Throttle Up Leadership
Delegation Is a Myth: Daria Rudnik on Building Teams That Click (snippet)
Daria Rudnik has spent her career proving that leaders do not need to carry everything. Drawing on work across six continents and her own time inside toxic workplaces, she argues that the heroic leader who saves, protects, and sits in every conversation is the wrong model for a world moving this fast. Her answer is leadership as a process the whole team owns. She calls delegation a myth, because if you are stopping to decide what to hand off, you are already in the wrong spot. Build the right processes and your people simply act.
Her book Clicking lays out a five-pillar framework for self-sufficient teams: clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing. Trust, she explains, is not binary but layered, from trusting people as humans to trusting their judgment and emotions. On AI, Daria warns that cadence matters. Think first, then bring AI in, or risk losing ownership of your own work. Her mission is simple and bold. More happy workplaces, because we spend most of our lives there and everyone deserves better.
Her book Clicking lays out a five-pillar framework for self-sufficient teams: clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing. Trust, she explains, is not binary but layered, from trusting people as humans to trusting their judgment and emotions. On AI, Daria warns that cadence matters. Think first, then bring AI in, or risk losing ownership of your own work. Her mission is simple and bold. More happy workplaces, because we spend most of our lives there and everyone deserves better.
I challenge the myth of the heroic leader and shows how to build teams that think, decide, and perform without depending on one person.
- Leadership is about designing systems, not carrying everything yourself
- Delegation is less important than building processes that enable autonomy
- The CLICK framework creates self-sufficient teams through purpose, connection, collaboration, and continuous learning
- Trust develops in layers and is the foundation of high-performing teams
- Use AI to enhance thinking—not replace it by thinking first and involving AI second
- Better teams create better workplaces, stronger results, and more fulfilled people
(00:05-00:18) Dr. John Dentico
Welcome to the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast. Our theme for 2026 continues, The Future of Work, Meaning is the New Money. Because meaning is simply the greatest motivational force on earth.
(00:19-00:35) Dr. John Dentico
But 68% of the global workforce is disengaged, leaving $9.6 trillion in productivity on the table every year. Gen Z, the canary in the coal mine, is exposing structural failures everyone else learned to ignore, rationalize, or endure. I'm Dr. John D'Antico, your host, bringing over 30 years of experience in leadership, strategic thinking, and designing solutions that solve real problems. This podcast delivers boots on the ground intelligence, real conversations with CEOs, fractional executives, coaches, and small and medium-sized business leaders navigating the same crisis.
(01:01-01:25) Dr. John Dentico
Mitigating the talent hemorrhage before competitive viability disappears. We go beyond symptoms like engagement scores and wellness programs to focus on the structural failures beneath them. Frontline intelligence, actionable frameworks, hard truths. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Now let's throttle up and dive into today's episode.
(01:25-01:53) Dr. John Dentico
Hello again, and welcome to the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast. This is your host, Dr. John D'Antico. With me this morning is Daria Rudnick. Daria has worked with leaders and teams across six continents, helped over 5,000 people build healthier and more collaborative work cultures, and built an AI-powered coaching tool from scratch. But what makes Daria Rudnick's perspective genuinely different is what she has lived through personally.
(01:54-02:21) Dr. John Dentico
An unexpected relocation to a new country and culture, followed by the experience of war. Those are not credentials you earn in a classroom. That is the kind of forging that either breaks you or produces something the world needs. Daria is a former chief people officer, an ex-Deloitte professional, an ICF professional certified coach, and the author of Clicking, a team-building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team trust, better results, and more time. She is also the co-author of AI Revolution, Thriving Within Civilization's Next Big Disruption. Her life's work comes down to one conviction. Leaders don't need to carry everything.
(02:47-03:06) Dr. John Dentico
I'm so pleased and privileged to have Daria with me this morning. Good morning, Daria. How are you? Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me here, John. I love listening to your show and I'm so excited to be here and talk to you about AI and leadership and all that. I appreciate that so very much. It's great to have you here.
(03:06-03:18) Dr. John Dentico
So let's begin with my most favorite question for everyone. And that is, tell me a little bit about yourself, your travels and all, and what were some of the influences in your early life?
(03:21-03:48) Daria Rudnik
I was lucky enough to work for great companies. And like you said, I worked for Deloitte, which is an amazing company with great culture, great structures. I've learned a lot there. I worked for some great startups where I had experiences of setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations, mergers and acquisitions. So I was lucky to go through some experience of great projects, great people and leaders helping me out.
