speaker 1
00:00
Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Okay, so if you're a leader, you probably know this feeling, right? That constant pressure, you feel like you have to be the chief firefighter, the one person giving the green light for absolutely everything. It's that whole heroic leadership idea and honestly it just leads straight to burnout for the leader and, well, stagnation for everyone else.
speaker 2
0:22 Yeah, it really does and it's becoming clearer that model just doesn't work anymore.
speaker 1
0:25 So today we dove into a pretty extensive body of work from team architect Daria Rudnik. She spent, what, 10, maybe 15 years transforming organizations
speaker 2
0:36 Across six continents. A massive amount of data on what makes teams tick or what makes them fall apart under pressure. And the central finding, the big takeaway, is this huge philosophical shift that's needed. Basically the era of that lone heroic leader, it's over. It just doesn't scale. It can't keep up with how fast things move now, the complexity of it all. Organizations that actually survive, the ones that thrive, they're built differently, they need agility, a shared burden, real empowerment, teams that can fundamentally run themselves.
speaker 1
1:05 Right, and what I found really fascinating is this sort of unconventional influence in her approach. She brings in concepts from her Taishan practice.
speaker 2
01:13 Yeah, that's right. Think of Taishan. It's about this discipline, kind of non-reactive focus, a zen-like flow, as you said. The idea is if you can actually design your team's environment, the structure to handle chaos with a kind of internal calm and, well, structure. Yeah. You're ahead of the game.
speaker 1 
01:33 So you build the resilience into the system.
speaker 2
01:34 Exactly.
speaker 1
01:35 So our mission today then is to really unpack the blueprint for that. How do you get that deep resilience, that self-sufficiency? We're going to use Rudnik's roadmap for this, the CLIC framework. Okay, let's unpack this then. If you want to test how strong a building is, you don't do it on a calm day, right? You hit it with a hurricane. So what do Rudnik's real-world crisis examples tell us? What's the difference between a team that holds up and one that just crumbles?
speaker 2
01:58 Yeah, the crisis test is, well, it's everything. And she gives these two really potent examples, sort of counterpoints, for the 2008 financial crisis and then the start of the COVID pandemic. The first big lesson she pulled out was about having a really clear shared purpose and focusing on that over just, you know, chasing prosperity or growth blindly. So back in 2008, during that meltdown, she was working with a bank. They were just set up in a new country. I mean, talk about bad timing. They had every reason to just fail. But instead of trying to expand fast or launch a bunch of new stuff, their purpose became laser-focused.
speaker 1
02:34 Okay, what was it?
speaker 2
02:35 Simply.  Keep our existing clients happy and safe through this global chaos. That's it. And that specificity, that focus on their internal processes, how they operated, rather than just grabbing new business, it allowed them to build structure. They survived for years, actually weathered the whole storm.
speaker 1
02:50 Wow. Okay, so contrast that with the second story, a cloud computing company growing fast.
speaker 2
02:55 Right. And here, the top management team, they weren't just colleagues. These guys were friends, like 15 years deep kind of friends. Dinners together, holidays.
speaker 1
03:03 Yeah, the kind of bond you'd think would make a team invincible, right? That personal connection.
speaker 2
03:08 That's what you'd think. But here's where it gets, well, really interesting, kind of brutal. When COVID hit, and then they had some other internal conflicts pile on top, the company failed. And shockingly fast.
speaker 1
03:23 Really? Despite the friendships.
speaker 2
03:25 Yeah, because that deep personal connection, it turned out to be basically meaningless. They lacked the organizational structure. They didn't have a unified business purpose that everyone bought into. So when the stress really hit, what happened? They didn't protect the organization. They protected themselves, their own little fiefdoms.
speaker 1
03:44 Oof. Yeah, that's a tough insight. Structure beating friendship in a crisis, it kind of flies in the face of a lot of startup talk, doesn't it? All that relying on chemistry and personal bonds.
speaker 2
03:52 It really does.
speaker 1
03:53 So if things looking fine when times are good doesn't really mean anything, how do we spot the real problems before a crisis hits? We need to be clear about what a real team actually is, I guess.
speaker 2
04:04 Exactly. We use that word team all the time, maybe too much. But most setups are just groups of individuals working in parallel, maybe collaborating a bit, but not really a team. To be a true team, Redneck says you need three non-negotiable architectural elements, things that have to be there, and they kind of force people into shared accountability.
speaker 1
04:24 Okay, what are those three? Lay them out for us.
speaker 2
04:25 Okay, number one, shared purpose. And like I said before, this is just some generic mission statement on a wall. It has to be a goal that only this specific group of people, this specific combination, can achieve together. If each person could hit their main goals working alone, well then they're just a work group, maybe coordinating a bit, not a team.
speaker 1
04:44 Got it. Specific and collective, what's two?
speaker 2
04:47 Number two is interconnection or interdependence. This means collaboration isn't just nice to have, it's absolutely mandatory, required, because the environment they're working in is complex, it's changing, the stakes are high. Think about air traffic controllers, high-risk system, right? Right. If one controller messes up, it immediately impacts the safety of every other flight they're managing, and maybe others too. They cannot do their job safely or effectively if they work in isolation. You need constant, mandatory, structured cooperation. Their feats are literally intertwined.
