most surprising thing you learned from working with teams on six continents? You talked about culture. We talked about diversity of teams and the global aspects. So talk to me about that. Biggest surprise. Yeah.

(29:20-29:48) Daria Rudnik
I very often hear the question, how do you handle cultures on teams? And I mean, it's a very important question because we, yes, we're all different, there are different cultural differences. When you're a huge organization and you have people all over the world, you do need to be mindful of different cultures. But I mean, since I work with teams and team leaders, and like, how many people do you have on your team? Eight, 10, well, 12, maybe?

(29:49-30:15) Daria Rudnik
You don't need to know all the cultural differences because you need to know humans and you need to know those people and their individual preferences because they might be different. If you think like the right cultures, there are more reserved, but there are people who are very open and easygoing within those cultures. And you have cultures where, again, you can have open conversations, but you have an introvert who doesn't want to share anything. So it's...

(30:16-30:32) Daria Rudnik
Well, I don't want to say it's useless, but I don't want people to put labels on various people based on their culture and their origin, because they might be different. They might go to university in another country and pick up another culture.

(30:32-30:53) Daria Rudnik
So it's important to understand humans and people on your team because you have not so many people and you can do that. So that was kind of surprising for me personally when I discovered that. And that's what I want to share it with leaders. Okay, yeah, I don't need to know everything about all the different cultures, but I'd love to know the people that are on my team.

(30:53-31:21) Vicki Noethling
Yeah. And it goes back to what we talked back in the very beginning is you have to build relationships. It is just vital that you take the time to do that. And, um, as you evolve, you know, those other people are going to be evolving too. So it's not a, oh, I met them on orientation, got to know them, everything about them. And then five years later, you don't really know anything about them anymore. You just have, that's a continual thing.

(31:23-31:51) Vicki Noethling
Well, time has flown by, and I'm sure that the audience would love to get in contact with you. So for everyone that watches knows that I do have a slide that has all of her contact information. If you are just listening, I do put all this on my YouTube channel as well as my findyourleadershipconfidence.com. So please just subscribe either to Vicki Nettling on YouTube or findyourleadershipconfidence.com on my website.

(31:51-32:13) Vicki Noethling
So the website is Daria Rudnick.com. That's her name. D-A-R-I-A-R-U-D-N-I-K.com. LinkedIn is her name, Daria Rudnick. Twitter is Daria L. Rudnick with initial caps there. And YouTube is at Daria Rudnick Coaching.

(32:13-32:27) Vicki Noethling
I'll turn it over to Daria. She'll talk to you about her call to action today, as well as what you can find on her website and what she puts out on social media that might be helpful for you as well. So Daria, it's all yours.

(32:28-32:45) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks, Vicky. Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very open to connections. Send me a message, send me a connection request, ask questions. Let's have a chat. On my website, DariaRudnik.com, you can find lots of downloadable materials like team maturity questionnaire.

(32:45-33:13) Daria Rudnik
AI-reliant self-assessment, motivation, lots of information and lots of materials and tools that you can use to build strong teams. But if you want to be more strategic and more systemic about it, you can get my book Clicking on Amazon. It has all the information you need to build self-sufficient, high-trust teams that will survive in any disruptions that are coming to us.

(33:13-33:27) Vicki Noethling
Very good. Daria, thank you so much for spending time with me today. What a great conversation we had on remote hybrid global teams. Here's how to make any team click. So thank you so much for being a great guest.

(33:28-33:43) Vicki Noethling
Thank you, Vicky. I mean, I really enjoyed the conversation and thanks for sharing your stories because it's very interesting to hear. Thank you. Thank you. As always, I remind everyone that life is a journey and it's up for you to enjoy the ride. This is Vicky Nettling signing off.

(33:44-34:02) Find Your Leadership Confidence Podcast
Thank you for tuning into the Find Your Leadership Confidence podcast with Vicki Medling, where we share impactful lessons that help you grow as an individual, grow your confidence, and find the positive and good within you so you powerfully and authentically become the best version of yourself.

(34:02-34:22) Find Your Leadership Confidence Podcast
Remember to visit our website at www.findyourleadershipconfidence.com and enjoy even more great episodes like this one. Again, while you're here, subscribe to us via your favorite network. We look forward to seeing you next time on the Find Your Leadership Confidence podcast.