How can leaders prevent burnout and drive results in an age of constant disruption?
Team Architect Daria Rudnik reveals her framework for building self-sufficient, high-trust teams that leverage both human and artificial intelligence. Learn practical strategies to combat cognitive overload, design energizing team rituals, and lead with clarity through chaos.
Team Architect Daria Rudnik reveals her framework for building self-sufficient, high-trust teams that leverage both human and artificial intelligence. Learn practical strategies to combat cognitive overload, design energizing team rituals, and lead with clarity through chaos.
In this episode, I share how leaders can prevent burnout while building teams that perform in times of constant disruption:
- From overload to self-sufficient teams — why high-trust teams reduce leadership bottlenecks and sustain performance.
- Human + AI collaboration — using hybrid intelligence to support decision-making without losing human judgment.
- Combat cognitive overload — practical strategies and team rituals that help leaders and teams stay focused and energized.
- Clarity in chaos — how strong team design and clear priorities help organizations thrive during rapid change.
(00:26-00:52) Khudania Ajay
Welcome to this very special edition of the KAJ Masterclass Live, the show which ensures that you profit from your time spent here with experts, either through their industry insights, information, or simply learning from them. And today we have with us Daria Rudnick, team architect, executive coach, and she's also the founder and CEO of Hydra AIs, and she helps overloaded leaders
(00:52-01:19) Khudania Ajay
build high trust, self-sufficient teams so they can get better results with less burnout. We'll learn about that. We'll learn about her framework for building such teams that leverage both human and artificial intelligence, practical strategies to combat cognitive overload, design organizing, energizing team rituals and lead with clarity through chaos. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks. It's great to be here.
(01:20-01:45) Khudania Ajay
You are welcome. Welcome to the show, Darya. Welcome to India in this online form. And I'm sure not just in India, but a lot of people, a lot of organizations, a lot of leaders across the world will benefit from what we are going to talk right now. We'll talk about how they can build teams that thrive even in chaos. But before that, let's talk a bit about your journey, your background, your story, so that people know who they are listening to.
(01:46-02:13) Daria Rudnik
Thanks. Well, my journey starts from, like, my career started at Deloitte. And I was very lucky to work for amazing companies like Deloitte. And then I moved to chief people office for mostly tech and telecom companies. And I've done lots of stuff there. I mean, you know that all in the corporate world, mergers and acquisitions, setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations. And through that journey, I saw, like, we've been through lots of
(02:13-02:35) Daria Rudnik
huge disruptions it was financial crisis for the banking industries and then i was helping leaders go through wars and pandemic and and again many many disruptions and the new upcoming disruption that really is going to be change the workplace is ai so while working with leaders as chief people officer and now as coach and consultant
(02:35-02:57) Daria Rudnik
I see how exhausted, tired, overloaded most leaders are. And why is that? Not only because of all the things happening around them, but also because they're trying to be good leaders for their teams. But instead of helping their teams, instead of helping empowering their teams, they're actually taking the load and carry the load
(02:57-03:17) Daria Rudnik
And the teams become less empowered and they just become overloaded. And I've seen the transformational change great teams can make on organizations when they build right, when they collaborate right. They can increase performance like three or four times. And I mean, I've seen that happening. I've helped that happen.
(03:17-03:45) Khudania Ajay
So that's kind of my story, starting from Deloitte up to chief people office and now helping leaders build amazing, strong teams that can survive and thrive in change and the area of destruction. Absolutely. Absolutely, Daria. Great things leaders are doing. Let's understand it better. You talk about, you know, leaders, overloaded leaders build high trust, self-sufficient teams. I want to understand this better.
(03:45-04:00) Khudania Ajay
What are these leaders overloaded with? Where have they been overloaded with? Because great resignation happened recently. Where were they so overloaded that they didn't notice this? Quite quitting is very much on.
(04:01-04:19) Khudania Ajay
Were they so overloaded that they didn't notice this? Then I want to understand what is it that they were so overloaded, except perhaps for, you know, looking at the bottom lines for the board or for some of the top guys and beyond and also looking at their own bank accounts.
(04:19-04:37) Khudania Ajay
Was this that overload or is it something beyond? Because it does not match. It does not match, you know, the talk they are doing. Help us understand from from that point of view, from the ground so that, you know, we can talk and understand the real problem. Is it that they are they are the real problems and not the teams?
(04:39-04:54) Daria Rudnik
Well, that is an amazing question. And I like your passion. There are lots of things happening. And mostly it's like once you step into the leadership position, you face multiple leadership paradoxes.
(04:54-05:10) Daria Rudnik
And the paradox, one of the paradoxes leaders face is, okay, how do I make this organization sustainable? How do I make it grow? How do I make it profitable? And how I can support my team members, how I can be an empathetic servant leaders so that they can grow.
(05:10-05:32) Daria Rudnik
And I work with like middle to like senior executive leaders. Okay, I'm biased. I have a coach. People come to me for help. So it means they want to change. I know there are other people out there. But those who do want to change, they make one mistake. Instead of letting teams...
(05:32-06:00) Daria Rudnik
make their own mistakes, learn as they go, make them, let them make decisions. They kind of think, I'll make all the decisions to help my team. I'll make my, like their life easier by making my life harder because I want to be a good leader. I want to help them. They have very, very good intentions on helping those people. But instead of like really growing them and really letting them fall down,
(06:00-06:11) Daria Rudnik
make mistakes, suffer from those, like take the consequences from those mistakes. But that's how we learn. They actually take all the responsibility on themselves.
(06:11-06:34) Daria Rudnik
And that mindset is kind of one of the biggest reasons they feel overloaded because, I mean, there's the economy, like you said, the people are residing, there was AI, there were financial, like difficult financial situations. But together with that, they take extra responsibility to help their teams. And that makes them overloaded.