speaker 1
05:21 That really reframes it. It's not just about sharing tasks conveniently, it's about sharing risk, because you have to in a complex situation.
speaker 2
05:28 Precisely. You got it. And that leads straight to number three, structure. You absolutely need clarity. Who is actually on this team? Who isn't? How do we make decisions? What are our ground rules for working together? Consistency is key. Rudnick found that groups where the membership is constantly shifting, you know, five people show up one day, 15 the next, they just fail, because boundaries, expectations, they're never properly set. There's no container.
speaker 1
05:51 Okay, so this all points to the idea that teams don't just happen. They need to be consciously designed, architected, like you said. And this is where Rudnick's CLIC framework comes in as the blueprint. Let's break that down. It's CLIC, clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing.
speaker 2
06:11 Yeah, let's start with linking connections. This one's huge for breaking down silos, and it applies both within the team and maybe more importantly, externally with stakeholders.
speaker 1
06:21 Okay, tell me more about that external piece.
speaker 2
06:23 Yeah, so she gives this great example of a cybersecurity leader. Super dedicated, high performer, really supportive of her people, but she became the bottleneck. She took on all the external stakeholder stuff herself, all the negotiating, the communicating requirements, translating things back and forth. She thought she was shielding her team, right, protecting them.
speaker 1
06:44 Which sounds like a good thing, maybe, keeping distractions away.
speaker 2
06:47 You'd think, yeah, but the result was the opposite. Her team members ended up feeling isolated, lonely, even disengaged, because they were totally cut off from the why. They didn't see who they were doing the work for.
speaker 1
06:59 Okay, but here's the tension I see there. If that leader really is the best negotiator, the best communicator, isn't it just faster and more efficient for her to handle these high-stakes conversations? Isn't there a risk you slow things down by forcing, say, a more junior engineer to talk to a demanding VP?
speaker 2
07:18 That's the efficiency trap. Yes, maybe it's fractionally faster in the short term for the expert to do it, but the source material is really clear here. The risk of not forcing that connection is way bigger long-term. What happened when the cybersecurity leader actually did connect your team members directly with the stakeholders, their sense of purpose, their energy, their feeling of accountability, it shot right back up immediately. They suddenly realized, I'm building this system for that person to solve their problem, not just, you know, handing a report up the chain to my boss. The long-term cost of that isolation and disengagement far outweighed any temporary dip in efficiency.
speaker 1
07:53 That's a really powerful case for designing connection right into the workflow. Okay, so that's linking connections. The next pillar is integrated work. This sounds like the internal how.
speaker 2
08:03 Exactly. This is where the team agrees on its norms, its charter, you know, the practical stuff. Like, are we gonna have meetings where everyone's on their phone? What are the real boundaries around work hours? How do we handle disagreements respectfully?
speaker 1
08:17 This sounds like where that Tyshon influence, that zen-like flow really comes into play, right? The discipline.
speaker 2 
08:23 Absolutely. The flow isn't about everyone being blissed out. It's about having that disciplined focus and, crucially, non-reaction. That's what a good team charter gives you. So instead of getting emotional or reactive when, say, someone misses a deadline or dominates a meeting, the team has a pre-agreed structure, a process to fall back on. It creates that mental space. Integrated work makes those agreed-upon behaviors the default, the rule, not the exception you have to fight for. It prevents the kind of chaos that constantly needs that heroic leader to step in and fix things.
speaker 1 
08:55 And we see that structure creating interdependence in practice with that project management team example she gives. speaker 2 09:00 Oh yeah, the lawyers, engineers, PMs.
speaker 1
09:03 Right. They were leading these complex projects, all working remotely and drowning in endless back-and-forth emails and misunderstandings. Their solution was, I thought, really clever in its simplicity. They just started intentionally pairing up on tasks.
speaker 2
09:19 Yes, yeah. A lawyer would sit virtually alongside an engineer while they worked on an engineering problem and vice versa. And that decision, it seemed small, but it was brilliant because it forced the interdependence that their complex work actually required. Initially, yeah, they probably felt like, this is slowing us down, I have to explain my stuff, doing more work seemingly. But by building that mutual understanding, okay, that's why the lawyer needs this documented this way, or ah, that's the technical constraint the engineer is facing. They slashed the cross-functional miscommunication dramatically. Decisions got faster, rework plummeted, the overall workload actually went down because stuff got done right the first time more often.
speaker 1
09:58 Designing the interaction reduced the friction. Okay, so the last pillars of CLIC are collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing. And this brings up probably the thorniest question for any manager, right?
speaker 2 
10:10 What do you do with those people who are maybe incredibly strong, really competent, deliver results, but they just refuse to collaborate? They want share knowledge, they work in their own silo.
speaker 1
10:20 Yeah, the brilliant jerk problem. Look, Redneck is really uncompromising on this point. If collaboration, if shared purpose, if interdependence, if those are the foundational rules you all agreed on, the structure itself, then someone who refuses to play by those rules fundamentally undermines the entire system. The team has to ask the hard question. Why is this person actually on this team? Maybe they're a great individual contributor, but are they right for this structure?
