(00:00-00:26) Utkarsh Narang
What if the reason teams in your organization are not working is because they don't even understand why they've been put together? We use the what team way too often. We overuse the what team. Most of organizational units are not teams. You have smart people, regular meetings, there's a common slack channel. It seems to be that they're moving in the right direction, but still nothing clicks. It's not because they're not capable, but it is because their why is not clear.

(00:26-00:50) Utkarsh Narang
This is Daria, former chief people officer and author of the award-winning Clicking. She's built high-performing teams across continents, led through mergers, AI, different prices. And she says...

(00:50-01:06) Daria Rudnik
If you are the leader, if you're leading a team, we don't need more heroic leaders. We need more empowered teams. So you don't need to save the world. There is a research: your brain on chat gpt that tells us that if we think it first and give it to ai our brain stays engaged but if we ask ai first and then try to edit and analyze that our brain becomes disengaged far more quickly

(01:07-01:23) Utkarsh Narang
The most human thing that you can still do is to build a team. Let's talk. What does it take for human beings to click together? Let's dive in. We live in a beautiful world where all of us are busy. We're very capable and we're still overwhelmed.

(01:23-01:49) Utkarsh Narang
And today's conversation will not be about how do we do more, because that I think all of us are experts in, but it'll be about how we can do a little less and still do more, how we're parts of teams where we need to click with each other. And the person who I have with me today is Daria Rudnick, and she has been working for the last couple of decades now in helping us simplify this work that she's been doing. Daria, welcome to the conversation.

(01:50-02:01) Utkarsh Narang
Well, thanks, Utkash. It's great to be here. I'm so excited to talk about this topic and teamwork. Absolutely. And, you know, as you were reflecting on this and you and I had the intro call as well, Daya,

(02:02-02:28) Utkarsh Narang
Team does not only exist in the corporate world, right? Team is a very multi-dimensional thing. So I'd love to explore that with you as well. And at the podcast, before we dive into our core content, in a way, we'd love to know a little bit more about the guests. So the first question we start the podcast with is that if that eight-year-old Daria, the little girl, wherever she was growing up, if that Daria comes and meets you right now, what kind of a conversation do you think will emerge between the two of you?

(02:31-03:00) Daria Rudnik
That's a super interesting question. When I think about that, it's that life is more unpredictable than we can even think of. We'll end up in places we never thought we will be. We'll face challenges we never thought existed. And we have so much more strength than we ever thought that we have. Being ready to unpredictable

(03:01-03:09) Daria Rudnik
Accepting the future is great because it brings a lot of wonders. Challenges as well, but wonders.

(03:12-03:34) Utkarsh Narang
But it does not come naturally to the human heart, mind or soul, right? That we're so seeking control on this uncontrollable, the future, that we live, I think, 50% of our life in the past and 50% in the future and about 0% in the present. How do you see that playing out? Well, you're so right.

(03:35-03:48) Daria Rudnik
Again, when we talk about corporate environment and teams, like feeling of, I need to control everything. I need to control what people are doing. I need to control results. I need to control the future.

(03:48-04:16) Daria Rudnik
that creates a lot of tension and stops us from moving forward, stops us from expanding and kind of experiencing opportunities, opportunities from what future brings us and opportunities from team dynamics and how people work together, what kind of thoughts come into them, what kind of ideas they can explore, what kind of challenges they can face together and overcome together. So kind of letting go of control is...

(04:16-04:43) Daria Rudnik
is a very important skill we all need to master and especially leaders. How does one do that? Apart from the leap of faith. The first thing we need to trust is we need to trust ourselves that I am the person who can manage those challenges. I am the person who, if something goes wrong, I can fix that.

(04:44-05:13) Daria Rudnik
The second thing is trusting people you're working with. I trust them that they have expertise. I trust them that they have experience. And if we are working on the same team, I trust that they are as motivated as I am and they can solve those problems and we can solve those problems. And if something goes wrong, we can fix that. So kind of those two things, they lay the foundation of letting go of control one step at a time.

