Leading Visionaries Podcast
Why Leadership Isn’t About Having All the Answers with Daria Rudnik
What if the biggest leadership mistake isn’t doing too little but trying to do too much alone? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Daria Rudnik, former Chief People Officer and ex-Deloitte professional, who shares a powerful shift in modern leadership. Drawing from her global executive experience and transition from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship, Daria breaks down what it really takes to lead in uncertainty, reduce overwhelm, and create teams that thrive without constant direction.
This conversation is a must-listen for leaders who feel stretched, responsible for everything, and unsure how to keep their teams engaged in a rapidly changing world.
What You Will Learn
This conversation is a must-listen for leaders who feel stretched, responsible for everything, and unsure how to keep their teams engaged in a rapidly changing world.
What You Will Learn
- How leadership is often developed later in life through experience, not just natural ability.
- What it means to uncover a clear vision and why clarity is the key to execution.
- How external challenges can accelerate major life and business decisions.
- Why trying to do everything at once slows growth and how focus creates momentum.
- How to determine when to pivot versus when to keep going in business or leadership.
- What separates disengaged teams from high-performing, self-sufficient ones.
- Why modern leadership is shifting away from control and toward collaboration.
- How leaders can create environments where teams feel empowered and motivated.
- What causes employee disengagement and how leaders unintentionally contribute to it.
- Why clarity remains one of the biggest challenges even for experienced leaders.
(00:07-00:30) Intro
Welcome to the Leading Visionaries podcast, featuring stellar conversations with emerging and established leading visionaries. Thanks for joining us today as we celebrate and spotlight the leading visionaries who are thinking differently, seeing new possibilities, have the courage to dream big, take inspired action, and create conscious change all around the world. Now, here's your host, Angel B. Hartwell.
(00:33-00:55) Anjel B. Hartwell
Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries podcast. Today we welcome our special guest Daria Rudnik.
(00:55-01:25) Anjel B. Hartwell
Daria is a team architect and executive leadership coach, author of Clicking, and co-author of The AI Revolution. A former chief people officer and ex-Deloitte professional, she brings over 15 years of international executive experience. Having lived in three countries and worked with clients across six continents, Daria has helped leaders from Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups navigate global financial crises, wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
(01:25-01:42) Anjel B. Hartwell
Daria helps leaders build high-performing teams in a world of rapid change and disruption. She does this through a mix of team and leadership coaching and an AI-powered coaching tool that she developed. And I do have to say, before I welcome her to the show...
(01:42-02:05) Anjel B. Hartwell
when i was reading about you know when i was talking about this show is about courage and clarity and confidence daria is coming to me today from israel where we may get interrupted at any point in time because there's a war going on over there so we're really excited to have you here today welcome daria and we're going to hold the space that that doesn't happen
(02:06-02:13) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks, Angela. I'm so excited to be here today. I love listening to your show and being here as a guest is a great honor. Thank you.
(02:14-02:36) Anjel B. Hartwell
Yeah, beautiful. Well, I want to start our time together talking to you about leadership, because obviously this is something that is near and dear to your heart. Were you the child who was the leader in your family or on the playground or in your class, or was leadership something that you grew into or got trained into as a result of your life trajectory? Yeah.
(02:38-02:48) Daria Rudnik
I was never a leader on a playground. I was kind of clumsy and more into being reading books, doing my homework.
(02:49-03:14) Daria Rudnik
rather than playing outside, which is not because I loved learning, but it's because I never felt like being leading or even sometimes being accepted on the playground. So leadership is something that came to me later in my university and corporate experience when I was focusing on building myself and building my career.
(03:15-03:44) Daria Rudnik
Beautiful. And so I'd love to have you just share with our listeners maybe like the first experience of leadership that you stepped into and what that was like for you. Well, the first time I realized I do have some leadership skills and I can be a leader was when my boss told me, stop. The way she said it was kind of funny. We were in some...
(03:44-04:00) Daria Rudnik
interaction, onboarding some new employees. I was a learning manager there and I was kind of helping them around. And she said something like, stop leading. We don't need her to lead. We need them to show up and to see how they react.
(04:01-04:18) Daria Rudnik
And I was kind of thinking, okay, what does she mean? Am I a leader? Can I lead? Am I a leader? Can I be a leader? And things like that were in my head. And that moment I started to think, okay, I can't be a leader. I have something in me. So I need to be in control of that and I can develop it. Beautiful.
(04:18-04:46) Anjel B. Hartwell
So let's talk about vision next. Is that, again, something that you feel was part of your childhood? Like, are you a natural visionary or did vision and coming into the role of being a visionary again happen later in your trajectory? Well, to me, vision is something that kind of consciously, like, I understand this is my vision. I can articulate that.
(04:46-05:05) Daria Rudnik
Like while being a child, university, like early years in my career, I had ideas, but I wouldn't be able to call them vision because I could not articulate them. Those kind of feelings or directions that I wanted to go. And I did went through some exercises with,
(05:07-05:37) Daria Rudnik
trying to uncover my vision. And that's slowly step by step. It didn't happen straight away, but slowly it happened. And now I see something like helping leaders feel well and perform well at work because that's where we spend most of our times, most of our lives. And we deserve to be happy at work. We deserve to have happy employees.
(05:37-05:48) Daria Rudnik
It's great when we have so many happy people producing amazing products to make their customers happy. So it's a win-win-win situation. Beautiful. I love it. That's a beautiful vision.
