Karen Chong
00:00:01 Welcome to the show, Mindblend. I'm your host, Karen Chong, and I'll be diving into the minds of incredible people, each an expert in their very own way. Together, we'll uncover insights and share ideas so you can be inspired and empowered to navigate your own unique journey in life. Ready to get curious and discover what's possible? Let's blend.
00:00:28 — So a few episodes back, I Mindblended with Colette Mason about how we can make AI work for us, not replace us.
00:00:35 — But the conversation doesn't stop there. There's so much more we have to explore about what happens when AI and human truly start working together. So today I'm joined by Daria Rudnik. Daria sits right at the intersection of AI, leadership, and human connection. She's a leadership coach, team architect, and we'll go a little bit more into that, and hybrid intelligence strategist who helps leaders and their teams build clarity, trust, and real connection in an AI-driven world.
00:01:05 — Hi, Daria, welcome to Mindblend.

Daria Rudnik
00:01:09 —- Hi, Karen, thanks for having me here. It's, yeah, I'm very excited to have this conversation.

Karen Chong
00:01: 14 —-Yeah, so I'm sure our listeners are intrigued by now.
00:01:16 — What do you mean by team architect and hybrid intelligence strategist? So tell us a little bit more about your journey and how you got to where you are today.

Daria Rudnik
00:01:27 — Yeah, well, my background is in HR and organizational development. I started my career in Deloitte and then I moved to a cheap people's office for mostly tech and telecom companies. And throughout my career, I've seen disruptions that, various disruptions that teams face, like mergers and acquisitions, like setting up offices in other countries. And what I've noticed is when organizations have strong teams, they are much more successful in any organization transformation that's happening.
00:02:02 — They are much more successful in dealing with global disasters like financial crisis or COVID or like whatever it is. But when the teams are not strong, when like the culture is very diluted, it's very hard for leaders to move the organization forward. And I've seen examples of like failures, where companies were just acquired and dissolved, they were not existing anymore, or they go bankrupt, a lot of it because the teams were not ready for for this change.
00:02:31 — So since at that time, I started to study and see how to design amazing teams, how to build those teams, because they don't just happen on the road. We never like families on the team, universities are not a team, schools are not a team. And the first time we're really joining a team is when we join a workforce.
00:02:50 — And now we're expected to be a team player, like work in a team or when manager goes into his first managerial role, they say you need to build a team. How do you do that?
Karen Chong
00:03:00 — Yeah, they don't teach it in school.
Daria Rudnik
00:03:02 — It's not about delegation and control. I mean, no. So you need to design the team, you need to build a team. It's a special effort. It's a skill. There are certain tools and techniques that you can use in order to practice this that you need to implement in order to build this, this great team. That's why I kind of call myself a team architect, because I help leaders build those kind of teams and design them. But you also mentioned about hybrid intelligence.
00:03:28 — And that's kind of a new thing when AI is joined in the workforce and influencing team dynamics, organizational dynamics, how we work together. It's not just work, how we think, collaborate rate and make decisions. And that's a totally new skill and kind of understanding of how to work with the AI so that you don't delegate too much, you're still in control, that you still own the work, that you need hybrid intelligence to do that.
Karen Chong
00:03:56 — So let's set the scene a little bit for our listeners. We are at the time of this recording close to the end of 2025. We've seen layoffs with reasons such as we're optimizing our resources, and now we don't need nearly as many people with the help of AI, you also see sort of like this pressure coming up from leadership or founders level C-suite of mandates of we need to use more AI or we need to use AI in all these projects and things like that.
00:04:29 — Because you work with teams and leaders directly, what sort of emerging patterns have you noticed? And it's kind of from the employee perspective,
Daria Rudnik
00:04:40 — There's a lot of fear, a lot of fear that. AI will replace me. And even more, it's not that AI will replace me, it's that the manager will think that. AI can replace me, which it's not. And like you mentioned, layoffs, there are a lot of layoffs labeled like AI driven layoffs, but like to be honest, most of them are economically driven layoffs and AI is just a nice cover
00:05:05 — for many of them.
Karen Chong
00:05:07 — I think so too.