(05:13-05:42) Daria Rudnik
And the next one is practice because it's behavior. It's what we do. And what you do is, okay, you delegate one task and you have no control over it. It might be some safe task. It might be some safe assignment that you don't check in. You don't control. If something goes wrong, I mean, you can, it's okay. We can live with that. And doing this one step at a time, building this trust, building this habit, that's how we do that.

(05:44-06:06) Utkarsh Narang
So much wisdom in that short sharing, right? Because what you said was to be able to practice this art and science of letting go, what you need is to trust yourself that I got this. Trust people around you that they're there to support you and you're part of the same tribe. And so you'll figure this out. And then just practice because that's the only way behavior change happens.

(06:08-06:25) Utkarsh Narang
Love that. Before we dive into just, and I heard you speak about team in the corporate world. What does, like, if you strip away the org charts, the titles, the hierarchies, what industrial revolution gave us and what AI is trying to challenge today, what does a team really mean?

(06:27-06:43) Daria Rudnik
Well, I love that question. And the reason I love it is that we use the word team way too often. We overuse the word team. Most of organizational units are not teams. If you're working together and you have one manager, it doesn't make you a team.

(06:43-07:03) Daria Rudnik
What really makes you a team is, first, you have a shared goal. You have a purpose of working together. It's not just that you are within the one box of the org chart. It's because you're creating something meaningful together that you cannot create on your own. You cannot add the sums of your individual contributions and reach that goal.

(07:03-07:30) Daria Rudnik
So it leads us to the second part, which is interconnectedness. You need to be interconnected and work together and collaborate and talk and brainstorm and add value to each other's work. So shared vision, interconnectedness, and then like clear structure. Like there was a need to be a clear set of people. Who are people on this team? Like are there eight people, 10 people?

(07:30-07:41) Daria Rudnik
Because I used to work with an organization. I'll tell you a story about the team I was working with. And the senior executive team was from five up to 30 people.

(07:41-08:07) Daria Rudnik
And whatever the meeting is called, let's call it an executive meeting. Okay, who's going to be on that team? You never know. Could be 5, 10, 15, 30. And there was a logic behind that in CEO's mind who understood that. But for everyone else, they didn't know that. And it led to a lot of misunderstanding of who makes what decision. Like why those people need to contribute and others don't.

(08:08-08:31) Daria Rudnik
Are we a team or are we not a team? So that created a lot of uncertainty and people were hesitated to move forward. They had to go to the CEO and ask the permission or question or clarify something rather than working together collaboratively. So you need to be clear about, okay, who's on your team, why you're connected and how you contribute to the shared success.

(08:31-08:56) Utkarsh Narang
And if you were to move this out of the corporate state, you could now apply this easily to sports. For example, if I look at cricket, it's simple, right? There's a team. The shared purpose, the goal for them is to be the best that they are or win the Ashes if you're looking at England and Australia or the World Cup if you're looking at India. So the Indian and Australian both stay alive in me.

(08:56-09:20) Utkarsh Narang
And then you need to be interconnected with each other so that you're each collaborating, cooperating, supporting each other's victories. And there has to be a clear structure that the person who's going to be bowling should not be opening and vice versa. How does that apply to someone's personal life? I do believe in we have those teams in sport. We have teams in corporate.

(09:21-09:39) Daria Rudnik
But I wouldn't call like a family a team because family is not a team. Whenever you're trying to bring this family analogy to corporate world, it kind of mixes things up together because in a family we love each other no matter what. You can never fire anyone from your family.

(09:39-09:53) Daria Rudnik
You don't have to be like you don't have actually a shared purpose rather than just being together and enjoying each other and supporting each other and loving each other. That's your main objective. You're not reaching any particular goal.

(09:53-10:09) Daria Rudnik
So when you bring this family analogy to business, it kind of mix things up. You expect dedication and devotion like you have in family, but you don't get back acceptance, like fully acceptance that you have in the family. And that creates...