(05:48-06:17) Anjel B. Hartwell
So, you know, it's interesting that you said that you did work to uncover the vision. For some of our guests and some of our listeners, and for me as the host, I receive vision. And for others like yourself, you uncover vision. But, you know, the truth here is that the vision is there. It's there somewhere, right? It's either something that you receive or you uncover. So I'm curious, what were some of the things that you...
(06:17-06:20) Anjel B. Hartwell
engaged in to uncover your vision.
(06:23-06:48) Daria Rudnik
Thinking about things I love doing most. Thinking about things that I help people with. Thinking about things that people come to me for advice or for help. Kind of getting it all together helps me understand what is that that I can bring the most value. And that also will make me really happy.
(06:49-06:55) Anjel B. Hartwell
Well, I love that you're continually bringing up the idea of being happy.
(06:55-07:25) Anjel B. Hartwell
So sometimes when we get a vision, we're like, oh my God, I don't want to do that, right? Sometimes the vision seems big. It seems really big. And so your vision to help people be happy at work is a pretty big vision. What inspired you to then say yes to that vision once that vision kind of got uncovered? What was in you that said, okay, yes, this is where I'm going to put my energy, my focus, my time, my intellect, my intuition, my creativity, right?
(07:26-07:51) Daria Rudnik
It didn't come out of nowhere. I was doing that. It was part of my work. It wasn't just, like I said, I didn't realize I was doing that. But once I got more clarity on what is it I'm doing and what is it that brings me joy, when I have this clarity and I have this vision, yeah, for sure, that's what I do. And that's what I like to keep doing. And I want to do it for more and more people.
(07:53-08:23) Daria Rudnik
So you have your own company now, right? And so part of this journey that you've been on was actually obviously getting the vision for the company. So tell us a little bit about that story. That is a hard question for me because my previous career was chief people officer in tech and telecom companies. And I was pretty inconsistent with my vision, helping people feel well at work and perform well at work and be happy at work. And that's what I was doing.
(08:23-08:44) Daria Rudnik
And when I said my business, I was thinking, okay, well, how does it translate to my business? What is it I'm doing? But to be honest, it's just the next step. It's not something completely different. I keep doing what I'm doing. I keep helping leaders. I coach leaders. I coach teams so that they feel well and perform well at work, that they work.
(08:44-09:13) Daria Rudnik
build amazing teams that collaborate and communicate. And again, that are happy to wake up on Monday morning and join their teams. So it's basically a continuum. It's something that I keep doing first as an executive and now as a business owner. Yeah, beautiful. So at what point did you make the decision to leave your executive position and step into business ownership? Oh, that is something that came to me.
(09:14-09:40) Daria Rudnik
I tried to do that several times, to be honest. But once you get an offer and say, here's your paycheck every month, very nice paycheck. I mean, it's hard to say no to that. And especially it's hard to quit. But four years ago, I moved from Moscow, Russia to Israel, quit my corporate career and decided that this is the moment.
(09:40-09:57) Anjel B. Hartwell
All right. Was there something internally that was, like, calling you to that moment? Or it was a combination of external things going on? Like, help us to understand. Because a lot of people can have vision...
(09:57-10:12) Anjel B. Hartwell
But they put it off. They put it off. They put it off. They put it off. So what was the indicator this is the moment for me to say yes to my vision and start to take the steps to put something in place to start my own business?
(10:12-10:37) Daria Rudnik
I love that question. And that's really a great question. And I had this vision of finally stepping out of my corporate career. And I was building my business together and parallel with my corporate job, which is not easy, but I thought I'll build it. And then once it's up and running, I can quit my corporate job and start my business. But things happen that are out of our control. Yeah.
(10:37-10:52) Daria Rudnik
At that time, the war between Russia and Ukraine started and I decided, okay, it's time for me to move somewhere else. We moved to Israel. And okay, what's the point? Let's do what I always wanted to do.
(10:52-11:11) Daria Rudnik
Beautiful. It's both. It's a combination of steps and following my vision, knowing that I want it, but also some external push that probably made it faster. So when you made that decision,
(11:11-11:30) Anjel B. Hartwell
This is kind of a trajectory for any visionary. First, you have to say yes to the vision, and then you have to start taking actions, especially if your vision is starting a business or starting some kind of initiative outside of what you're used to generating money in.
(11:30-11:47) Anjel B. Hartwell
like one of the first steps is figuring out what you're offering. So can you share a little bit about your process in discerning what you were going to offer to the people that you wanted to serve? Oh, it's still a work in progress. And I don't know, is it just me or it's just...
(11:48-12:12) Daria Rudnik
The way it works, it always, some here and there, again, same process. The things that I'm doing and enjoy doing, things where I can bring the most value to my clients, kind of combination of those two, they define my offering, they define my value proposition, they define the focus of my business.
(12:12-12:33) Daria Rudnik
And when the world changes, this also changes a little bit. And now again, with all this uncertainty, with all this instability, I see a lot of leaders overloaded and stretched. And okay, I want to help them. And let's focus on that. This is my focus, helping leaders feel well in this uncertainty and turbulence.
(12:33-12:55) Anjel B. Hartwell
Yeah, beautiful. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk more about your AI tool. We're going to talk about your book. And we're going to let people know where they can find out more about you. But right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role of leading other visionaries? Consider joining our community and sharing your feedback and takeaways from each episode.