(03:48-04:17) Daria Rudnik
But together with that, I also experienced toxic workplaces where leaders' behaviors were actually draining energy and destroying confidence in people, myself included, and kind of making hard decisions. Should I stay or should I go? If I go, will it be a failure? Or if I stay, would I fail in this environment? So these experiences
(04:18-04:43) Daria Rudnik
taught me and I learned through them how important it is to have a great team. Because what I've seen is when organizations have strong teams that are united by values, by shared purpose, they can do anything. They can survive through financial crisis. I was working for a bank during global financial crisis in 2008, and we did it.
(04:43-05:13) Daria Rudnik
We made through that, we survived as an organization because we had this strong culture. And I've also seen organizations failing because they were saying one thing, but doing the other thing. They're not on the market right now. So ever since that time, I'm focusing my time and my energy on helping leaders build strong, self-sufficient teams that can operate on their own, work collaboratively, make decisions and make better products for their customers.
(05:14-05:34) Dr. John Dentico
I couldn't agree with you more. Just before we started, I was talking about a report I'm about ready to release to get it to the printer. That's kind of where we are right now. It's almost finished. I'll tell you the title of the report. It's called Throttle Up from the Field, Volume 1, Canaries in the Coal Mine.
(05:35-06:00) Dr. John Dentico
the workforce crisis gen z is exposing so what i did was i i looked at the generational issues and the report draws from gallup gallup's 2025 state of the global workplace talks a lot about what you just said development dimensions internationals global leadership forecast 2025.
(06:00-06:29) Dr. John Dentico
18 of my podcast guests' interviews, boots on the ground, as I like to call it. And then Edelman's trust barometer, which is another piece, which oddly enough, I couldn't believe it when I read the report, agrees completely with what I was saying. But the interesting part about these different data sources from different places is they all converge at one spot, right on top of one another. And they say the same thing.
(06:29-06:53) Dr. John Dentico
And here's the crux of it. And then I'd love to get your comments on it. Three frames are failing in organizations. Number one, values alignment. People want to make sure that they work for an organization whose values echo their own. Okay. You said it just a few minutes ago. When you say one thing and reward something else,
(06:54-07:15) Dr. John Dentico
That's a value misalignment, okay? The second one is personal agency. Do I have the ability to act here? Can I actually do something, engage in something, or am I constantly running around looking for empowerment? You know, the permission slip to go to the next level.
(07:16-07:39) Dr. John Dentico
And the third one, and it's a big one, it's one that I didn't think had that big an effect, but found out it has the biggest effect. And that is growth trajectory. Can I grow in this organization? Can I move up? Is there a pathway for me to do that? These are the three big things. And I'd love to get your, based on your experience and your background, I'd love to get your reflection on that.
(07:40-08:01) Daria Rudnik
That resonates a lot. When I work with leaders as a coach, the things I'm hearing a lot is I want to do some meaningful work. I don't feel that the things that I'm doing right now bring any value to our customers. They may be kind of, I'm playing some political games and I know how to do that, but I don't want to spend my life doing that.
(08:01-08:13) Daria Rudnik
I want to do something meaningful. I want this organization to succeed and I want it to bring happiness and great service to our customers. But I don't feel that I'm doing exactly that. And that's question number one.
(08:13-08:41) Daria Rudnik
Question number two that I'm hearing a lot is we've been such a great company aligned with our values, but then leadership has changed and everything's changed. And we're not the same company anymore. And we're chasing, we have the same name, we have kind of the same people, we have the same values on the wall, but we're chasing different objectives. And I don't feel that for me. And as for growth, I mean, personally, I see like on the low levels, there are a lot of
(08:41-09:03) Daria Rudnik
opportunities to grow because you can go to team member, team manager, and then hire above. But at some point you kind of get stuck because again, people don't want to play political games for the sake of playing political games. They want some meaningful growth and they say, okay, I could potentially go into VP level. Do I want to?
(09:06-09:29) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, I agree. In fact, one of the reports, I can't remember which one, I think they all kind of alluded to it, but one specifically stated, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I think it was the DDI report. The DDI report said that people are not looking to be in those positions. Do you want to be the CEO or senior vice president? No, I don't want to do that. No, that's not for me.
(09:29-09:55) Dr. John Dentico
Too much pressure, too much on top of me that will force me to live a wholly different life, if you will. And this is an interesting key point, and I'd love to get your reflection on this as well. You know, when we talk about leadership, the typical leadership conversation or definition of leadership that everybody presumes everybody else knows is,
(09:55-10:20) Dr. John Dentico
is the people in charge, the people in the upper strata. I see leadership as a process. To me, it's a leadership process. What is it that you do? How do you affect leadership? And I make the differentiation between leadership and management, okay? Management, you need them both. By the way, you need both. They go hand in hand, two sides of the same coin.