(10:11-10:38) Daria Rudnik
I mean, unrealistic expectations from everyone. So I really don't support that. And I know how hard it is to run a family business. But again, it's very important to be very clear. Here is the family issues and here are the business issues. And here are how we deal with those issues. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. And I agree with that. And I have heard thought leaders across the world speak about the corporate world becoming family and all of that.

(10:38-11:04) Utkarsh Narang
I don't think anyone should be dedicated to a business the way they are dedicated. And there are dysfunctional families, so I'm going to kind of call it out, that there are families where people don't want to be close to each other and want to be away. But calling your team at work, a family is doing a disservice to all parts of that team. Yeah, yeah.

(11:04-11:32) Utkarsh Narang
Yeah. What I also feel is like in a team structure, there are all kinds of people, right? Different people come together and they're trying to figure out how do we work together. And there are a lot of people who I've seen, and I'd love your views on it, who feel like they're self-sufficient. They're the lone wolf. They'll take care of everything and they don't really need the team or need to lean on. How does that impact the team's dynamics?

(11:34-11:57) Daria Rudnik
I love that question. Absolutely. I mean, there are people who don't need other people. The thing is, again, we all come back to the goal. Like, what is the goal we're trying to achieve? And what kind of people we need on that team? If somehow we have someone who is self-sufficient, why is this person even on the team? Like, what's the role? Like, why are they there?

(11:58-12:18) Daria Rudnik
You need some external expert who will give advice when needed, or will you have some external professional who's doing their work and then adds to teamwork and then team works with that and moves forward with it. So it all starts with, okay, what is the goal? What are we trying to achieve? And what kind of people we need to have on the team to do that?

(12:18-12:42) Daria Rudnik
And at some point, not all the unit need to be a team. Like you can have people who can do their individual work and they can be a group of people working together. They have fight and fun together, but they don't contribute to each other. And that's fine because you don't always need a team. So it always comes to, again, to questions. Like what is the main purpose of the team and what kind of people you need to have?

(12:43-13:02) Utkarsh Narang
So two good questions to ask is for anyone to become a team, what is the purpose of that person being on the team? And then second was? What is the main purpose of the team? What are we trying to achieve and what kind of people and roles we need to have on the team to reach that goal?

(13:02-13:22) Utkarsh Narang
So a higher purpose, the structured goal of the team, and then what kind of people do we need to make sure that we achieve that objective? Yes. Interesting. I like that idea. Now, what I'm most intrigued to have us speak about is what does it take for a team to click? What's the model? Oh, I love that. Well...

(13:24-13:54) Daria Rudnik
I've been working with teams since I joined the corporate, because we all work in teams. And I was very fascinated about, okay, how do you make sure people feel well at work and perform well at work? How you can make those things work together? So it's not either or, so it goes together. And I was lucky enough to work in very amazing team cultures. I was working for Deloitte. I was working for an international telecom startup with amazing culture. And I

(13:54-14:13) Daria Rudnik
I witnessed, I saw how strong culture and strong teamwork helped organizations overcome crisis. Like I was working for a bank and there was crisis 2008. And we survived that just because we were together and we knew what our goal is.

(14:14-14:38) Daria Rudnik
launching offices in other countries, going through mergers and acquisitions. I saw teams and I was helping teams to go through that. And I also unfortunately witnessed teams who didn't make it because like they didn't have clear understanding who's on the team and what does the team, like what is the team. They were dysfunctional teams and those projects failed.

(14:39-15:04) Daria Rudnik
So I came up like while working with those teams, I came up to the Five Pillar Click framework, which is about, again, clear purpose. The first thing you need to have, like, what is the shared purpose of your team? Why does the team exist? And that's pretty obvious. I mean, you know that. I'm sure you know about that. The second thing is linking connections. That becomes a little bit more tricky because...

(15:04-15:24) Daria Rudnik
What I see in the modern world is that leaders who want to be good leaders, they build a lot of one-to-one conversations with their team members and especially in remote settings. They want to help their teams succeed. They want people to feel well, and that's great. What's missing is that they're not connecting team members to each other.