(06:34-06:53) Daria Rudnik
Wow, what they can do and what they should do is stop trying to be heroic leader and try to save the world or save the company or save the team. They need to step up, I mean, and kind of step away aside and let the teams meet the world. It's hard because we never learned how to do that.
(06:53-07:20) Daria Rudnik
I mean, school is not a team. Family is not a team. University is not a team. All the team projects we make in school and do school, people just suffer through that. They don't like them. No one teaches you how to work in a team. And that's why I wrote my book, Clicking, which is exactly about the five steps you need to make to build a strong team. And one of those steps is kind of let people make mistakes. Let them...
(07:22-07:50) Khudania Ajay
Let them do. Let them make decisions. You don't have to make all the decisions. You don't have to do it all. People can do it on their own. Absolutely. Absolutely, Daria. I understand your position. Many of them are your clients. So you have to end. But they are not my clients. I'm not on the payroll of any of these leaders. My leaders are my audience. And I've got to speak for them.
(07:50-08:16) Khudania Ajay
And if at all, if I get paid from any of the leaders, I will certainly tell my audience that these people are sponsoring the show. So let's understand it better from again from a people's point of view. You are a people's officer, people, a chief people officer at earlier. Let's understand it from that. These leaders are very intelligent people. They come from very good institutes, management institutes.
(08:16-08:44) Khudania Ajay
They are well spoken, think good. They have been brought to their position. Everybody knows they are very intelligent and competent people. They go on very big forums. They speak, come out with ideas that industry are facing and give ideas for those solutions, even give ideas for the world. You know, they write great articles on newspapers, write great thought leadership articles on LinkedIn and everywhere.
(08:44-09:06) Khudania Ajay
You know, why is it that they don't implement or are not able to implement that same idea within their teams? What fails them? And if you are talking about building teams, they already have teams within their organization. Are they inefficient that they are not noticing those teams or those teams are inefficient, then you've got to fire them.
(09:06-09:22) Khudania Ajay
What other team do you want? You already got a team there and you are the leader of that organization. Help us understand from that. It is like, you know, creeping about things which do not exist and not noticing what you have. You've got the resources. Use them.
(09:22-09:49) Khudania Ajay
Use your power. You are the leader. Don't look at lead, you know, lead questions outside. Help us understand from those. I know there are many, many good leaders. I know them, but I want to talk about, you know, the ones who are not taking their, you know, taking the call that they should be talking about. Then they are inefficient from that point of view. Help us understand. You can take your stand, but I need to be answerable to my audience.
(09:50-09:56) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks. And I love that you mentioned that you said that they have teams. Well, to be honest, they don't.
(09:56-10:24) Daria Rudnik
What we do call a team is, I mean, you just get people together, you call them a team, and you kind of expect them to work as a team. That's not going to work. It's not working like that. Most functions, I mean, functional units, they're not teams. People just walk through the days and then wait to go home and be with their families and do what they like to do because they are not heard. They are not visible. They don't understand.
(10:24-10:40) Daria Rudnik
What the hell are they doing there? I mean, what's the purpose of my work? How it's connected to the big organizational purpose? They don't know that because to really be a team, like what is defined? How the team is defined? The team is defined by a shared purpose.
(10:40-11:02) Daria Rudnik
So if everyone on the team can speak pretty much the same words about why they are together, what is the shared purpose, why were they combined together as one team, and what is it that they collectively need to create together, that is the team. If you ask any person in the organization, like, why are you together?
(11:02-11:20) Daria Rudnik
because I am in the same org chart. We share the same square with same box on the org chart. That's not the team. So most kind of teams in organizations are not real teams. So the first thing is shared purpose. Everyone needs to understand what is the shared purpose for the team.
(11:20-11:37) Daria Rudnik
Then you can call it a team if it's interconnected. If you have several people doing different types of jobs and not talking to each other, that's not a team. It's a group of people working together, but it's not a team. They need to be interconnected and interdependent.
(11:38-12:04) Daria Rudnik
So these are the main elements of the team. And for leaders to build amazing teams, again, they need to be a clear purpose. They need to be linking connections. People need to be connected between themselves and with external organization. And I'll tell you an example of a good leader who like went to forums and did presentations and wrote articles. She was a, I mean, she is still a, she's a leader.
(12:04-12:29) Daria Rudnik
cybersecurity, chief cybersecurity office in the company. And again, she was really good with their teams. She gave one-to-ones, regular feedbacks for their team. But she was the only spokesperson from this team to the wide organization. Team members on this cybersecurity team didn't have a chance to go out there. I mean, they didn't really want it to because she did all the job and they felt, okay, let her do the job.
(12:30-12:49) Daria Rudnik
But eventually they started to feel isolated. They started to lose, okay, how are we connected with the organization? What are we doing here? What's the benefit? What's the value of our work? All because she was the spokesperson. She was talking. She was taking too much because she wanted to help them.
(12:49-13:05) Daria Rudnik
And they became disengaged. But once she stopped doing that, she let them go out there. She let them talk to the stakeholders. They became more engaged. So they, I mean, they got more work because they had to go to people and talk to them. They had to explain things.
(13:05-13:23) Daria Rudnik
But together with that, they had meaning and they became more engaged. That was linking connections is about connections between team members and with the wider organization. So that's kind of one of the steps leaders can do to make a work group and move it to a real team.
(13:24-13:46) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely. So how does that look at the solution? Some you gave, but even at the cost of repeating some of the things so that it gets emphasized. What is it that leaders can do with present teams? Because, see, there are top leaders management and then there are, you know, people along in the hierarchy. You have been a chief people, chief people's officer.