Daria Rudnik
00:05:09 — Yeah, and we've seen situations when people kind of think, okay, now AI can do that for them, we can save some money. They have to rehire those people back because well, no, AI cannot do all the work for humans. It can support, you can do more with the same amount of people, but doing more with less people, well, not yet.
Karen Chong
00:05:31 — Yeah, I'm glad you pointed out the not yet, because, you know, we're actively training it, the models are getting improved. At some point, it can do more than what it can do today. However, we need to keep the lights on. And it's, I definitely believe that it's more how you can make your people more efficient. So you can do more of what's important for the organization, not just do more. Yeah.
00:05:57 — What about leaders? Like what are like the ones who advocate like, yes, we should just use AI and replace half of our workforce or the ones that are sort of pressured by their management of incorporating more AI in like your team. Like, what have you seen with that layer?
Daria Rudnik
00:06:15 — A lot of companies are experimenting with AI and we are at this experimentation stage when lots of AI projects are initiated from various parts of organizations, sometimes from the top, sometimes from the bottom, sometimes like multiple AI projects in various functions. But together with that, we also see that AI is not bringing a return on investment as we hope it will. So, I mean, we're still trying to figure out how that should work.
00:06:42 — So, for leaders, the main question is, they will have to use AI. Everyone will have to use AI. We can understand that. But the question is, why? Yeah. I'm not against that at all. Yes. Why and how? Like, what is the reason? What is that we want to use AI for? And what are the norms? How are we going to use it? Because I've seen situations where kind of people just diving, okay, let's use AI for everything.
00:07:07 — And then that causes team disengagement, loss of motivation, and eventually loss of productivity and effectiveness.
Karen Chong
00:07:15 — So you help companies build effective teams, high-performing teams. Name some characteristics of a high-performing team? Oh, I can name you five. Yeah, name as many as you want.
Daria Rudnik
00:07:29 — Again, while working with teams and not just in practical, but reading literature and scientific literature about what does it make to be a great team, I came up with five major pillars of any successful team, high-performing team, team that is more self-sufficient, more autonomous, that can manage themselves and they don't need leader for every decision. So the first things they have, they have a clear purpose.
00:07:57 — And that's pretty obvious is you need to understand why you're together. And the tricky part here is, not every team has that. So if you have a bunch of people, and like, just been reporting to one manager, that doesn't make them a team, they become a team only when they have a shared purpose, something that they can achieve together, by collaborating and working together, and not just by combining the individual contributions.
00:08:22 — So that's, that's the one important part. The second one is linking connections. When people are connected within the organization, there are a lot of connections, manager to employee. But what about like people, employee to employee, people, team members, team members? And more importantly, what about the connections of these team members to other to their stakeholders. So it's not just the manager who goes out to a boss, to the stakeholders, to peers, presenting the results.
00:08:52 — So it's people, team members going out to their stakeholders, understanding their needs, presenting results, taking responsibility for the mistakes that they've made. So that's the second one, linking connections. The third one is integrated work. And that that's what many leaders are missing, is how do we work together as a team? What are our team norms? What do we support in terms of behavior?
00:09:16 — What kind of behavior do we want to see on our team.
00:09:20 — And what kind of behavior we never want to tolerate? So what is not tolerated on our team? So these team norms, how many meetings do we want to have? Like, what are the communications channels that we're going to use? It creates a lot of clarity and removes frustration from people. Okay, what's next. The fourth one is collaborative decisions. How do you make decisions on your team? Because you as a manager, you don't have to make all decisions on your own.
00:09:47 — And then finally, knowledge sharing and feedback. How do you as a team learn and grow together? How you learn from your mistakes? How you give feedback to each other? How you collect feedback from your stakeholders? So those five pillars, clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing is what will make your team click.
Karen Chong
00:10:09 — Have you seen anything that, let's say you have a client that you help them build high performing teams, have you seen any cases where they used to be performing great, but recently they've started phasing out certain things that they're doing because of changes in technology? Have you seen anything like that?