(15:24-15:37) Daria Rudnik
So this particular team member sitting somewhere in the office or at home without access to office and all the people, the main connection they have is their manager.

(15:38-16:05) Daria Rudnik
And they might feel lonely, while the manager has many connections, team members, peers, their boss. So what leaders need to do is connect team members to each other so that they have more conversations, more collaboration, and not just talking to their manager. So linking connection is very important. And besides, they also need to be connected to the board organization, people they're serving, their internal customers.

(16:07-16:18) Daria Rudnik
So that is the second, clear purpose linking connections. The third one is integrated work. And this one is super critical, super easy, but very often missed.

(16:20-16:40) Daria Rudnik
When teams have clear team norms and team rules of how they work together and how they operate, everything becomes much more clearer. A lot of frustrations, a lot of anxiety just go away because they know what's expected of them. They know each other's expectations. They know how to reply to the email.

(16:40-17:07) Daria Rudnik
When to go online, when to have a video, like a Zoom call with video on or video off. What is the good result look like? What kind of level of details they need to go to? Like all of those things that are important for the team. When you have that spoken and written down and kind of really understanding what's expected, the work becomes much more smoother, easier and enjoyable.

(17:08-17:21) Daria Rudnik
The fourth one is collaborative decisions, where teams make decisions together. Not all decisions need to be made by the manager. People can make some decisions together. Some decisions can be made by individual contributors.

(17:22-17:45) Daria Rudnik
And finally, knowledge sharing and feedback, how you grow together and how you learn together as a team, how you get feedback, how you collect feedback, how you give feedback, all of those things, how you learn together. So when you have clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, knowledge, collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing, your team will click.

(17:46-18:08) Utkarsh Narang
Love that. Such a simple framework. And it's so deep because I loved your thought around link connections because it's not about just the connectedness of the manager to the direct report, but it's about the interconnectedness of the other parts of the system. Let's go through them one by one. A few questions have been popping up in my head.

(18:10-18:30) Utkarsh Narang
It seems such a no brainer that teams should have a clear purpose, should have clarity on what that objective is. But so many times you see that teams are trying to operate in silos. There's no clear understanding of what we're trying to achieve. One person is going in direction A, the other is going in B.

(18:31-18:59) Daria Rudnik
What happens in those moments of dysfunction? I can tell a story. I was working with the senior executive team of a manufacturing company. And the CEO and the owner reached out to me and said, okay, we have a lot of conflicts on the team because people, like you said, they don't collaborate. They argue a lot, a lot of conflicts. So when I came and we started having those conversations all together,

(19:00-19:24) Daria Rudnik
It actually happened that they were all very much engaged. A lot of people are engaged in what they're doing. They want their team to succeed. They want their organization to succeed. They want to be part of something successful. The thing is, they just have different understanding of how their success can be reached. What will lead them to the success? And since teams don't have that conversation around the how, and

(19:26-19:52) Daria Rudnik
So that is the reason they might have conflicts on the team. How do we reach success? How we make goals? What would success look like? Because everyone has their own vision of success. So the first thing we did with that team is we actually had a clear statement on what success would look like for their team. And then how are we going to reach that success? Again, that sounds obvious. You have a vision, you have a strategy.

(19:52-20:17) Daria Rudnik
And at some executive level, some companies have that. I mean, not all, but some do that, but they don't have it on the team level. And having that on the team level is the thing that really helps solve many conflicts on the team about how we're reaching our goal and what's our goal. And linking team goal to organizational goal and having this connection.

(20:18-20:29) Daria Rudnik
I really, I really like encourage team leaders and I help leaders, I work with leaders to have those team sessions and figure out what is the purpose of your team? Why are you together?