(10:20-10:40) Dr. John Dentico
Management is about incremental change, efficiency. Leadership is about transforming change and effectiveness. And you have to understand what the leadership practices are about. That's what my book Throttle Up is about. These are the leadership practices. So as opposed to someone
(10:41-10:58) Dr. John Dentico
sitting in the corner office as the leader or the leadership. And I've been tracking this for over 30 years with the democratization of information and knowledge. And someone who is 28 years of age and has AI tools at their fingertips
(10:58-11:26) Dr. John Dentico
has as much knowledge or more knowledge than the people in the corner office. And where also you can see leadership as an influence relationship and anybody can have influence. To me, that's one of the biggest mind shifts that people have to make when it comes to leadership. I'd love to get your reflection on that. I love how you say it. And again, like people think that leaders are people in trust, like you said, but it's not like that.
(11:28-11:34) Daria Rudnik
I agree that leadership is a process, but I also want to make another kind of dimension to that is...
(11:35-12:02) Daria Rudnik
We tend to think that leaders are some kind of heroes saving the world, saving the organization, saving their people. And sometimes, I mean, they're doing it with good intentions. I want to be there for my people. I want to help them grow. I want to protect them from challenges. I want to protect them from negative feedback or from too much information or from too little information. I want to protect them. And sometimes it's ego. Sometimes it's good intentions.
(12:02-12:20) Daria Rudnik
But still, leaders kind of tend to take a lot of responsibility on themselves. And with this speed of change, with this level of uncertainty, where there's so many multiple demands that come into those managers, no person can handle it on their own.
(12:20-12:39) Daria Rudnik
What they need to do is they need to make a shift from being a heroic leader to someone who facilitates, who does leadership as a process for their teams so that teams are more empowered. Not when they say, hey, can I do this? But just take and do it. And leaders are not involved. That's why I say delegation is a myth.
(12:39-13:05) Daria Rudnik
If you need to delegate, if you need to think, okay, what should I delegate? You're in the wrong spot. But if you have processes in place where your team members know exactly what they're working on, or if they don't know, they get together and decide, and you don't have to be in every conversation as a leader. That's the process that can help teams move forward, organizations move forward, and you as a leader, you can breathe. You can finally breathe.
(13:06-13:35) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, a few months ago, I interviewed Sarah Daw from the UK. And Sarah is the CEO of the Liberty Group, spelled L-I-B-E-R-T-I, in the UK. And they have 1,500 fractional people, chief technology officers, mostly, I think, in the finance area, chief financial officers, who go to small or medium-sized companies and fill that position.
(13:36-13:58) Dr. John Dentico
And one of the things that she did, she did a LinkedIn learning thing, and I watched it. I was there listening to her. And one of the issues she's struggling with, as she looks at the world she's involved with, and she's everywhere, let me tell you. When I interviewed her, she was in the UAE. And so we were having this discussion. And she said one of the things that she thinks would work...
(13:59-14:28) Dr. John Dentico
is what they now call co-CEOs. In other words, so instead of one CEO, we got two CEOs, in a sense, dividing the work. But I have to tell you, to my way of thinking, it's still not enough. They're gonna be overwhelmed. But here's the thing, and I think she's an absolutely spectacular individual. I mean, there's no question about it. And she's brilliant, working on her doctorate, and just really has it together.
(14:28-14:40) Dr. John Dentico
is that if you still see leadership embodied in one or even two individuals in the world we live in today with things happening so fast,
(14:41-15:04) Dr. John Dentico
it's still not enough. You have to see leadership as something that, as I like to say, leadership is what people do together. That's leadership. You know, we have a team, we have a group. I don't have to be part of every, like you say, I don't have to be part of every conversation. We just have to set the tone, the direction, go for it, you know, do it. And if you don't have that,
(15:04-15:32) Dr. John Dentico
What I see is a lack of trust. It really is about a lot. Do you trust these people to go off and do what they need to do without you being in the middle of it? It's just so obvious to me. But anyway, I'd love to get your reflection on that as well, if I could. I mean, I agree with you. I know examples of, I actually worked for a company with two CEOs, but they were kind of running different side of the same business.
(15:33-15:48) Daria Rudnik
We do have destruction place. We have executive teams. It's just they're not teams. They're called teams, but they don't work for the shared purpose of that team. When you go to CE4 and ask, what's your team? What would they say?
(15:49-16:09) Daria Rudnik
they would say, my team is finance. If you go to a CMO, they would say, my team is marketing. And it's not the wrong, I mean, it's the wrong answer. Their team is executive team, well, their peers. And once they realize that, once they become this, the crown table, that's when they can start working together as a team.