(12:55-13:20) Anjel B. Hartwell
If you're interested in finding out more about how you can receive support for getting your vision out of the air and onto the ground in a way that's both impact and income producing, the best support is found in collaboration with other leading visionaries, which is why we've created the Creative Age Leader Lab. Discover more about this opportunity at leadingvisionariespodcast.com forward slash creative age leader lab.
(13:21-13:46) Anjel B. Hartwell
Or you can click the Connect with Angel button on the website to apply and qualify for a conversation for more personalized access and support. Be sure to share this show and your own spirals of influence with the people you think might benefit from our content. I want to say a huge thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating, and reviewing. We're welcoming thousands and thousands of downloads from all over the world. And I want to shout out this week to our listeners in Russia.
(13:46-13:58) Anjel B. Hartwell
And our listeners in Israel, they're both on the list, as well as our new listeners coming in from Turkey. And we will be right back with Daria Rudnick.
(14:08-14:23) Intro
The Leading Visionaries podcast is brought to you by the Creative Age Consulting Group. Are you the one who thinks differently? Who is called to create a significant conscious change in the world? Who is seeing and dreaming of a better way for your industry, your community, humanity?
(14:23-14:47) Intro
Creative Age Consulting Group is hired to guide leading visionaries just like you who want to break through the static in order to clearly express and confidently enroll support for their vision in a way that makes it inevitable that it will come to pass. Your word is your wand. And as the leader, your ability to articulate and communicate your vision is essential to its materialization and monetization.
(14:47-15:04) Intro
Please enjoy with our compliments a free copy of the book Be Heard by Millions and Live Your Destiny, which was a number one new release in three categories to get you started. The book is yours by visiting gift.leadingvisionariespodcast.com.
(15:23-15:40) Anjel B. Hartwell
And we are back with Daria Rudnick. You can find out more about her and her services at DariaRudnick.com. We will have that for you in the show notes. It's pretty easy. Just her name, DariaRudnick.com. And of course, you can also connect with her on LinkedIn.
(15:40-15:54) Anjel B. Hartwell
So before we went to the break, Daria, I mentioned that we would talk about your book, Clicking. So let's talk about what inspired that. Like, where did the vision come from for this book and also the other book, The AI Revolution? Yeah.
(15:56-16:15) Daria Rudnik
The book clicking, I wanted to write a book for quite a while. And I started writing a book in 2020. Didn't finish it. Started again. 2022. Didn't finish it. Like all went into trash. Nothing survived. But in 2024, I...
(16:15-16:33) Daria Rudnik
I had a clear vision. That's when I finished my book. Because having the idea I want to write a book, but having no clarity, it didn't help me to write a book. But having this clarity about what is this book about? Who is this book for?
(16:33-17:00) Daria Rudnik
What are the important steps leaders need to take in order to build self-sufficient teams? Because the book is about overloaded leaders, how they can build self-sufficient teams. So what are the steps they can take to build those kind of teams? When I have this clarity, nine months later, the book was out there. Nine months. Perfect. So it's funny. Women often take nine months to get things birthed, right? Yeah.
(17:01-17:23) Anjel B. Hartwell
All right. Beautiful. Well, congratulations on the book. And one of the things that we visionary leaders often need to do is secure resources for our vision, secure resources for, in your case, you want clients, you obviously want book sales and things like that. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about your
(17:23-17:49) Anjel B. Hartwell
into securing the resources that you required in order to not only make the leap to start your business, but also to support a book launch and all of the rest of the things that go along? I love the question about securing resources and kind of having energy to do many things. And I recently, probably a year, I started practicing Tai Chi.
(17:50-18:12) Daria Rudnik
And in Tai Chi, there is a kind of understanding that you can do an action, but then you need to release the tension and let it happen, like what you pushed into the world. So what I do is I'm not trying to push everything at once.
(18:13-18:33) Daria Rudnik
I'm focusing on a book. I'm writing a book. I'm pushing it out into the world. And then I'm releasing it and seeing, okay, what's happening? And it frees some time and some energy. Okay, now what do I want to do next? I want to write an article for Forbes Coaches Council. Or I want to focus on something else. Or I want to be a podcast guest.
(18:34-18:48) Daria Rudnik
So it's doing one step at a time. And the compound effect is what actually makes my business moving. But it's never like doing everything at once, no matter how I want it. Yeah.
(18:49-19:14) Anjel B. Hartwell
Well, you know, what I love is that when I was asking about resources, I was really talking about money primarily. However, you remind us all, and this is something I remind my clients as well, is that money is just one of the resources that we have. We have our time, our energy, our attention, our creativity. We also have our support system, whether it's colleagues or...
(19:14-19:35) Anjel B. Hartwell
team members or anything that any other entities, stakeholders that come in to support the vision. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about also this idea of sometimes as creators, as leaders, as visionaries, we will start something and then it ends up in the trash. Yeah.
(19:35-20:02) Anjel B. Hartwell
So a lot of times people only see the big successes, right? They only see the bestselling book. They only see the, you know, 15 or 20 or however many awards that you've won for podcasts like I have, but they don't often see what we've thrown in the trash. And so I'd love to have you speak a little bit about that letting go process about like, how do you think that
(20:02-20:32) Daria Rudnik
What's your thinking when you get to a place where it's like, oh, this isn't going to work. I've got to throw it in the trash. I'm pretty easy on, so to say, failure. I don't see, like, if I haven't finished the book now, it is a failure. I don't see that I've tried a new resource to get new clients and it didn't go well. And I spent, like, invested some money there and some time there. It's a failure. It's...