Daria Rudnik
00:10:33 — Well, I have an example of a team. I'm not sure they were a super high-performing team, but they were pretty decent before AI. It was a customer success team. They were working with the clients, pretty happy together, engaged, working well. It was a good team. And at some point, they were a good team, they were curious about new things. So they implemented and started using AI quite a lot.
00:11:01 — This. So they, they had a conversation with clients, the conversation was recorded, they had a transcript of this conversation, AI generated insights from the conversation, they uploaded it to CRM, some of the items went to backlog, and then AI helped them generate agenda for the next meeting with the client. So a lot was automated, everyone was happy, they had lots of time, they had to pick up the projects that they didn't have time for before.
00:11:28 — They had some time to breathe and kind of, okay, relax. I'm not behind all the things all the time. But here's what happened next. At some point during the team meetings, they couldn't recall some of the things they used to know about their clients. They used to know in and out, but now they keep forgetting. They need to go to the CRM to look at their insights that they not generated that were created by AI.
00:11:59 — They couldn't prioritize items for the backlog because, okay, they didn't have this understanding what's more important for their clients. Because again, they were not the ones who generated those items. It was AI. And they started to feel like they're losing connection with their work. They became just operators, putting data from one source to another, helping AI do the work for them. But they lost the meaning.
00:12:22 — They lost meaning, they lost engagement, and eventually they lost productivity because they are not so much involved in everything that's happening with their clients. And that's when I joined this team and kind of helping them to be like, to regain their, like, get the engagement back and productivity and become more efficient with AI and how they use AI.
00:12:45 — And so what they did is, well, they started again with, with why, with a clear purpose, why, why are we using AI? Like, what are we using AI for? What's, what's in it? And what is what should stay with us as a team? What's our value proposition for organization for our clients? Again, this, this understanding and feeling of what the clients need, and being able to support their needs the best way possible, is what should stay with them as humans as teams. And some of their automated work can be created by AI.
00:13:16 — And the next thing they did is, I don't know heard that there's a research called Your Brain on Chat GPT that tells that if you ask AI to do something and then try to edit it, your brain is disengaged and it stays disengaged for the whole project. But if you do something, if you initiate the draft, if you do something first and then ask AI to edit it or give some input, your brain stays engaged longer.
00:13:44 — So what they did is they, before generating insights from the conversation and from the transcript. At the end of each conversation, when the conversation was over, they kind of just were speaking, speaking some of things that they thought of this conversation, their feelings, again, their insights, their ideas. And then AI generated insights based on what managers said, and their transcript of the conversation.
00:14:08 — So they were the first one to give this input, they still own the conversation, they still own the result. And then, well, they had team meetings when they looked at those insights, looked at the backlog, and they were like, really, really going deep into that and analyzing what's there and say, okay, this is relevant, this is not relevant. So they became part of the process rather than just being observers of what AI is doing for them.
Karen Chong
00:14:35 — Yeah, you know what that sort of made me think of? Two real life scenarios. One, phone numbers. So, now you just hand your phone to whoever, they put the phone number in, you call them to like give them your own phone number, that was the transactions. So the numbers have not even gone into your brain at all, so it's kind of similar to that.
00:14:58 — Another one is if you are, if you work in a restaurant and you're the person taking the order and you pass it to the chef, you may remember what it is, but that was like really just the level, and you may not even remember if there's like 100 customers. So what you pointed out about you being the first engaging your brain, I think that's like a really, really good point, because there are many things that we are starting to do it like that.
00:15:27 — If you have to go somewhere, put the address in the GPS, you may not remember how you get there. I know that happened to me a few times. So, by them kind of taking back that ownership of the insides of the idea, how have you seen them gone back on track?
Daria Rudnik
00:15:48 — Well, they started having this conversation, well, first of all, between themselves. When they started, when they re-engaged in team meetings, discussing the outputs, the inside, the backlog, well, not only they understood it better because they discussed it, but they also, again, had a chance to talk. We love connecting with people, we love working together.
00:16:10 — We love like seeing how ideas are built on like ideas that we share something, someone picks it up, or it's a question and that not only helped them understand better their clients, but also helped with the team climate and how they feel together.