(20:31-20:52) Utkarsh Narang
Yeah. And one example that's popping up as you were saying about this, and I'm kind of trying to just expand it so that listeners who are, who maybe are not part of teams, who are just maybe starting their first job or are homemakers, whatever it be that state. Like what I'm also thinking is, it's like when as a family, group of friends, or as a team, you're trying to

(20:52-21:12) Utkarsh Narang
achieve a certain goal, maybe going for a vacation to a certain destination. You would put something in a GPS before you start to drive, right? And so you need to really understand where you're headed is what I'm hearing you say. And there could be multiple paths that can take you to that destination. But as a team, you've got to come together because four people sitting in a car cannot say that, oh, I'm going to take path here, you take path here.

(21:12-21:33) Utkarsh Narang
It doesn't work like that. It's going to lead to chaos. What you said almost sounds like a very simple solution again, really hard to achieve, is that communication is that first step towards that chaos, towards solving that, resolving that chaos. Yeah. And actually, I remember the situation I had with my friends. Again, you're right. It's not just about corporate teams.

(21:33-21:47) Daria Rudnik
Like we were preparing a new year party. So like a group of friends, we live together, we shared an apartment a long, long time ago. And we're thinking, okay, we should have a new year party.

(21:47-22:05) Daria Rudnik
And we almost had like came to the conflict because one person saying, okay, what kind of plates should we have? What kind of like setup? The other person was focusing, okay, what should we eat? What kind of food? What kind of drinks? I was focusing, okay, who are the people we're going to invite in? And we were arguing like, what are you talking about? That's not, that's not important.

(22:06-22:27) Utkarsh Narang
And then this kind of sharing, okay, what is it we want to achieve? Who's doing what? Maybe we share the roles. That would make us have a great, amazing New Year party. I agree with that. I agree with that. Thank you for sharing that. We move to the next one, which is linking connections, right? So how do you create that interconnectedness within the team?

(22:28-22:56) Utkarsh Narang
see we could we could all be like friendly and we could have like a good relationship and all of that but what according to you is again and i want to expand it from the corporate to like human beings maybe what does it really mean to be linked to the other human being that's a great question and again it's not just you are either connected or not and in my book clicking i write about the five levels of trust how we trust each other and again

(22:57-23:22) Daria Rudnik
We can have trust on multiple levels. We can have all of them or just some of them. But again, it all starts with trusting in style like we started in the beginning of this conversation. Like, how do you trust? Do you trust yourself? Do you trust yourself to be a good team leader? Do you trust yourself to be a good team player? Do you trust that you are a decent person? Like being very clear about that. Yes, I can handle all of the things. People can trust me. I can trust myself.

(23:23-23:50) Daria Rudnik
The second one is just basic human to human connections, human relationships. I don't know you, but I know that you're a good person. I believe I have thought that you're a good person. I can have normal, regular conversation with you. I can have a chit chat. I can talk. And then once I know and learn about you better, I know that you're a professional. I can trust you on a professional level. I know that there are certain tasks that I can give to you and you'll fix them and you'll do them. I can trust that.

(23:52-24:08) Daria Rudnik
And then there comes the next level where I can share my feelings with you. I can say, okay, I doubt, I don't think that's going to work. I don't think that, well, I'm afraid that might not work. I can challenge you and I trust that you respond well.

(24:09-24:30) Daria Rudnik
And then I can share my concerns. I'm afraid. I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. And we can have this level, like we have this high connection. And then, okay, we have this trust on the high level. We have the synergy. We're working together as a team. We share thoughts. We share concerns. We share ideas. And we collaborate. And it all comes to one place.

(24:32-25:01) Utkarsh Narang
Love it. And it leads to that state of being super psychologically safe, that I'm okay sharing my feelings with you, my concerns with you, and you're part of a team. And that's absolutely okay. And where he started, that it starts with trust. One of my mentors who were running a workshop, he said something very thoughtful. He said that when I walk into a new room towards a new person, I give my trust, but they need to earn my respect, which I found really powerful and profound.

(25:04-25:19) Utkarsh Narang
linking connections. Let's move to the third one, integrated work. That seems to be like how our work comes kind of together. How do we work together? How do we stop this from getting to a dysfunction?