(16:09-16:38) Daria Rudnik
They can take some burden from the CEO. They can make better decisions together because they have shared purpose of their team. And then the marketing team, the finance team are the secondary teams. And I write about this a lot in my book, Clicking, about how to build these kind of teams and how to build that kind of trust. Because again, trust is not something you either have or you don't have. When you ask your team members, do you trust this person? Yeah, sure, I trust. He's a professional or she's a professional.
(16:38-16:50) Daria Rudnik
Yes, you trust them as professionals. But do you trust them to make right decisions? Do you trust them to say, I don't know, I'm not sure, I'm confused? Do you trust them with that?
(16:50-17:14) Daria Rudnik
So these are different levels of trust you need to build on your team. Like first you need to trust yourself as a leader. I can lead those people. I am capable. Then you need to trust them as human beings. Okay. They're dangerous. Most of us, like we have that. Then we start trusting them as professionals. Okay. They can do the task and maybe even more complicated tasks and maybe become more complex tasks.
(17:14-17:41) Daria Rudnik
And then you start trusting them, like your emotions. What do you feel? Are you confused? How you make decisions together? And then you have this team synergy when you actually have trust on all multiple levels. And that's when you become a real team. Yeah, I agree. I agree completely. And I think we were talking about this before we started. And companies who don't do that in the world today may not be around tomorrow.
(17:43-18:12) Dr. John Dentico
because the rate of complex change is overwhelming. And if you don't have an ability to shift and be agile in this world, and you're still stuck in this very, you know, top-down level, mechanistic approach to how the, you know, quote-unquote, bureaucracy runs, because bureaucracy is a mechanistic machine,
(18:12-18:20) Dr. John Dentico
then you're not going to be able to respond to the needs of your clients or your customers or the people involved.
(18:20-18:44) Dr. John Dentico
inside the organization and i and people and and everybody i think i laugh at this see so much of this on linkedin everybody keeps scratching their head going what do we do how do we do this and the answer is it's right in front of you if you just take the time to look at it so it's very very interesting to me so let's move on i want to ask you a couple of more questions
(18:45-18:58) Dr. John Dentico
You built Adra AI. I think I said that right. Your own AI-powered coaching tool. You are also the co-author of a book on the AI revolution. I want to go down this path with you for a bit.
(18:59-19:28) Dr. John Dentico
Most of the conversation around AI and organizations right now is about productivity and efficiency, productivity, efficiency. You seem to be approaching it differently. What is AI actually capable of in the leadership and team development space? And where does it fall short? Well, that's actually an incredible topic is a very interesting, very complex.
(19:30-19:55) Daria Rudnik
The thing that interests me the most is how AI influences how we think, how we work, and how we collaborate. And lots of research, first of all, there is a research called Your Brain on ChatGPT that tells us that the cadence of how you work with AI actually matters a lot. So if you have something to do and you think about it first, and then you ask AI to give additional input or...
(19:55-20:22) Daria Rudnik
change it somehow but you think about it first and then ask ai to update then you stay engaged with the task and you own the task but if you go to the ai and tell them give me an article on this topic or give me a presentation or give me a slide deck it'll give you something you try to edit it but your brain becomes disengaged very quickly and you lose ownership and i've seen teams struggling with that because
(20:22-20:51) Daria Rudnik
when they had ai implemented across many of the processes the recording conversations making summary of those conversations updating backlog updating crm like ai was doing everything because it can and you have text and you can get some data points out uploaded to another system ai can do that but what people started to feel is that they lost connections with their clients they don't understand the backlog because okay
(20:51-21:14) Daria Rudnik
how do we prioritize that because i don't have the context i wasn't involved and when they changed the cadence ai was still doing the work but they were uploading their initial thoughts first they kind of had a conversation then thought about it and said okay these are my takeaways from these conversations they gave it to ai and then ai generated
(21:14-21:38) Daria Rudnik
data, insights, points for CRM, for backlog, but people were staying engaged and they kept this in their memory and they had that context so they could prioritize backlog, they could make decisions. And that is important. And again, AI is influencing how we work together in many different ways. And that's one of it, how our brain reacts to AI. So it's a very interesting kind of thing.
(21:39-22:03) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, the thing that I think is, and I'm working on this personally for a course I'm about ready to put on maven.com, which is a cohort training site. And it has to do with helping. The bottom line is it has to do with helping people do better in interviews. So, for example, you know, people show up. I'm sure you've seen this. People show up.