(20:32-21:01) Daria Rudnik
I mean, you're going to hate me, but it's a learning opportunity. No, I don't actually hate you. I don't hate you at all. It is a learning opportunity. It sounds like a cliche. It is. And I cannot do anything about it. I'm trying new things. I'm ready to experiment. I like experimenting. I like trying. And if something doesn't go right, it's okay. If something doesn't go right for a long period of time, that makes me feel bad for sure.
(21:02-21:29) Daria Rudnik
Right. So how do you know when it's time, when it's time to say, oh, we've got to stop this and start something else? Oh, that's such a good question. Well, I can't say I have a clear answer to that. Well, but I have a kind of a few questions that I ask myself. The first question is, is this like the thing I'm doing, is this the critical for the bigger goal for the vision to succeed? Yeah.
(21:29-21:50) Daria Rudnik
The second one is, am I learning something while doing that? And the third one, does it give me energy or drains me? So kind of a combination of those answers gives me the overall understanding, okay, whether I should push it forward or just leave it aside.
(21:50-22:12) Anjel B. Hartwell
Yeah, beautiful. Well, in the last little bit that we have here, what I'd love to ask you is who are the people that you are most interested in working with, like having them decide to hire you? Where are they located in their leadership or in their vision or in their flow of bringing initiatives out into the world?
(22:13-22:42) Daria Rudnik
Well, I worked a lot with leaders from scale-ups and fast-grown companies. And I know the tensions and I know the challenge that they're facing when everything is changing so fast, when you don't know the next step, you cannot tell your people what the next step will be and you feel bad about that. And kind of changing this narrative of me as a leader being like, I need to be a hero. I need to have all the answers. I need to make tough decisions.
(22:43-23:00) Daria Rudnik
And making the shift to being a facilitator for the team so that together with the team, they can make those decisions. Together with the team, they can figure out the next step. Going out to the team members saying, I don't know that yet. Let's get together and figure it out together.
(23:00-23:28) Anjel B. Hartwell
So I believe that the era of heroic leadership is gone. Now it's time for empowered teams, and it's especially important for leaders in fast-growing companies that are navigating uncertainties and stretching things from multiple demands. I love that comment, that you believe that the era of heroic leadership is over, and it's the new era of empowered teams. So that speaks to how do we source...
(23:28-23:57) Anjel B. Hartwell
in the form of teams that are going to buy into the vision. This goes back to enrollment as well. Securing resources includes enrolling people in your vision, including team members. So talk a little bit about your experience in your own business or working with the teams that you work with around bringing out the best in people and bringing the best people in to work with you to bring your vision to reality.
(24:01-24:28) Daria Rudnik
The Gallup research tells us that only about 30% of people are engaged at work. And what does it tell us? That people are disengaged? That we cannot motivate our people? Well, to me, it actually tells that organizations are great at demotivating and disengaging people because 100% of people joining your company are engaged and motivated. What happens to them later? They become disengaged.
(24:28-24:56) Daria Rudnik
So for leaders to have those engaged employees, they join your vision. They want to contribute. Let them be active contributors. So when leaders are overloaded, teams become disengaged. When leaders go to their teams, work it out together, they have more time to breathe and they have more energy and teams stay engaged as they join the company. Beautiful. I love that.
(24:57-25:19) Anjel B. Hartwell
Great. So one aspect of being a leader and a leading visionary is speaking your vision into reality, right? And so what I'd love to have you do right now for us, Daria, is speak your vision into reality for your company. Where do you want to see yourself in the next maybe, say, three years with your company?
(25:21-25:50) Daria Rudnik
Again, I want to help. I want to work with overloaded leaders and help them feel well and feel supported by their teams. I want them to see the teams that are happy to go to work and they are valued and they are empowered and they can make decisions. Leadership is not something that's done to them, but they are leading themselves. They're leading organizations. They're growing organizations. I want to do that for every English-speaking business I can reach.
(25:53-25:59) Anjel B. Hartwell
Beautiful. Tell us about the scale of your businesses that you work with.
(25:59-26:29) Daria Rudnik
Medium-sized companies, 100, 900 employees growing. Like the most important thing is if you're navigating uncertainty, if you don't know what's the next step, if your bosses want great performance, your employees want you to motivate them, your customers want amazing, like incredible service from you, your shareholders want money. When you stretch things, that's where either I or my book can help you.
(26:29-26:51) Anjel B. Hartwell
Beautiful. All right. Well, in the last little bit that we have here, I'm curious, as you're thinking about this vision for yourself and for your business, what would you say right now is on the radar for you as your biggest challenge to bringing this vision to life? That's a great question.
(26:54-27:22) Daria Rudnik
I think my biggest challenge is clarity. With every step, with every conversation, with every client engagement, I gain more and more clarity. But I still feel that I need more of that to be able to articulate it clearly to me and to my potential clients. Beautiful. All right. Well, I want to say thank you for you showing up in the middle of a war zone.