(25:22-25:46) Daria Rudnik
Well, again, I'll continue. Like the story I started talking about with this executive manufacturing company. So the first thing we did is we created a statement for the shared purpose. But the second thing we did is we talked about integrated work, how they work together. So what they did to overcome those conflicts and challenges that they had is we talked about the

(25:46-26:04) Daria Rudnik
The list of keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors. So keep it up behaviors are behaviors that they want to see on their team. They want to have more of those. Something like when you see there is a problem or when you doubt something, raise the concern. Don't like shy away. Talk about it.

(26:04-26:22) Daria Rudnik
And cut it out behavior is like, don't blame other people for anything. Ask a question, but no blaming. And they had a list of keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors. And they agreed that they want to stick to them because they would help them reach their shared purpose, their goal.

(26:23-26:50) Daria Rudnik
And everything was fine. I mean, everything was great. I finished the engagement with this team. But about six months later, the CEO called me and said, like, wanted to share updates, how they're doing. And he said, everything's fine. We're working together. Like, we're great as a team. There's just one thing that happened. And that's very interesting. He said that the team decided to let the sales director go.

(26:51-27:11) Daria Rudnik
The chief sales officer, they decided that she's not going to be part of the team. Why? Because she violated those keep it up and cut it out behaviors. She didn't follow the rules that they all agreed they're going to be following. She showed some of the cut it out behaviors consistently.

(27:12-27:23) Daria Rudnik
They gave her feedback. She kept doing that. And they, as a team, decided, here are the rules that we agreed that are working for our team. That's how we want to work together. She's violating those rules.

(27:23-27:52) Daria Rudnik
Like she should not be part of our team. So they came to the CEO and they shared it with the CEO and well, they let her go. It wasn't CEO's decision. It was team's decision, collaborative decision. Decision that made the team work together, that made the team sustainable. So that is one of the amazing results of having those integrated work on your team is that you keep your team productive and engaged. And if something goes wrong, they can solve it.

(27:53-28:12) Utkarsh Narang
Love that. So you've empowered the team by giving them a list of keep it up behaviors. And I heard first the other one as kick it out behaviors instead of cut it out. I think kick it out. So you create a list of keep it up behaviors and kick it, cut it out behaviors. And then if a team member is not

(28:13-28:37) Utkarsh Narang
committing to them and is not following them then it's time for them even in this case the sales director to go and not be part of the team fascinating the next one seems really straightforward right that in a team we need to come together and have some collaborative decisions where do you see this getting broken well

(28:38-28:51) Daria Rudnik
In today's corporate world, there is a kind of a narrative of a leader who needs to know everything, who needs to solve everything, who needs to be a heroic leader who saves the world.

(28:51-29:12) Daria Rudnik
And many people, whether it's because of the ego or because of this narrative or because they want to protect their team, they kind of take a lot of responsibility on themselves. So they make all the decisions, they solve all of the problems. It feels like they want to protect the team, but on the other hand, they're isolating their team.

(29:12-29:33) Daria Rudnik
So that is the first challenge that I helped leaders all become is, okay, let go. You don't need to make all the decisions. You don't need to save your team. And I'll share a story with you. It's a story about the cybersecurity team in an organization, a cloud computing company. And they had a great leader, and she was...

(29:33-29:58) Daria Rudnik
She wanted to protect the team members. So what she did, she was communicating about all the mistakes that team made. She was communicating about all the goals. She was a go-to person in the company to solve problems, to make decisions on the cybersecurity topic. And she thought that she was protecting her team.

(29:59-30:19) Daria Rudnik
But suddenly she realized that the team became disengaged. They were losing motivation because they didn't feel this connection with the poor organization. They were kind of, okay, they're doing some automated manual work that's kind of meaningless. So...

(30:19-30:34) Daria Rudnik
What she did instead, like what we did to reverse that is she stepped aside and she let the team members go out, talk to stakeholders, make some decisions on their own in the area of expertise.