(13:46-14:05) Khudania Ajay
What's the job of people to make sure that the leaders get the team that they want? Everywhere you have got the human resource officer, chief human resource officer. It comes under CXO and all those things. Every year there are conferences. So many things are there. Why are they not?
(14:05-14:24) Khudania Ajay
getting the teams aligned with the vision of the leader or the management or the company itself? Is it that the leader has come from another planet and the team has come from any other planet and that is why they are not able to communicate or understand each other? Where is the problem?
(14:24-14:43) Khudania Ajay
Who should take where should the buck stop? Help us understand from there. And what is the option? Who has to find an option, the employee or the leader? Should the leader exit or should the employees exit? You are already removing a lot of employees, bringing in artificial intelligence.
(14:43-14:57) Khudania Ajay
And many a time people are also talking about why don't we automate the leadership itself. There was an experiment where AI CEO was made the leader and it performed better than human leader.
(14:58-15:17) Khudania Ajay
So should they leave out the leader and let the employees because AI is also knocking on your doors. So it's not only for employees, it's also for leaders. So we can't just keep on talking about people, whereas I may be very inefficient. Help us understand again from the solution point of view, Daria.
(15:18-15:47) Daria Rudnik
Great question. And the great question, like, are they coming from different planet? No, the problem is they're coming from the same planet, the same planet where they used to be employees. They didn't have a good leader. They didn't have a good team. They know what they need to be doing, but they don't have the how. No one taught them how to build amazing teams. And I mean, again, you're absolutely right saying that AI is coming for them. AI is coming for managers.
(15:48-16:04) Daria Rudnik
AI is coming for project managers. For those whose work is on delegation and control, that AI can do better than any human. What AI cannot do is, again, AI cannot build amazing teams.
(16:04-16:32) Daria Rudnik
And to build amazing teams, there are five simple steps. First is define the clear vision. Get together with the team, start talking, and define why you're here together. What's the meaning? What's the purpose of you being together? Make sure team members talk to each other. Because in remote and hybrid teams, team members talk to leaders. And that's it. They have one-to-ones. But they don't talk to each other. Make sure they talk to each other.
(16:32-16:51) Daria Rudnik
The third point is have integrated work rules. Create a team charter. What are the team norms? How do you communicate? What type of meetings are you having? Where do you communicate? On Slack, on WhatsApp, on email, on video, on Zoom chat? What is that? How do you work together?
(16:52-17:07) Daria Rudnik
The fourth one is collaborative decisions. How do you make decisions? Leaders don't have to make all decisions on their own. People can, and they can take ownership and they can say, I'll make this decision. I'll do that. They can initiate that.
(17:07-17:28) Daria Rudnik
And the final one is knowledge sharing and feedback. How do you learn together? How do you get feedback? How do you ask for feedback? How leaders ask for feedback? And how team members ask for feedback from each other? Those five steps are something that will move you towards a better team. And it will definitely make your people feel better on the team.
(17:29-17:53) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely. Absolutely. You are working, doing a lot of work in this field. Do you think a lot of leaders have already lost their positions? Why? Because AI is coming very strongly. The new generation does not want this sort of leaders. They want leaders who care about them. They want leaders who know how these people want to work.
(17:54-18:19) Khudania Ajay
They don't want all those washings, you know, green washing and all those things. They want the real picture for them, you know. Do you think that is why I ask that, is it already too late for such leaders or is it how do such leaders or even the good ones, there are most of them are good. How do they get prepared?
(18:19-18:42) Khudania Ajay
You know, for the future so that they have enough skills to deal with the new kind of workforce that is coming and also deal with AI that will get integrated. It's already getting it integrated into yourself. As you said, the future is already human plus AI. What should the leader do now? Time is running out for a lot of them.
(18:43-19:11) Daria Rudnik
Time is running, absolutely. We don't see yet the decline in managers positions, but we will. There was a research by Harvard Business Review together with GitHub when they analyzed how work is changing. And then what they found out is that, yes, developers can do more, but developers are not the ones to be replaced. The managers are. The managers who delegate and control, who bring no extra value rather than that.
(19:11-19:33) Daria Rudnik
So it means that if you are a manager, like you stop focusing on this bullshit, like controlling people, what they're doing, but you start on building teamwork, building collaboration, making sure people feel engaged and motivated, making sure they have this autonomy and making decisions, making mistakes. That's your role and AI cannot do that yet.
(19:34-20:01) Daria Rudnik
We do see some decline in junior positions. And yes, AI will affect that. But we will see a decline in managers' positions. Managers will have to go if all they do is delegation and control. So they need to switch to making sure how people work together. And one of the biggest risks AI brings us and what leaders need to monitor is critical thinking. Because we tend to...
(20:01-20:27) Daria Rudnik
over rely on AI and have this, there's a cognitive offloading effect when you use AI too much without kind of critically evaluating the outputs. And if you don't do that and just use the output that AI give you as a final decision, again, I've seen examples, I've worked with a team that used AI outputs and they became disengaged. They lost the spark, they lost the engagement because they were not engaged.
(20:27-20:57) Daria Rudnik
And what Lita did is she ensured that people get together and discuss. Again, we talk about working together, collaboration together. So they discussed as a team AI outputs and critically evaluating them and making sure the decision is human decision, not AI decision. And that's how they managed to get the most out of AI automating work, but not delegating decision-making, not delegating critical thinking. And they got the engagement back.
(20:58-21:09) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely, Daria. And talking of AI within the systems, you know, teams recently, I read an article about this whole word itself called works law.
(21:09-21:33) Khudania Ajay
What AI is doing is they are taking out a lot of things and technically anyone who is presenting whatever they had to present looks technically fine. But when you go through it and with the supervisor goes through, finds that it is nothing, but you don't know how to prove it. You know, anything is morally, it might be no wrong, but technically it is correct.