(27:22-27:43) Anjel B. Hartwell
to do this interview that's the first time I've had an interview with a guest who's in the middle of a war zone and we're thankful to all of the angels that are surrounding you that have kept you from having to go to the shelter right now and really grateful for your contribution to today's show listeners we do love feedback please let us know what you thought of today's
(27:43-28:12) Anjel B. Hartwell
Episode by joining our community, sharing your takeaways, asking questions or submitting guest suggestions. You can weave your visionary thread into our fabric by opting in on our website at leadingvisionariespodcast.com or by interacting with us on social. Look for the handle at leadingvisionariespodcast across all the major platforms. Thanks so much for tuning in. Keep your eyes, ears and hearts open. And remember, you are here to create conscious change.
(28:23-28:49) Intro
Thanks for tuning in, downloading, and listening. Be sure to rate and review Leading Visionaries on Apple Podcasts and share with other people you know who can benefit from today's episode. Leading Visionaries is the premier podcast series for informing, activating, and inspiring the leading visionaries who are called to create conscious change and know that now is the best time to welcome wealth and cultivate a web of collaborative support to bring their vision to life.
(28:49-28:58) Intro
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Welcome to the Leading Visionaries podcast, featuring stellar conversations with emerging and established leading visionaries. Thanks for joining us today as we celebrate and spotlight the leading visionaries who are thinking differently, seeing new possibilities, have the courage to dream big, take inspired action, and create conscious change all around the world. Now, here's your host, Angel B. Hartwell.
(00:33-00:55) Anjel B. Hartwell
Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries podcast. Today we welcome our special guest Daria Rudnik.
(00:55-01:25) Anjel B. Hartwell
Daria is a team architect and executive leadership coach, author of Clicking, and co-author of The AI Revolution. A former chief people officer and ex-Deloitte professional, she brings over 15 years of international executive experience. Having lived in three countries and worked with clients across six continents, Daria has helped leaders from Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups navigate global financial crises, wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
(01:25-01:42) Anjel B. Hartwell
Daria helps leaders build high-performing teams in a world of rapid change and disruption. She does this through a mix of team and leadership coaching and an AI-powered coaching tool that she developed. And I do have to say, before I welcome her to the show...
(01:42-02:05) Anjel B. Hartwell
when i was reading about you know when i was talking about this show is about courage and clarity and confidence daria is coming to me today from israel where we may get interrupted at any point in time because there's a war going on over there so we're really excited to have you here today welcome daria and we're going to hold the space that that doesn't happen
(02:06-02:13) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks, Angela. I'm so excited to be here today. I love listening to your show and being here as a guest is a great honor. Thank you.
(02:14-02:36) Anjel B. Hartwell
Yeah, beautiful. Well, I want to start our time together talking to you about leadership, because obviously this is something that is near and dear to your heart. Were you the child who was the leader in your family or on the playground or in your class, or was leadership something that you grew into or got trained into as a result of your life trajectory? Yeah.
(02:38-02:48) Daria Rudnik
I was never a leader on a playground. I was kind of clumsy and more into being reading books, doing my homework.
(02:49-03:14) Daria Rudnik
rather than playing outside, which is not because I loved learning, but it's because I never felt like being leading or even sometimes being accepted on the playground. So leadership is something that came to me later in my university and corporate experience when I was focusing on building myself and building my career.
(03:15-03:44) Daria Rudnik
Beautiful. And so I'd love to have you just share with our listeners maybe like the first experience of leadership that you stepped into and what that was like for you. Well, the first time I realized I do have some leadership skills and I can be a leader was when my boss told me, stop. The way she said it was kind of funny. We were in some...
(03:44-04:00) Daria Rudnik
interaction, onboarding some new employees. I was a learning manager there and I was kind of helping them around. And she said something like, stop leading. We don't need her to lead. We need them to show up and to see how they react.
(04:01-04:18) Daria Rudnik
And I was kind of thinking, okay, what does she mean? Am I a leader? Can I lead? Am I a leader? Can I be a leader? And things like that were in my head. And that moment I started to think, okay, I can't be a leader. I have something in me. So I need to be in control of that and I can develop it. Beautiful.
(04:18-04:46) Anjel B. Hartwell
So let's talk about vision next. Is that, again, something that you feel was part of your childhood? Like, are you a natural visionary or did vision and coming into the role of being a visionary again happen later in your trajectory? Well, to me, vision is something that kind of consciously, like, I understand this is my vision. I can articulate that.
(04:46-05:05) Daria Rudnik
Like while being a child, university, like early years in my career, I had ideas, but I wouldn't be able to call them vision because I could not articulate them. Those kind of feelings or directions that I wanted to go. And I did went through some exercises with,
(05:07-05:37) Daria Rudnik
trying to uncover my vision. And that's slowly step by step. It didn't happen straight away, but slowly it happened. And now I see something like helping leaders feel well and perform well at work because that's where we spend most of our times, most of our lives. And we deserve to be happy at work. We deserve to have happy employees.
(05:37-05:48) Daria Rudnik
It's great when we have so many happy people producing amazing products to make their customers happy. So it's a win-win-win situation. Beautiful. I love it. That's a beautiful vision.
(05:48-06:17) Anjel B. Hartwell
So, you know, it's interesting that you said that you did work to uncover the vision. For some of our guests and some of our listeners, and for me as the host, I receive vision. And for others like yourself, you uncover vision. But, you know, the truth here is that the vision is there. It's there somewhere, right? It's either something that you receive or you uncover. So I'm curious, what were some of the things that you...