(30:34-30:54) Daria Rudnik
And they also agreed that some decisions were made by her as a leader. Some decisions were made by individual contributors within the area of expertise. And some decisions they need to make collaboratively, like the decisions on the integrated work on the team norms and team rules, on the next step, on the strategy of how team should develop.

(30:54-31:17) Daria Rudnik
So they divided those decision levels between the leader, individual contributors, and collaborative decisions as a team. And that made the team more engaged. They got their engagement back. They were motivated. They finally saw, okay, here are the people we're working for. Here is the organization. Here is the bigger goal. And they got their engagement back.

(31:17-31:35) Utkarsh Narang
Yeah, that becomes just like it becomes like that glue ride that brings the team together that makes it makes stronger and do amazing work. Knowledge sharing. Now, there's a part of me that is playing the devil's advocate throughout because that's how I feel like the best ideas come out of us.

(31:36-31:55) Utkarsh Narang
In terms of knowledge sharing, there could be parts of the team, right, where we feel like, let me protect my competence. Let me protect my knowledge. Let me protect what I know so that someone else does not get ahead in the game. And that's how the human brain feels. How have you seen that play out in terms of knowledge sharing as the fifth and the final pillar?

(31:55-32:17) Daria Rudnik
If someone has that feeling on the team, that means something's wrong. Because what's the point? We're all here to collaborate. We're not here to replace. We're better when we can collaborate. But I'll tell you again. I'll tell you a story about a project management team. They were working for a consulting. I mean, it was a consulting department of a company.

(32:18-32:35) Daria Rudnik
And on that team, they had people, they had project managers, they had lawyers, they had technical experts, and they had someone else. I mean, the expertise was very diverse. How do you make them work together? How do you, how can they collaborate? How can they share knowledge?

(32:36-32:57) Daria Rudnik
So what they decided to do to speed up and to build stronger connections on the team, it was their decision. We worked as a team coaching setting, and they decided that they want to share knowledge. So that's how they did that. They were working through some project steps, and there was one person at a time responsible for each step.

(32:57-33:14) Daria Rudnik
So for each step, they invited the person responsible for the next step to join them and to share knowledge and to collaborate. And what that made for that team is that the next step became more logical and clear for the next person because they already knew what's happening before.

(33:14-33:41) Daria Rudnik
So they were kind of sharing both knowledge process and they knew more about how they're working together. They didn't need to go deep into that lawyer work or project management or technical expertise, but they had a general overview and that made their individual work easier and more productive. Yeah, and the more you share in a team, the more productive each member becomes, which ultimately leads to the productivity of the whole team. So I love that.

(33:42-34:07) Utkarsh Narang
And eventually, they actually, this team, they became the center of expertise for the whole organization. Amazing. Just because they had this practice. Yeah, yeah, of sharing the knowledge. And you don't have to go deep into everything, but at least share that with the right people at the right time. Now, we've heard the Qlik framework, and I think it helps teams build high performance. But in this world of AI, when everything's changing, and you've played a lot with AI, what have you learned today?

(34:09-34:26) Daria Rudnik
through your experiences with AI about human behavior and where do we struggle the most? That's an absolutely like amazing conversation on AI and how it influences team dynamics. And like the more I'm into that space, the more I realize how important like

(34:27-34:47) Daria Rudnik
building teams is now because AI transformation is not a tech transformation. It's how we work together. It's about the dynamics at the workplace. So what AI does, it's not just automation. At many points, AI takes

(34:47-35:06) Daria Rudnik
Teams tend to offload too much to AI. And when they offload too much to AI, they kind of lose the connection to their work. And I've seen teams that were losing engagement and they were losing productivity. For example, there was a team that overloaded, that uploaded too much to AI.

(35:06-35:31) Daria Rudnik
AI was doing transcripts of the conversations with customers. AI was doing insights, adding those insights, backlog items, a generated agenda for the next conversation. It felt like at first it was feeling like, okay, that's great. We have so much free time. We can do things that we never had time to do before. But then they started to feel that they're losing connection when they work. They couldn't recall anything.