(21:33-22:02) Khudania Ajay
So in that aspect, AI is not proving to be a solution. It is proving to be a problem. Do you think the future leaders will get more inundated with such sort of a problem? It's a big study. If you do a bit of a search, you know, I was aghast to see this whole thing happening and happening over and over again that they had to come out with this report. How do you see this part of, you know, that the future is AI, you know, hybrid?
(22:02-22:16) Khudania Ajay
AI plus human. Again, human will be in problem because they thought that, you know, it will come. It will solve the problem. We remove the humans. But looks like humans will continue to stay with this sort of a situation called work slope.
(22:17-22:45) Daria Rudnik
Yeah, I've read the article. Yeah, I read this article. And I'm sure, I mean, we've all seen that. We've all got those emails or messages written by AI. What? You kind of read the words, but what? And again, it's not AI that's bad. Like you can give a hammer and people just can go smashing everything around with the hammer. It's not the hammer that's bad. It's that people don't know how to use it right. And again, what leaders together with teams need to discuss is
(22:45-23:06) Daria Rudnik
How do we use AI? And when we talk about, again, one of the pillars of the Qlik framework of building an amazing team, integrated work and work rules and norms is a very critical thing. So you get together as a team and say, okay, how are we using AI? What are we using AI for? And how we evaluate the output?
(23:06-23:35) Daria Rudnik
What should never be done with AI? You should never fire a person with AI. You should never have a kind of empathetic conversation. Use AI when you need an empathetic conversation. But you can use it for automation. And then in some parts, you need to take this, what AI gives you, and evaluate it critically either by yourself or in a team settings. That's one of the things leaders need to do is get people together and agree on the norms
(23:35-23:41) Daria Rudnik
how they use AI and practice this skill of critically evaluating the AI outputs.
(23:42-24:08) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely, Daria. So let's understand your role in there. When do you come into the picture? Is it that a leader knows about these things when things are very good? As they say in medicine, prevention is better than cure. Do they come to you there or is it that it's all fire and the leader has just escaped from that place, you know, called workplace and come to you for understanding about teams? Do they cry also? Who are these leaders? Tell us a bit about that.
(24:09-24:30) Daria Rudnik
Well, I mean, I wish more people come to me at the early stage. And there were some leaders. I mean, I worked with a leader who just recently assembled a team, like a team that was responsible for a transformation for huge, like thousands of people organization. And they had to lead this information. And I need a strong team that can perform now.
(24:30-24:58) Daria Rudnik
So we went through those five pillars with clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing. We've done all that, and the team was set to go. That was kind of the ideal situation. It rarely happens. Very rare. In some cases, and in most cases, there was a leader, and like the leader of a team, the leader has this leader subordinate, and they make a lot of mistakes, or there are some issues, and a leader is not aware
(24:58-25:20) Daria Rudnik
fully aware of the problems and I want to help that leader because I mean I believe that that leader can be a good a good leader and they can grow into a good team so in most cases it's like that it's either an owner of the company who wants the team coaching for the executive team or it's a department head who wants
(25:20-25:45) Daria Rudnik
to support one of the teams on the organization and in that case like there was one case when an owners asked me to join uh it was it was pretty hard work to talk to a leader of this team like it's someone who really is in charge of the team that they they need help but once we talk about the benefits for them uh that they can have less work they can breathe more freely
(25:45-26:03) Daria Rudnik
They will have fun and they will love coming to work and all the people would love coming to work and they will achieve the ambitious goals that the owners of the company set in front of them. That thing starts to move. Absolutely, absolutely. Let's understand it from your book.
(26:04-26:31) Khudania Ajay
From your book, you showed that you are the author of Clicking and also the co-author of The AI Revolution and also the co-founder of SEO and founder of Hydra AI. Tell us about your book. Was it so easy to find these solutions for them? It means it is like someone else is creating the problem and Daria has to create the solutions for them. Do they really want to listen? Who is this book for?
(26:32-27:02) Daria Rudnik
Well, again, I wrote this book based on my experience as chief people officer, as now working with coaching and consulting. It's actually like 15 years and 15 plus years of my work. I've seen amazing teams. Like I'll tell you an example that really like is stuck with me is when CEO, it was a telecom company and this telecom company went through like very hard times. They had like very hard times in terms of economy and they had to cut costs.
(27:02-27:25) Daria Rudnik
what traditional organization does where they need to cut costs. They say, okay, we fire these kind of people. We cut these processes. We do that and we'll be fine. What this leader did is he came to multiple organizations, multiple units of the company. And this one, for example, was the contact center. So he came to this contact center and he said,
(27:25-27:51) Daria Rudnik
I know you're doing a great job in serving our customers. And they love talking to you. And you make an extra step to helping them. But when your conversation is too long, every minute costs us money. So combined, we spend a lot of money. And I don't want to tell you to cut your conversations. Because I know how important they are for you, for our customers, to have this relationship.
(27:51-28:13) Daria Rudnik
But I ask you to be mindful about the time and to cut the conversation time as much as you can without sacrificing the best service that you provide. So he was not imposing any rules. He was not cutting out any processes. He talked to people who shared the same vision.
(28:14-28:34) Daria Rudnik
And what they did, they listened and they cut the time of their conversations. And they saved tens of millions of dollars because of this one very open, very transparent conversation. And this thing only possible when you do have an amazing team. It's not possible when you, oh, I want to have a great team. Let's talk to my people. That will not work.
(28:34-28:48) Daria Rudnik
When you have the team that has like clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing, you can make this step and you can save thousands of dollars, millions of dollars on just one conversation.
(28:49-29:08) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely. Absolutely. Daria, there is much to learn from you about all these things. And I'm sure a lot of people, a lot of leaders all across the world in these changing times would want to connect with you, learn more about you, about the work you are doing, and also perhaps be your client. What's the best way for them to do so?