(06:17-06:20) Anjel B. Hartwell
engaged in to uncover your vision.
(06:23-06:48) Daria Rudnik
Thinking about things I love doing most. Thinking about things that I help people with. Thinking about things that people come to me for advice or for help. Kind of getting it all together helps me understand what is that that I can bring the most value. And that also will make me really happy.
(06:49-06:55) Anjel B. Hartwell
Well, I love that you're continually bringing up the idea of being happy.
(06:55-07:25) Anjel B. Hartwell
So sometimes when we get a vision, we're like, oh my God, I don't want to do that, right? Sometimes the vision seems big. It seems really big. And so your vision to help people be happy at work is a pretty big vision. What inspired you to then say yes to that vision once that vision kind of got uncovered? What was in you that said, okay, yes, this is where I'm going to put my energy, my focus, my time, my intellect, my intuition, my creativity, right?
(07:26-07:51) Daria Rudnik
It didn't come out of nowhere. I was doing that. It was part of my work. It wasn't just, like I said, I didn't realize I was doing that. But once I got more clarity on what is it I'm doing and what is it that brings me joy, when I have this clarity and I have this vision, yeah, for sure, that's what I do. And that's what I like to keep doing. And I want to do it for more and more people.
(07:53-08:23) Daria Rudnik
So you have your own company now, right? And so part of this journey that you've been on was actually obviously getting the vision for the company. So tell us a little bit about that story. That is a hard question for me because my previous career was chief people officer in tech and telecom companies. And I was pretty inconsistent with my vision, helping people feel well at work and perform well at work and be happy at work. And that's what I was doing.
(08:23-08:44) Daria Rudnik
And when I said my business, I was thinking, okay, well, how does it translate to my business? What is it I'm doing? But to be honest, it's just the next step. It's not something completely different. I keep doing what I'm doing. I keep helping leaders. I coach leaders. I coach teams so that they feel well and perform well at work, that they work.
(08:44-09:13) Daria Rudnik
build amazing teams that collaborate and communicate. And again, that are happy to wake up on Monday morning and join their teams. So it's basically a continuum. It's something that I keep doing first as an executive and now as a business owner. Yeah, beautiful. So at what point did you make the decision to leave your executive position and step into business ownership? Oh, that is something that came to me.
(09:14-09:40) Daria Rudnik
I tried to do that several times, to be honest. But once you get an offer and say, here's your paycheck every month, very nice paycheck. I mean, it's hard to say no to that. And especially it's hard to quit. But four years ago, I moved from Moscow, Russia to Israel, quit my corporate career and decided that this is the moment.
(09:40-09:57) Anjel B. Hartwell
All right. Was there something internally that was, like, calling you to that moment? Or it was a combination of external things going on? Like, help us to understand. Because a lot of people can have vision...
(09:57-10:12) Anjel B. Hartwell
But they put it off. They put it off. They put it off. They put it off. So what was the indicator this is the moment for me to say yes to my vision and start to take the steps to put something in place to start my own business?
(10:12-10:37) Daria Rudnik
I love that question. And that's really a great question. And I had this vision of finally stepping out of my corporate career. And I was building my business together and parallel with my corporate job, which is not easy, but I thought I'll build it. And then once it's up and running, I can quit my corporate job and start my business. But things happen that are out of our control. Yeah.
(10:37-10:52) Daria Rudnik
At that time, the war between Russia and Ukraine started and I decided, okay, it's time for me to move somewhere else. We moved to Israel. And okay, what's the point? Let's do what I always wanted to do.
(10:52-11:11) Daria Rudnik
Beautiful. It's both. It's a combination of steps and following my vision, knowing that I want it, but also some external push that probably made it faster. So when you made that decision,
(11:11-11:30) Anjel B. Hartwell
This is kind of a trajectory for any visionary. First, you have to say yes to the vision, and then you have to start taking actions, especially if your vision is starting a business or starting some kind of initiative outside of what you're used to generating money in.
(11:30-11:47) Anjel B. Hartwell
like one of the first steps is figuring out what you're offering. So can you share a little bit about your process in discerning what you were going to offer to the people that you wanted to serve? Oh, it's still a work in progress. And I don't know, is it just me or it's just...
(11:48-12:12) Daria Rudnik
The way it works, it always, some here and there, again, same process. The things that I'm doing and enjoy doing, things where I can bring the most value to my clients, kind of combination of those two, they define my offering, they define my value proposition, they define the focus of my business.
(12:12-12:33) Daria Rudnik
And when the world changes, this also changes a little bit. And now again, with all this uncertainty, with all this instability, I see a lot of leaders overloaded and stretched. And okay, I want to help them. And let's focus on that. This is my focus, helping leaders feel well in this uncertainty and turbulence.
(12:33-12:55) Anjel B. Hartwell
Yeah, beautiful. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk more about your AI tool. We're going to talk about your book. And we're going to let people know where they can find out more about you. But right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role of leading other visionaries? Consider joining our community and sharing your feedback and takeaways from each episode.
(12:55-13:20) Anjel B. Hartwell
If you're interested in finding out more about how you can receive support for getting your vision out of the air and onto the ground in a way that's both impact and income producing, the best support is found in collaboration with other leading visionaries, which is why we've created the Creative Age Leader Lab. Discover more about this opportunity at leadingvisionariespodcast.com forward slash creative age leader lab.