Karen Chong
00:16:26 — Yeah, and I feel like they may have insights that AI will never be able to generate for them, because we understand situations differently, and you sort of have to feed all the nuance into AI for it to give you like a well-rounded suggestion or insight. So I'm glad. So what you were describing, like never touching their brain, is that what you call cognitive offloading?
Daria Rudnik
00:16:51 — I mean, it's a term, and this term is actually what you like perfectly described with phone numbers and GPS. Has, it's been with us for quite a while already. When we offload some of the information from our brain to technology, which is good, I mean, there's so many, like, there's so many things we need to remember. So that's so much information, we don't need to remember it all. So at some point, cognitive offloading is helping us to, to live with this excessive data that we have around us.
00:17:21 — But when you offload too much, when you like, one thing is offloading data numbers and things like that. The other thing is when you offload decision making. And that's when things go wrong. And that's, that's the difference between, like automation and AI, because with automation, you don't expect anything from a machine. But with AI, we kind of think we're talking to a human being, we kind of have a real conversation, We kind of assume that this thing is telling us the truth, that this thing knows something which is not true.
00:17:55 — So that's why it's very important to be mindful about how much do you want to offload to AI and lose this connection with your work.
Karen Chong
00:18:05 — So what, in your opinion, so besides data and like everyday business scenario, what else would be suitable, a suitable category of information to offload? And what people should definitely not offload? You mentioned decision-making, don't offload.
Daria Rudnik
00:18:22 — Yeah, I mean, there are lots of things we can offload. What we cannot and should not offload is something that needs empathy and human to human connection. And a great example is you should never fire a person with AI, with the help of AI. And there was a, it sounds ridiculous. There was a company, there was a post on LinkedIn, and some CEO or CEO or some executive of the company, they mentioned, okay, we're laying off lots of people. Here is an AI tool you can like reach out to and talk to if you feel bad about that.
00:18:52 — Oh, that's, that's, that's so bad. This post was deleted, but internet remembers everything. So the screenshots are there. But yeah, things like that should never be delegated to AI. And if you work with, again, high sensitive data, obviously, and be very mindful about like, who is getting access to that data.
00:19:14 — And again, things AI telling us they're not true. I mean, it depends on how you train this AI, but if it's generated AI, they're not true, they're probabilities, they're AI predictions, based on what it knows. So always checking, rechecking the output that AI gives you is a critical skill. For now, at least. We still need to do that.
Karen Chong
00:19:40 — Do you have any good success cases? Like we can step away from just focusing on AI. How has your biggest success been going into a team and trying to fix, quote unquote, fix their issues and turn them into a high performing team?
Daria Rudnik
00:19:57 — Great question. There are a lot of indicators of a high performing great team. One of them is how much revenue they can generate, how much they can perform. I've been working with companies that increased performance three or four times, but they were already a pretty good team, to be honest. The transformation they've been through was successful because they were a good team. But I have an example where there was a lot of conflict on the team.
00:20:26 — It's a manufacturing company and the CEO reached out to me saying, hey, I have a lot of conflict on my team. People cannot make decisions together. They think the idea is better. So when I joined the team and started having those conversations, team sessions, it happened that, well, people, all of them, they were really engaged and they're really motivated in company success. They just saw it differently. Some saw that they need to focus on quality, others saw.
00:20:55 — The most important thing is distribution channels and things like that. So one of the things we did together is, apart from being clear on the purpose of the team, we created a list of behaviours, like what are the behaviours that the team wants to see and wants to support and want to see more of, like sort of the keep it up behaviours, behaviours that need to stay on the team.
00:21:22 — And what are their cut it out behaviors, behaviors that they're not going to tolerate. So they had the list, they had the list of keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors. And eventually, they had, they decided to have meaningful conversations with each other, they learned how to work together, they moved forward. And I think it was a success. But the most interesting thing happened about six months after when the CEO reached out to me and said, you know, we're moving fine.
00:21:51 — We're going in that direction. There are a lot of conversations, lots of argument, but they're not like personality conflicts, but people really bringing some ideas and challenging them.
Karen Chong
00:22:02 — Yeah.