(29:09-29:37) Daria Rudnik
Well, I'm very accessible on LinkedIn. I'm always there. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. There's also my website, DariaRudnik.com. So please welcome and read my book. It's a go-to. I mean, it's very practical, very action-oriented. It really helps you build your strong team. Wonderful. With this, it's set up on this very special edition of the KJ Masterclass Live. Thank you so much indeed for joining us. Thank you.
Welcome to this very special edition of the KAJ Masterclass Live, the show which ensures that you profit from your time spent here with experts, either through their industry insights, information, or simply learning from them. And today we have with us Daria Rudnick, team architect, executive coach, and she's also the founder and CEO of Hydra AIs, and she helps overloaded leaders
(00:52-01:19) Khudania Ajay
build high trust, self-sufficient teams so they can get better results with less burnout. We'll learn about that. We'll learn about her framework for building such teams that leverage both human and artificial intelligence, practical strategies to combat cognitive overload, design organizing, energizing team rituals and lead with clarity through chaos. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks. It's great to be here.
(01:20-01:45) Khudania Ajay
You are welcome. Welcome to the show, Darya. Welcome to India in this online form. And I'm sure not just in India, but a lot of people, a lot of organizations, a lot of leaders across the world will benefit from what we are going to talk right now. We'll talk about how they can build teams that thrive even in chaos. But before that, let's talk a bit about your journey, your background, your story, so that people know who they are listening to.
(01:46-02:13) Daria Rudnik
Thanks. Well, my journey starts from, like, my career started at Deloitte. And I was very lucky to work for amazing companies like Deloitte. And then I moved to chief people office for mostly tech and telecom companies. And I've done lots of stuff there. I mean, you know that all in the corporate world, mergers and acquisitions, setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations. And through that journey, I saw, like, we've been through lots of
(02:13-02:35) Daria Rudnik
huge disruptions it was financial crisis for the banking industries and then i was helping leaders go through wars and pandemic and and again many many disruptions and the new upcoming disruption that really is going to be change the workplace is ai so while working with leaders as chief people officer and now as coach and consultant
(02:35-02:57) Daria Rudnik
I see how exhausted, tired, overloaded most leaders are. And why is that? Not only because of all the things happening around them, but also because they're trying to be good leaders for their teams. But instead of helping their teams, instead of helping empowering their teams, they're actually taking the load and carry the load
(02:57-03:17) Daria Rudnik
And the teams become less empowered and they just become overloaded. And I've seen the transformational change great teams can make on organizations when they build right, when they collaborate right. They can increase performance like three or four times. And I mean, I've seen that happening. I've helped that happen.
(03:17-03:45) Khudania Ajay
So that's kind of my story, starting from Deloitte up to chief people office and now helping leaders build amazing, strong teams that can survive and thrive in change and the area of destruction. Absolutely. Absolutely, Daria. Great things leaders are doing. Let's understand it better. You talk about, you know, leaders, overloaded leaders build high trust, self-sufficient teams. I want to understand this better.
(03:45-04:00) Khudania Ajay
What are these leaders overloaded with? Where have they been overloaded with? Because great resignation happened recently. Where were they so overloaded that they didn't notice this? Quite quitting is very much on.
(04:01-04:19) Khudania Ajay
Were they so overloaded that they didn't notice this? Then I want to understand what is it that they were so overloaded, except perhaps for, you know, looking at the bottom lines for the board or for some of the top guys and beyond and also looking at their own bank accounts.
(04:19-04:37) Khudania Ajay
Was this that overload or is it something beyond? Because it does not match. It does not match, you know, the talk they are doing. Help us understand from from that point of view, from the ground so that, you know, we can talk and understand the real problem. Is it that they are they are the real problems and not the teams?
(04:39-04:54) Daria Rudnik
Well, that is an amazing question. And I like your passion. There are lots of things happening. And mostly it's like once you step into the leadership position, you face multiple leadership paradoxes.
(04:54-05:10) Daria Rudnik
And the paradox, one of the paradoxes leaders face is, okay, how do I make this organization sustainable? How do I make it grow? How do I make it profitable? And how I can support my team members, how I can be an empathetic servant leaders so that they can grow.
(05:10-05:32) Daria Rudnik
And I work with like middle to like senior executive leaders. Okay, I'm biased. I have a coach. People come to me for help. So it means they want to change. I know there are other people out there. But those who do want to change, they make one mistake. Instead of letting teams...
(05:32-06:00) Daria Rudnik
make their own mistakes, learn as they go, make them, let them make decisions. They kind of think, I'll make all the decisions to help my team. I'll make my, like their life easier by making my life harder because I want to be a good leader. I want to help them. They have very, very good intentions on helping those people. But instead of like really growing them and really letting them fall down,
(06:00-06:11) Daria Rudnik
make mistakes, suffer from those, like take the consequences from those mistakes. But that's how we learn. They actually take all the responsibility on themselves.
(06:11-06:34) Daria Rudnik
And that mindset is kind of one of the biggest reasons they feel overloaded because, I mean, there's the economy, like you said, the people are residing, there was AI, there were financial, like difficult financial situations. But together with that, they take extra responsibility to help their teams. And that makes them overloaded.
(06:34-06:53) Daria Rudnik
Wow, what they can do and what they should do is stop trying to be heroic leader and try to save the world or save the company or save the team. They need to step up, I mean, and kind of step away aside and let the teams meet the world. It's hard because we never learned how to do that.
(06:53-07:20) Daria Rudnik
I mean, school is not a team. Family is not a team. University is not a team. All the team projects we make in school and do school, people just suffer through that. They don't like them. No one teaches you how to work in a team. And that's why I wrote my book, Clicking, which is exactly about the five steps you need to make to build a strong team. And one of those steps is kind of let people make mistakes. Let them...