(13:21-13:46) Anjel B. Hartwell
Or you can click the Connect with Angel button on the website to apply and qualify for a conversation for more personalized access and support. Be sure to share this show and your own spirals of influence with the people you think might benefit from our content. I want to say a huge thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating, and reviewing. We're welcoming thousands and thousands of downloads from all over the world. And I want to shout out this week to our listeners in Russia.
(13:46-13:58) Anjel B. Hartwell
And our listeners in Israel, they're both on the list, as well as our new listeners coming in from Turkey. And we will be right back with Daria Rudnick.
(14:08-14:23) Intro
The Leading Visionaries podcast is brought to you by the Creative Age Consulting Group. Are you the one who thinks differently? Who is called to create a significant conscious change in the world? Who is seeing and dreaming of a better way for your industry, your community, humanity?
(14:23-14:47) Intro
Creative Age Consulting Group is hired to guide leading visionaries just like you who want to break through the static in order to clearly express and confidently enroll support for their vision in a way that makes it inevitable that it will come to pass. Your word is your wand. And as the leader, your ability to articulate and communicate your vision is essential to its materialization and monetization.
(14:47-15:04) Intro
Please enjoy with our compliments a free copy of the book Be Heard by Millions and Live Your Destiny, which was a number one new release in three categories to get you started. The book is yours by visiting gift.leadingvisionariespodcast.com.
(15:23-15:40) Anjel B. Hartwell
And we are back with Daria Rudnick. You can find out more about her and her services at DariaRudnick.com. We will have that for you in the show notes. It's pretty easy. Just her name, DariaRudnick.com. And of course, you can also connect with her on LinkedIn.
(15:40-15:54) Anjel B. Hartwell
So before we went to the break, Daria, I mentioned that we would talk about your book, Clicking. So let's talk about what inspired that. Like, where did the vision come from for this book and also the other book, The AI Revolution? Yeah.
(15:56-16:15) Daria Rudnik
The book clicking, I wanted to write a book for quite a while. And I started writing a book in 2020. Didn't finish it. Started again. 2022. Didn't finish it. Like all went into trash. Nothing survived. But in 2024, I...
(16:15-16:33) Daria Rudnik
I had a clear vision. That's when I finished my book. Because having the idea I want to write a book, but having no clarity, it didn't help me to write a book. But having this clarity about what is this book about? Who is this book for?
(16:33-17:00) Daria Rudnik
What are the important steps leaders need to take in order to build self-sufficient teams? Because the book is about overloaded leaders, how they can build self-sufficient teams. So what are the steps they can take to build those kind of teams? When I have this clarity, nine months later, the book was out there. Nine months. Perfect. So it's funny. Women often take nine months to get things birthed, right? Yeah.
(17:01-17:23) Anjel B. Hartwell
All right. Beautiful. Well, congratulations on the book. And one of the things that we visionary leaders often need to do is secure resources for our vision, secure resources for, in your case, you want clients, you obviously want book sales and things like that. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about your
(17:23-17:49) Anjel B. Hartwell
into securing the resources that you required in order to not only make the leap to start your business, but also to support a book launch and all of the rest of the things that go along? I love the question about securing resources and kind of having energy to do many things. And I recently, probably a year, I started practicing Tai Chi.
(17:50-18:12) Daria Rudnik
And in Tai Chi, there is a kind of understanding that you can do an action, but then you need to release the tension and let it happen, like what you pushed into the world. So what I do is I'm not trying to push everything at once.
(18:13-18:33) Daria Rudnik
I'm focusing on a book. I'm writing a book. I'm pushing it out into the world. And then I'm releasing it and seeing, okay, what's happening? And it frees some time and some energy. Okay, now what do I want to do next? I want to write an article for Forbes Coaches Council. Or I want to focus on something else. Or I want to be a podcast guest.
(18:34-18:48) Daria Rudnik
So it's doing one step at a time. And the compound effect is what actually makes my business moving. But it's never like doing everything at once, no matter how I want it. Yeah.
(18:49-19:14) Anjel B. Hartwell
Well, you know, what I love is that when I was asking about resources, I was really talking about money primarily. However, you remind us all, and this is something I remind my clients as well, is that money is just one of the resources that we have. We have our time, our energy, our attention, our creativity. We also have our support system, whether it's colleagues or...
(19:14-19:35) Anjel B. Hartwell
team members or anything that any other entities, stakeholders that come in to support the vision. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about also this idea of sometimes as creators, as leaders, as visionaries, we will start something and then it ends up in the trash. Yeah.
(19:35-20:02) Anjel B. Hartwell
So a lot of times people only see the big successes, right? They only see the bestselling book. They only see the, you know, 15 or 20 or however many awards that you've won for podcasts like I have, but they don't often see what we've thrown in the trash. And so I'd love to have you speak a little bit about that letting go process about like, how do you think that
(20:02-20:32) Daria Rudnik
What's your thinking when you get to a place where it's like, oh, this isn't going to work. I've got to throw it in the trash. I'm pretty easy on, so to say, failure. I don't see, like, if I haven't finished the book now, it is a failure. I don't see that I've tried a new resource to get new clients and it didn't go well. And I spent, like, invested some money there and some time there. It's a failure. It's...