speaker 2
10:46 So it's not just about individual performance.
speaker 1
10:48 Not if you're building a true team. She shared this, frankly, startling example from a manufacturing company. The executive team went through the whole process to find their shared behavioral rules, their charter for integrated work. Months later, guess what happened? The team, not the CEO acting alone, the team as a collective decided they had to fire the sales director.
speaker 2
11:10 Wow, even if they were hitting their numbers, even though they were a high performer in terms of raw sales figures. Why? Because that director consistently failed to follow the collaborative norms the team had agreed upon. They broke the structure.
speaker 1
11:25 So the team itself enforced the rules. They chose the integrity of their collaborative structure over those immediate individual results.
speaker 2
11:32 Exactly. And can you imagine the impact of that decision? It instantly signals these rules aren't just talk. They matter. We own them. It's cemented their commitment.
speaker 1
 11:41 That's huge. Okay, so that's the people side of collaborative decisions. What about the process side? You mentioned beating burnout. We all know that feeling of being overwhelmed.
speaker 2
11:49 Right, and we've all used or tried to use the standard Eisenhower matrix, you know, urgent important.
speaker 1
11:55 Yeah, urgent important. Not urgent important.
speaker 2
11:57 Where does everything usually end up?
speaker 1
11:59 Urgent and important. Always. Everything feels like it needs doing now. Leaders just feel like they're constantly executing, putting out fires.
speaker 2 
12:06 Exactly. It breaks down in practice. So Rudnik modifies it to force actual focus. First, you add an impact ranking to each task. Simple scale. One to five. One is maximum impact on the overall goal. Five is minimal impact.
speaker 1
12:20 Okay, so you're adding another dimension.
speaker 2 
12:21 Yes. Then second, the leadership team has to apply what she calls the critical question. Look hard at the tasks that fall into urgent and important, you know, the classic distractions. Now, combine that with the impact score. Something is urgent and important and it has a low impact score like a four or five. You have to ask forcefully, why are we doing this at all?
speaker 1
12:41 If it's not important and has minimal impact, it's just noise. Organizational waste.
speaker 2
 12:46 Precisely. Get rid of it or drastically minimize it. And then the third trick, which I love, is moving away from endless to-do lists. She insists the team identifies only the top three tasks the absolute must completes for that period. Three. That's it.
speaker 1
13:01 Just three. That sounds restrictive.
speaker 2 
13:03 It sounds restrictive, but it forces ruthless prioritization. By limiting the focus, you guarantee you're moving the needle on what actually matters. Shifting from just being busy to achieving high impact results.
speaker 1
13:13 Okay, I can see how that would fight the overwhelm. And that focus naturally leads into the final pillar, doesn't it? Knowledge sharing.
speaker 2
 13:20 It does. Because once you figure out how to prioritize, how to collaborate effectively, how to navigate a crisis, you need to make sure the learning sticks. The purpose of knowledge sharing in this framework isn't just, you know, onboarding new people. It's fundamentally about building resilience into the team's DNA. When a team successfully gets through something tough or completes a complex project, well, they must document it. How do we do it? How do we make those decisions? What went wrong? What worked?
speaker 1
13:49 So going back to that bank example, the one that survived 2008.
speaker 2
13:51 Yeah.
speaker 1
13:52 If they hadn't somehow captured and shared the knowledge of how they restructured their processes, how they focused on those clients, that success could have just been a one-off, dependent on the people who were there then.
speaker 2
14:03 Exactly right. Knowledge sharing makes the structure, the learning, repeatable. It prevents the team from sliding back in to relying on individual heroics or just sheer luck the next time a crisis hits. It codifies that interdependence, so future members inherit the wisdom, they don't have to learn every lesson the hard way all over again.
speaker 1
14:22 Wow. Okay, we have covered a really monumental shift here today. Moving past that burnt-out heroic leader model to create genuinely self-sufficient teams, it boils down to those three non-negotiables, doesn't it? A clear shared purpose that only this team can achieve, mandatory interdependence built into the work, and a defined respected structure. And the CLIC framework, clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, knowledge sharing, gives you the architectural blueprint to actually design and build those powerhouse teams.
speaker 2
14:53 Yeah, it forces the connections, clarifies the rule.
speaker 1
14:56 And makes it clear that collaboration isn't just a nice-to-have, it's the price of entry if you want that kind of resilience, even if it means making tough calls sometimes.
speaker 2
 15:04 And, you know, we've seen that resilience isn't really about personality, is it? It's a design feature, it's baked into the structure. Building those systems that actually force interaction, like that paired working example with the lawyers and engineers, it might feel like more effort up front. But it's not really about doing more work overall. It's about designing a process that guarantees people have to rely on each other, that minimizes that dangerous isolation, and ensures that the system, the structure itself, protects the team from chaos, not just the leader.
speaker 1
15:36 So a final thought for you listening. Think about your own team or teams you work with. Which of those three non-negotiables, purpose, interdependence, or structure feels like the weakest link right now? And what's one small architectural change, one tweak to the design you could maybe try this week to start building or enforcing that deeper resilience?