(07:22-07:50) Khudania Ajay
Let them do. Let them make decisions. You don't have to make all the decisions. You don't have to do it all. People can do it on their own. Absolutely. Absolutely, Daria. I understand your position. Many of them are your clients. So you have to end. But they are not my clients. I'm not on the payroll of any of these leaders. My leaders are my audience. And I've got to speak for them.
(07:50-08:16) Khudania Ajay
And if at all, if I get paid from any of the leaders, I will certainly tell my audience that these people are sponsoring the show. So let's understand it better from again from a people's point of view. You are a people's officer, people, a chief people officer at earlier. Let's understand it from that. These leaders are very intelligent people. They come from very good institutes, management institutes.
(08:16-08:44) Khudania Ajay
They are well spoken, think good. They have been brought to their position. Everybody knows they are very intelligent and competent people. They go on very big forums. They speak, come out with ideas that industry are facing and give ideas for those solutions, even give ideas for the world. You know, they write great articles on newspapers, write great thought leadership articles on LinkedIn and everywhere.
(08:44-09:06) Khudania Ajay
You know, why is it that they don't implement or are not able to implement that same idea within their teams? What fails them? And if you are talking about building teams, they already have teams within their organization. Are they inefficient that they are not noticing those teams or those teams are inefficient, then you've got to fire them.
(09:06-09:22) Khudania Ajay
What other team do you want? You already got a team there and you are the leader of that organization. Help us understand from that. It is like, you know, creeping about things which do not exist and not noticing what you have. You've got the resources. Use them.
(09:22-09:49) Khudania Ajay
Use your power. You are the leader. Don't look at lead, you know, lead questions outside. Help us understand from those. I know there are many, many good leaders. I know them, but I want to talk about, you know, the ones who are not taking their, you know, taking the call that they should be talking about. Then they are inefficient from that point of view. Help us understand. You can take your stand, but I need to be answerable to my audience.
(09:50-09:56) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks. And I love that you mentioned that you said that they have teams. Well, to be honest, they don't.
(09:56-10:24) Daria Rudnik
What we do call a team is, I mean, you just get people together, you call them a team, and you kind of expect them to work as a team. That's not going to work. It's not working like that. Most functions, I mean, functional units, they're not teams. People just walk through the days and then wait to go home and be with their families and do what they like to do because they are not heard. They are not visible. They don't understand.
(10:24-10:40) Daria Rudnik
What the hell are they doing there? I mean, what's the purpose of my work? How it's connected to the big organizational purpose? They don't know that because to really be a team, like what is defined? How the team is defined? The team is defined by a shared purpose.
(10:40-11:02) Daria Rudnik
So if everyone on the team can speak pretty much the same words about why they are together, what is the shared purpose, why were they combined together as one team, and what is it that they collectively need to create together, that is the team. If you ask any person in the organization, like, why are you together?
(11:02-11:20) Daria Rudnik
because I am in the same org chart. We share the same square with same box on the org chart. That's not the team. So most kind of teams in organizations are not real teams. So the first thing is shared purpose. Everyone needs to understand what is the shared purpose for the team.
(11:20-11:37) Daria Rudnik
Then you can call it a team if it's interconnected. If you have several people doing different types of jobs and not talking to each other, that's not a team. It's a group of people working together, but it's not a team. They need to be interconnected and interdependent.
(11:38-12:04) Daria Rudnik
So these are the main elements of the team. And for leaders to build amazing teams, again, they need to be a clear purpose. They need to be linking connections. People need to be connected between themselves and with external organization. And I'll tell you an example of a good leader who like went to forums and did presentations and wrote articles. She was a, I mean, she is still a, she's a leader.
(12:04-12:29) Daria Rudnik
cybersecurity, chief cybersecurity office in the company. And again, she was really good with their teams. She gave one-to-ones, regular feedbacks for their team. But she was the only spokesperson from this team to the wide organization. Team members on this cybersecurity team didn't have a chance to go out there. I mean, they didn't really want it to because she did all the job and they felt, okay, let her do the job.
(12:30-12:49) Daria Rudnik
But eventually they started to feel isolated. They started to lose, okay, how are we connected with the organization? What are we doing here? What's the benefit? What's the value of our work? All because she was the spokesperson. She was talking. She was taking too much because she wanted to help them.
(12:49-13:05) Daria Rudnik
And they became disengaged. But once she stopped doing that, she let them go out there. She let them talk to the stakeholders. They became more engaged. So they, I mean, they got more work because they had to go to people and talk to them. They had to explain things.
(13:05-13:23) Daria Rudnik
But together with that, they had meaning and they became more engaged. That was linking connections is about connections between team members and with the wider organization. So that's kind of one of the steps leaders can do to make a work group and move it to a real team.
(13:24-13:46) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely. So how does that look at the solution? Some you gave, but even at the cost of repeating some of the things so that it gets emphasized. What is it that leaders can do with present teams? Because, see, there are top leaders management and then there are, you know, people along in the hierarchy. You have been a chief people, chief people's officer.
(13:46-14:05) Khudania Ajay
What's the job of people to make sure that the leaders get the team that they want? Everywhere you have got the human resource officer, chief human resource officer. It comes under CXO and all those things. Every year there are conferences. So many things are there. Why are they not?
(14:05-14:24) Khudania Ajay
getting the teams aligned with the vision of the leader or the management or the company itself? Is it that the leader has come from another planet and the team has come from any other planet and that is why they are not able to communicate or understand each other? Where is the problem?
(14:24-14:43) Khudania Ajay
Who should take where should the buck stop? Help us understand from there. And what is the option? Who has to find an option, the employee or the leader? Should the leader exit or should the employees exit? You are already removing a lot of employees, bringing in artificial intelligence.