(20:32-21:01) Daria Rudnik
I mean, you're going to hate me, but it's a learning opportunity. No, I don't actually hate you. I don't hate you at all. It is a learning opportunity. It sounds like a cliche. It is. And I cannot do anything about it. I'm trying new things. I'm ready to experiment. I like experimenting. I like trying. And if something doesn't go right, it's okay. If something doesn't go right for a long period of time, that makes me feel bad for sure.
(21:02-21:29) Daria Rudnik
Right. So how do you know when it's time, when it's time to say, oh, we've got to stop this and start something else? Oh, that's such a good question. Well, I can't say I have a clear answer to that. Well, but I have a kind of a few questions that I ask myself. The first question is, is this like the thing I'm doing, is this the critical for the bigger goal for the vision to succeed? Yeah.
(21:29-21:50) Daria Rudnik
The second one is, am I learning something while doing that? And the third one, does it give me energy or drains me? So kind of a combination of those answers gives me the overall understanding, okay, whether I should push it forward or just leave it aside.
(21:50-22:12) Anjel B. Hartwell
Yeah, beautiful. Well, in the last little bit that we have here, what I'd love to ask you is who are the people that you are most interested in working with, like having them decide to hire you? Where are they located in their leadership or in their vision or in their flow of bringing initiatives out into the world?
(22:13-22:42) Daria Rudnik
Well, I worked a lot with leaders from scale-ups and fast-grown companies. And I know the tensions and I know the challenge that they're facing when everything is changing so fast, when you don't know the next step, you cannot tell your people what the next step will be and you feel bad about that. And kind of changing this narrative of me as a leader being like, I need to be a hero. I need to have all the answers. I need to make tough decisions.
(22:43-23:00) Daria Rudnik
And making the shift to being a facilitator for the team so that together with the team, they can make those decisions. Together with the team, they can figure out the next step. Going out to the team members saying, I don't know that yet. Let's get together and figure it out together.
(23:00-23:28) Anjel B. Hartwell
So I believe that the era of heroic leadership is gone. Now it's time for empowered teams, and it's especially important for leaders in fast-growing companies that are navigating uncertainties and stretching things from multiple demands. I love that comment, that you believe that the era of heroic leadership is over, and it's the new era of empowered teams. So that speaks to how do we source...
(23:28-23:57) Anjel B. Hartwell
in the form of teams that are going to buy into the vision. This goes back to enrollment as well. Securing resources includes enrolling people in your vision, including team members. So talk a little bit about your experience in your own business or working with the teams that you work with around bringing out the best in people and bringing the best people in to work with you to bring your vision to reality.
(24:01-24:28) Daria Rudnik
The Gallup research tells us that only about 30% of people are engaged at work. And what does it tell us? That people are disengaged? That we cannot motivate our people? Well, to me, it actually tells that organizations are great at demotivating and disengaging people because 100% of people joining your company are engaged and motivated. What happens to them later? They become disengaged.
(24:28-24:56) Daria Rudnik
So for leaders to have those engaged employees, they join your vision. They want to contribute. Let them be active contributors. So when leaders are overloaded, teams become disengaged. When leaders go to their teams, work it out together, they have more time to breathe and they have more energy and teams stay engaged as they join the company. Beautiful. I love that.
(24:57-25:19) Anjel B. Hartwell
Great. So one aspect of being a leader and a leading visionary is speaking your vision into reality, right? And so what I'd love to have you do right now for us, Daria, is speak your vision into reality for your company. Where do you want to see yourself in the next maybe, say, three years with your company?
(25:21-25:50) Daria Rudnik
Again, I want to help. I want to work with overloaded leaders and help them feel well and feel supported by their teams. I want them to see the teams that are happy to go to work and they are valued and they are empowered and they can make decisions. Leadership is not something that's done to them, but they are leading themselves. They're leading organizations. They're growing organizations. I want to do that for every English-speaking business I can reach.
(25:53-25:59) Anjel B. Hartwell
Beautiful. Tell us about the scale of your businesses that you work with.
(25:59-26:29) Daria Rudnik
Medium-sized companies, 100, 900 employees growing. Like the most important thing is if you're navigating uncertainty, if you don't know what's the next step, if your bosses want great performance, your employees want you to motivate them, your customers want amazing, like incredible service from you, your shareholders want money. When you stretch things, that's where either I or my book can help you.
(26:29-26:51) Anjel B. Hartwell
Beautiful. All right. Well, in the last little bit that we have here, I'm curious, as you're thinking about this vision for yourself and for your business, what would you say right now is on the radar for you as your biggest challenge to bringing this vision to life? That's a great question.
(26:54-27:22) Daria Rudnik
I think my biggest challenge is clarity. With every step, with every conversation, with every client engagement, I gain more and more clarity. But I still feel that I need more of that to be able to articulate it clearly to me and to my potential clients. Beautiful. All right. Well, I want to say thank you for you showing up in the middle of a war zone.
(27:22-27:43) Anjel B. Hartwell
to do this interview that's the first time I've had an interview with a guest who's in the middle of a war zone and we're thankful to all of the angels that are surrounding you that have kept you from having to go to the shelter right now and really grateful for your contribution to today's show listeners we do love feedback please let us know what you thought of today's
(27:43-28:12) Anjel B. Hartwell
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(28:23-28:49) Intro
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(28:49-28:58) Intro
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