Daria Rudnik
00:22:03 — And the team decided that the sales leader needs to go. Why? Because she didn't follow the keeping up behaviors and she constantly demonstrated some of they cut it out behaviors. And the team mentioned that several times she didn't change. And, and the team, they decided that she needs to go it wasn't see the CEO, it wasn't like the the board, it was the teams that she's not part of our team, because she's not following what we agreed to follow altogether.
00:22:32 — Yeah, yeah. And I think that's, that's a great example of team being more self sufficient, but they don't need their leader to make every decision. They can make decisions on their own. They can solve problems on their own. They can be more autonomous and they're moving without delay because they can make those decisions and they can,
Karen Chong
00:22:51 — They can do that. Are the clients that you work with, are they like more concentrated in certain geographies or you work with different people in different continents?
Daria Rudnik
00:23:02 — I actually, yeah, I was counting, okay, how many countries I've been working with people in India, in Zimbabwe, in Latin America, U.S., mostly it's North America and Europe, but Australia. And it's, yeah, I love this opportunity to work with any people from any country,
Karen Chong
00:23:22 — Like due to, again, due to technology. Yeah, because what I wanted to ask is, you know, like I know one of your efforts is to help teams be, like to avoid burnout, both burn out for the leaders and burn out for the team. And in the example that you gave, the team can make decisions themselves, so they don't have to go to a leader every single time. That hierarchy sort of depends on the culture too. Some cultures, that is fine.
00:23:49 — Some cultures, the finals, they still come from the top. So how do you balance the culture versus the nature of a high-performing team and how to keep people from burning out?
Daria Rudnik
00:24:02 — That is, I mean, I love that question. And the best thing about a high performing team and how they are formed is that the team themselves, the people on this team, they decide what works for them best. If they think that the manager needs to have a final word, perfect, they can do that. There are cultures where, like company organizational cultures, when and they say, you work hard, you work 12 hours a day, like you're not getting promoted for five years, but you'll get in return like rapid growth or like skills or whatever.
00:24:39 — So it's a very clear contract and a very clear agreement. So you can have any type of culture you want, I guess, long as you set together and agreed on your team norms and team goal.
Karen Chong
00:24:54 — I haven't really thought about it that way, but that is a very good tactic to kind of frame people's mindset before they go into how do we get to become a high performing team. So there's this like cycle of you have forming, storming, norming, performing. So that's a typical cycle of any team. Some teams may skip some.
00:25:19 — Some teams may be stuck in storming, for example, and they come to you.
Daria Rudnik
00:25:25 — But again, it's not a cycle, it's more like a spiral, because with any new challenge, with any new member coming in, coming out, you go through the same cycle again, over and over again. And then it's important for manage to kind of catch those cycles and make sure that to help team go through that cycle, because they will repeat.
Karen Chong
00:25:45 — Yeah. Now with technology, like what would be something that any leader or team members who are burnout or anyone listening who wants to make a change so that they can use AI to help them better? What would be something that you would suggest they start?
Daria Rudnik
00:26:05 — Well, to be honest, it depends on the stage of AI and like awareness. Yeah. In the company, like personally for themselves, where they are, because I mean, I know there were people who are using AI daily, but companies just okay, thinking, should we do it? Should we not? So they are in the different like, levels, but well, first is being curious about what's there, like how it works, being curious, like, not only how should I use it,
00:26:33 — but also like, what's really happening when AI produces some outcomes, like the thing I mentioned that it's not true is predictions, like how actually LLMs work, and start trying it out, make mistakes, be mindful about the outcomes, and again, like repeat the cycle, learn something else, try it out, share with other people, see what they're doing, and that's how we learn.
Karen Chong
00:26:59 — Yeah, the theme of curiosity has been floating through the whole Mindblend series so far, is like to keep an open mind and iterate, learn from your mistakes.
Daria Rudnik
00:27:10 — Yeah, well, that's the drive of a progress.
Karen Chong
00:27:13 — Yeah. What would be your worst case study? It's always something that you talk about at a casual family gathering or dinner party or something.
Daria Rudnik
00:27:23 — I have an example. I was having a conversation with the CEO and the founder of one company, and well, they said that they value, I think it was either transparency or honesty, like transparency your honesty, probably honesty was their value. And they want to build honest relationships with their customers. And he talks a lot about that.