(14:43-14:57) Khudania Ajay
And many a time people are also talking about why don't we automate the leadership itself. There was an experiment where AI CEO was made the leader and it performed better than human leader.
(14:58-15:17) Khudania Ajay
So should they leave out the leader and let the employees because AI is also knocking on your doors. So it's not only for employees, it's also for leaders. So we can't just keep on talking about people, whereas I may be very inefficient. Help us understand again from the solution point of view, Daria.
(15:18-15:47) Daria Rudnik
Great question. And the great question, like, are they coming from different planet? No, the problem is they're coming from the same planet, the same planet where they used to be employees. They didn't have a good leader. They didn't have a good team. They know what they need to be doing, but they don't have the how. No one taught them how to build amazing teams. And I mean, again, you're absolutely right saying that AI is coming for them. AI is coming for managers.
(15:48-16:04) Daria Rudnik
AI is coming for project managers. For those whose work is on delegation and control, that AI can do better than any human. What AI cannot do is, again, AI cannot build amazing teams.
(16:04-16:32) Daria Rudnik
And to build amazing teams, there are five simple steps. First is define the clear vision. Get together with the team, start talking, and define why you're here together. What's the meaning? What's the purpose of you being together? Make sure team members talk to each other. Because in remote and hybrid teams, team members talk to leaders. And that's it. They have one-to-ones. But they don't talk to each other. Make sure they talk to each other.
(16:32-16:51) Daria Rudnik
The third point is have integrated work rules. Create a team charter. What are the team norms? How do you communicate? What type of meetings are you having? Where do you communicate? On Slack, on WhatsApp, on email, on video, on Zoom chat? What is that? How do you work together?
(16:52-17:07) Daria Rudnik
The fourth one is collaborative decisions. How do you make decisions? Leaders don't have to make all decisions on their own. People can, and they can take ownership and they can say, I'll make this decision. I'll do that. They can initiate that.
(17:07-17:28) Daria Rudnik
And the final one is knowledge sharing and feedback. How do you learn together? How do you get feedback? How do you ask for feedback? How leaders ask for feedback? And how team members ask for feedback from each other? Those five steps are something that will move you towards a better team. And it will definitely make your people feel better on the team.
(17:29-17:53) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely. Absolutely. You are working, doing a lot of work in this field. Do you think a lot of leaders have already lost their positions? Why? Because AI is coming very strongly. The new generation does not want this sort of leaders. They want leaders who care about them. They want leaders who know how these people want to work.
(17:54-18:19) Khudania Ajay
They don't want all those washings, you know, green washing and all those things. They want the real picture for them, you know. Do you think that is why I ask that, is it already too late for such leaders or is it how do such leaders or even the good ones, there are most of them are good. How do they get prepared?
(18:19-18:42) Khudania Ajay
You know, for the future so that they have enough skills to deal with the new kind of workforce that is coming and also deal with AI that will get integrated. It's already getting it integrated into yourself. As you said, the future is already human plus AI. What should the leader do now? Time is running out for a lot of them.
(18:43-19:11) Daria Rudnik
Time is running, absolutely. We don't see yet the decline in managers positions, but we will. There was a research by Harvard Business Review together with GitHub when they analyzed how work is changing. And then what they found out is that, yes, developers can do more, but developers are not the ones to be replaced. The managers are. The managers who delegate and control, who bring no extra value rather than that.
(19:11-19:33) Daria Rudnik
So it means that if you are a manager, like you stop focusing on this bullshit, like controlling people, what they're doing, but you start on building teamwork, building collaboration, making sure people feel engaged and motivated, making sure they have this autonomy and making decisions, making mistakes. That's your role and AI cannot do that yet.
(19:34-20:01) Daria Rudnik
We do see some decline in junior positions. And yes, AI will affect that. But we will see a decline in managers' positions. Managers will have to go if all they do is delegation and control. So they need to switch to making sure how people work together. And one of the biggest risks AI brings us and what leaders need to monitor is critical thinking. Because we tend to...
(20:01-20:27) Daria Rudnik
over rely on AI and have this, there's a cognitive offloading effect when you use AI too much without kind of critically evaluating the outputs. And if you don't do that and just use the output that AI give you as a final decision, again, I've seen examples, I've worked with a team that used AI outputs and they became disengaged. They lost the spark, they lost the engagement because they were not engaged.
(20:27-20:57) Daria Rudnik
And what Lita did is she ensured that people get together and discuss. Again, we talk about working together, collaboration together. So they discussed as a team AI outputs and critically evaluating them and making sure the decision is human decision, not AI decision. And that's how they managed to get the most out of AI automating work, but not delegating decision-making, not delegating critical thinking. And they got the engagement back.
(20:58-21:09) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely, Daria. And talking of AI within the systems, you know, teams recently, I read an article about this whole word itself called works law.
(21:09-21:33) Khudania Ajay
What AI is doing is they are taking out a lot of things and technically anyone who is presenting whatever they had to present looks technically fine. But when you go through it and with the supervisor goes through, finds that it is nothing, but you don't know how to prove it. You know, anything is morally, it might be no wrong, but technically it is correct.
(21:33-22:02) Khudania Ajay
So in that aspect, AI is not proving to be a solution. It is proving to be a problem. Do you think the future leaders will get more inundated with such sort of a problem? It's a big study. If you do a bit of a search, you know, I was aghast to see this whole thing happening and happening over and over again that they had to come out with this report. How do you see this part of, you know, that the future is AI, you know, hybrid?
(22:02-22:16) Khudania Ajay
AI plus human. Again, human will be in problem because they thought that, you know, it will come. It will solve the problem. We remove the humans. But looks like humans will continue to stay with this sort of a situation called work slope.