(35:32-35:36) Daria Rudnik
what the clients need. They couldn't prioritize backlog because they didn't

(35:37-36:03) Daria Rudnik
feel their clients anymore. They didn't have this connection because they offloaded too much. So what we did instead, as again, we created integrated norms of how they work with AI, how they collaborate with AI. And one of the keep it up behavior was that they did their thinking first, like from after having a conversation with the customer, they

(36:03-36:21) Daria Rudnik
they thought about how they felt about it, they thought about the insight that they had from this conversation, they talked, they gave those insights to AI and then AI generated some summary of the conversation based on the transcript and this person's insight. So it was

(36:21-36:47) Daria Rudnik
They were thinking first and then AI. And that's critical because there is a research, your brain on ChatGPT, that tells us that if we think it first and give it to AI, our brain stays engaged. But if we ask AI first and then try to edit and analyze that, our brain becomes disengaged far more quickly. So that's why they implemented the rule of thinking first and then giving it to AI.

(36:48-37:17) Utkarsh Narang
Yeah, AI is here to stay and it's going to grow and it's absolutely a stunning piece of technology that's going to augment our work really well. But I think what you just shared there, that if we give away all our work, A, we lose that meaning and that connection to work, but then also the cognitive function of the brain, like what does the brain do then? And so I think it's really important to do that first cut, to do the initial design thinking and then go to AI and see how you can improve that. Yeah, absolutely. Amazing.

(37:18-37:46) Utkarsh Narang
I've loved our conversation. It's been very, very crisp. And another framework is coming up to my mind. But as we now come towards the closure of the conversation, if Darya, you continue to do the work that you're doing over the next few decades, and that 80-year-old Darya, the one from the future, comes to you right now in this moment and has one piece of advice on how you should lead the rest of your years, what do you think that 80-year-old will say? Oh, I love the question.

(37:46-38:13) Daria Rudnik
I think from that she would say relax because like being dedicated and like having this tension and kind of pushing through is good. But if it's too much, you kind of lose what's going on right now. Like you said, being in the present and experiencing the present and you need to be more, I need to be more relaxed to fully experience that. So, yeah.

(38:14-38:31) Utkarsh Narang
Thank you for sharing. To everyone who's listening and with us 40 minutes into the conversation, let's listen to the 80-year-old Darya's advice. Let's just relax and be in the moment. We also want to let you know that AI is an amazing piece of technology, but don't

(38:31-38:57) Utkarsh Narang
Give away your piece of thinking. Don't give away your creativity to AI completely. Do the thinking first. For those who are in the corporate world, you're a manager, a leader, or part of a team, then you must understand the Qlik framework, which is that as a team, you need to create a clear purpose. You need to make sure that you're linking the connections beyond just the manager and the direct report, but the interconnectedness of the team comes out.

(38:57-39:21) Utkarsh Narang
You're doing work that's going through and the book's right there. You're doing work where the work gets integrated and you understand what that working ways are. You create some collaborative decisions. And then finally, knowledge sharing is super critical. And all of these principles apply to your life as well. Because what makes you better as a human being is to have shared purpose with humanity and with the people around you.

(39:21-39:38) Utkarsh Narang
create that interconnectedness with them, and have a clear structure of what you're trying to pursue. We'll put all the links so that you can reach out to Daria, get her book into the show notes today. Daria, thank you for this beautiful conversation. Any final words before we wrap?

(39:39-40:08) Daria Rudnik
Well, thank you so much, Edgar. It was a great conversation. I love talking about teams and how that influences our workplaces. The only thing that I want to say, if you are the leader, if you're leading a team, we don't need more heroic leaders. We need more empowered teams. So you don't need to save the world. Just be there with your team and together you can reach any goals you want. Amazing. You don't have to save the world. Trust yourself. You got this.

(40:08-40:11) Utkarsh Narang
This is Uttar Shandarya signing off.