00:27:49 — But like, throughout some conversations, trust, it was trust. So he was talking about trust, and he wanted to build trustful relationship with the customers. But like, while talking to that person, I found out that he's not paying full salary for the employees. Like using some like kind of schemes to minimize taxes.
00:28:14 — Okay, you're talking about trust, how people can trust you if you're doing things like that And like the Response was, okay, you don't understand how to lead a business. You cannot lead it, like you cannot run a business if you don't do things like that. I mean, what happened a few months after that is that one of the suppliers brought bad product and some of the customers got poisoned because of that product. Wow. Okay.
00:28:41 — And I mean, if you build your relationship on trust, you need to make sure everyone can trust you, but if you're trusting here and not trusting there, make sure you control everything very, very thoroughly. Because trust is one thing, but if you're relying on some other things, it destroys your culture. And finally, it destroys your business. So that is a great example of how declared values are not actually part of the company and how it can ruin a company.
Karen Chong
00:29:16 — Yeah. You mentioned it in the beginning, the pillars of a high-performing team, like shared values. Yeah. So for this last part, let's play something out of the ordinary. So I have a few rapid fire questions, just like really quick, whatever comes to your mind, say it. What's one human skill you think is underrated in the age of AI? Well, since we talked about curiosity,
Daria Rudnik
00:29:42 — I have this curiosity in my mind. I think like we underestimate curiosity and we underutilize curiosity. We need to be more curious and open to new things.
Karen Chong
00:29:51 — Yeah, I am 100% with that. So you've worked with like many, many continents. What culture taught you the most about teamwork?
Daria Rudnik
00:30:02 — It's not like culture. It's again that don't put labels on people based on their origin. Like see the human. As a leader, you have 10, eight people on your team. We can learn about them as human beings without labeling them based in their culture.
Karen Chong
00:30:20 — Yeah, yeah. I see this a lot. It's not intentional, but people will be called, oh, the Scottish guy, like the Chinese guy. Yeah, know them by their name. Call them by their name. Okay. When you feel mentally overloaded, what's your go-to way to reset your mind? I started practicing Tai Chi with some kids. I love it. Tell me more.
Daria Rudnik
00:30:49 — Well, like I used to do yoga, like long, long time ago, and I went, okay, I need to get.
Karen Chong
00:30:53 — Back to yoga.
Daria Rudnik
00:30:53 — I could get back to doing yoga, but I couldn't do that. It's important. My husband shared a video with me and like a lesson. And I was, I was impressed with the wisdom of it is that goes together with the body movement.
00:31:12 — And the wisdom for me was very important at that point, is that you cannot achieve anything with force, because force is just one, like powder, one thing, but you need to be able to release, and that is as powerful as force, if you do it right, in the right way. This balance between moving forward and releasing, and letting go, is what I'm practicing in my business and life and Tai Chi is really helping me with that.
Karen Chong
00:31:46 — Interesting. I see people in parks sometimes doing Tai Chi in the morning and like I have a mental image of the movement just because like I grew up in Asia. But interesting that helps with business too. So complete this sentence. I wish AI could. I wish I could change the world for the better. I'm not sure if it's possible.
00:32:14 — Well, this is why we're having this conversation today. Like I think if we can early on adopt a healthy mindset of using AI and how we should use it to help us partner with us even not just like an operational tool. If more people can think of things like this, then yeah, we can change it for the better. Like we have so much more information. Humans can change.
00:32:41 — Yeah, it itself will not do anything. I do want people to walk away with knowing this. AI shouldn't be used on its own. We should always be the humans in the loop. Thank you very much for having this conversation with me, Daria. I will leave your information in the show notes. So anyone who would like to continue this conversation, they can get in touch with you or you can leave us a comment and we'll keep the conversation going.
00:33:09 — Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of Mindblend. If you enjoyed the conversation, don't forget to follow and share it with anyone who needs to hear it. And let's keep the conversation going. Connect with me on LinkedIn or leave me a comment. Until next time, stay curious, keep exploring, and let's continue to blend our minds and discover what's possible.