(22:17-22:45) Daria Rudnik
Yeah, I've read the article. Yeah, I read this article. And I'm sure, I mean, we've all seen that. We've all got those emails or messages written by AI. What? You kind of read the words, but what? And again, it's not AI that's bad. Like you can give a hammer and people just can go smashing everything around with the hammer. It's not the hammer that's bad. It's that people don't know how to use it right. And again, what leaders together with teams need to discuss is
(22:45-23:06) Daria Rudnik
How do we use AI? And when we talk about, again, one of the pillars of the Qlik framework of building an amazing team, integrated work and work rules and norms is a very critical thing. So you get together as a team and say, okay, how are we using AI? What are we using AI for? And how we evaluate the output?
(23:06-23:35) Daria Rudnik
What should never be done with AI? You should never fire a person with AI. You should never have a kind of empathetic conversation. Use AI when you need an empathetic conversation. But you can use it for automation. And then in some parts, you need to take this, what AI gives you, and evaluate it critically either by yourself or in a team settings. That's one of the things leaders need to do is get people together and agree on the norms
(23:35-23:41) Daria Rudnik
how they use AI and practice this skill of critically evaluating the AI outputs.
(23:42-24:08) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely, Daria. So let's understand your role in there. When do you come into the picture? Is it that a leader knows about these things when things are very good? As they say in medicine, prevention is better than cure. Do they come to you there or is it that it's all fire and the leader has just escaped from that place, you know, called workplace and come to you for understanding about teams? Do they cry also? Who are these leaders? Tell us a bit about that.
(24:09-24:30) Daria Rudnik
Well, I mean, I wish more people come to me at the early stage. And there were some leaders. I mean, I worked with a leader who just recently assembled a team, like a team that was responsible for a transformation for huge, like thousands of people organization. And they had to lead this information. And I need a strong team that can perform now.
(24:30-24:58) Daria Rudnik
So we went through those five pillars with clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing. We've done all that, and the team was set to go. That was kind of the ideal situation. It rarely happens. Very rare. In some cases, and in most cases, there was a leader, and like the leader of a team, the leader has this leader subordinate, and they make a lot of mistakes, or there are some issues, and a leader is not aware
(24:58-25:20) Daria Rudnik
fully aware of the problems and I want to help that leader because I mean I believe that that leader can be a good a good leader and they can grow into a good team so in most cases it's like that it's either an owner of the company who wants the team coaching for the executive team or it's a department head who wants
(25:20-25:45) Daria Rudnik
to support one of the teams on the organization and in that case like there was one case when an owners asked me to join uh it was it was pretty hard work to talk to a leader of this team like it's someone who really is in charge of the team that they they need help but once we talk about the benefits for them uh that they can have less work they can breathe more freely
(25:45-26:03) Daria Rudnik
They will have fun and they will love coming to work and all the people would love coming to work and they will achieve the ambitious goals that the owners of the company set in front of them. That thing starts to move. Absolutely, absolutely. Let's understand it from your book.
(26:04-26:31) Khudania Ajay
From your book, you showed that you are the author of Clicking and also the co-author of The AI Revolution and also the co-founder of SEO and founder of Hydra AI. Tell us about your book. Was it so easy to find these solutions for them? It means it is like someone else is creating the problem and Daria has to create the solutions for them. Do they really want to listen? Who is this book for?
(26:32-27:02) Daria Rudnik
Well, again, I wrote this book based on my experience as chief people officer, as now working with coaching and consulting. It's actually like 15 years and 15 plus years of my work. I've seen amazing teams. Like I'll tell you an example that really like is stuck with me is when CEO, it was a telecom company and this telecom company went through like very hard times. They had like very hard times in terms of economy and they had to cut costs.
(27:02-27:25) Daria Rudnik
what traditional organization does where they need to cut costs. They say, okay, we fire these kind of people. We cut these processes. We do that and we'll be fine. What this leader did is he came to multiple organizations, multiple units of the company. And this one, for example, was the contact center. So he came to this contact center and he said,
(27:25-27:51) Daria Rudnik
I know you're doing a great job in serving our customers. And they love talking to you. And you make an extra step to helping them. But when your conversation is too long, every minute costs us money. So combined, we spend a lot of money. And I don't want to tell you to cut your conversations. Because I know how important they are for you, for our customers, to have this relationship.
(27:51-28:13) Daria Rudnik
But I ask you to be mindful about the time and to cut the conversation time as much as you can without sacrificing the best service that you provide. So he was not imposing any rules. He was not cutting out any processes. He talked to people who shared the same vision.
(28:14-28:34) Daria Rudnik
And what they did, they listened and they cut the time of their conversations. And they saved tens of millions of dollars because of this one very open, very transparent conversation. And this thing only possible when you do have an amazing team. It's not possible when you, oh, I want to have a great team. Let's talk to my people. That will not work.
(28:34-28:48) Daria Rudnik
When you have the team that has like clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing, you can make this step and you can save thousands of dollars, millions of dollars on just one conversation.
(28:49-29:08) Khudania Ajay
Absolutely. Absolutely. Daria, there is much to learn from you about all these things. And I'm sure a lot of people, a lot of leaders all across the world in these changing times would want to connect with you, learn more about you, about the work you are doing, and also perhaps be your client. What's the best way for them to do so?
(29:09-29:37) Daria Rudnik
Well, I'm very accessible on LinkedIn. I'm always there. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. There's also my website, DariaRudnik.com. So please welcome and read my book. It's a go-to. I mean, it's very practical, very action-oriented. It really helps you build your strong team. Wonderful. With this, it's set up on this very special edition of the KJ Masterclass Live. Thank you so much indeed for joining us. Thank you.