(22:04-22:26) Dr. John Dentico
They're ready to answer the 42 questions they're expecting to be asked. They've done all the tactical stuff, right? Prepared their resumes, updated them, LinkedIn profiles, you know, all those kinds of things. And I want to concentrate more on the strategic. But first, let's figure out who you are. What are your non-negotiables?
(22:26-22:47) Dr. John Dentico
sometimes you have to take work i get that no question about it you got to feed your family put food on the table you got to take the job i get it but there are times when you want to look back and say wait a minute if i go work for this company am i going to stay with this company are we meant to be together
(22:48-23:14) Dr. John Dentico
Almost like a marriage, right? Are we meant to be together? That kind of thing. So I'm working on that. And one of the areas that I'm working on right now, and I'm processing it myself and learning it myself before I go do it. And that is this idea of four levels of prompting. We can't just teach. We just can't use AI as a chatbot.
(23:16-23:37) Dr. John Dentico
And the four levels are simple prompting, right? Contextual, which is people are starting to get into. The next one's called intent. What is the overall intent? Something that Klarna had a problem with. You know, they laid off 700 people and then hired them back because the intent was save money.
(23:38-24:04) Dr. John Dentico
And it did that. AI saved the money. But then they lost on customer satisfaction and customer support. They didn't see that. And the last one, which is really an interesting one, is called specification engineering. So you go from intent to specification engineering. So I'm going to introduce those concepts to help people build a tool that they can now, and here's where things turn around.
(24:06-24:35) Dr. John Dentico
diagnose an organization before they ever go to the interview. What are these folks all about? What is it that they say? What is it that they do? Can I find values alignment? Can I act in this organization? Is there growth here? Those are the three frames. That's the lens. And through that lens, I want to be able to help them create a tool that goes much beyond where AI prompting is today.
(24:35-25:00) Daria Rudnik
I'd love to get your reflection on just the idea. I mean, I think it's an incredible idea. The thing is, AI can help us make baddest decisions if we apply it in the right way. If we have those different lenses, if we know what we're looking for, if we kind of see different perspectives, AI can help us a lot. If you just ask a question, take the response and use it, that's not a good thing.
(25:00-25:16) Daria Rudnik
I'm also preparing some courses on decision-making with AI. How do you use AI for better decision-making? And I like your four levels of prompting. What I do is also ask to push back, to criticize, to find blind spots, because
(25:16-25:37) Daria Rudnik
It tends to, hey, great idea. Let's do that. Absolutely. You're so right. No, I'm not. I have no idea what I'm doing here. And I need someone or something to actually criticize what I'm thinking to find other perspective. So that's the way AI can help us make better decisions, not by asking it what to do.
(25:37-25:53) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, I agree. It's a phenomenal tool. And there's these reports that CEOs come out and say, okay, in two weeks, we want to be using AI in two weeks. Let's go team, right? And everybody goes, whoa.
(25:53-26:22) Dr. John Dentico
We don't even know what it can do at the administration or at the execution level. Someone down in finance, for example, okay, AI, what am I going to do with this? So again, there's a pushback on this. The CEO may decree it, but it's not necessarily getting done or infused in the areas that it needs to be accepted. And then, of course, you have this interesting question.
(26:22-26:52) Dr. John Dentico
Which AI tool do you use? Does the company sponsor or officially recognize a particular tool? And is that available to everybody? Or are people going to bring their best friend AI to their work? You know, somebody may say, well, the company may say, we're going to use ChatGPT. And someone says, I like Claude a lot better. Yeah, they're going to use Claude, that kind of a thing. So it's just so, it's chaotic.
(26:53-27:12) Dr. John Dentico
I mean, the infusion, the acceptance of AI and the money, the absolute money that they're throwing at it. And then, you know, for these data centers, building data centers, power, cooling, those kinds of things. And then, of course...
(27:12-27:33) Dr. John Dentico
have those guys at apple who are traveling a different road who say well maybe what we'll do is we'll build a really powerful machine and you can run ai locally rather than in a data center and they have i saw the number the other day something like 3.2 billion
(27:33-27:43) Dr. John Dentico
devices all around the planet that they can distribute their stuff to instantaneously. You just have to maybe have a little bit more powerful laptop.
(27:44-28:12) Dr. John Dentico
You know, and they're doing it. I mean, the M5 Pro is, you know, eye-watering what its ability to do. So it's so interesting because it's so chaotic. But again, I think you'd agree with me. Within chaos, we find opportunity. So the question is, how do people find the opportunity that they want to pursue? Let me ask you another question, if I can. You wrote Clicking. And I want to ask you about the title itself.
(28:12-28:34) Dr. John Dentico
What does a team that is clicking feel like from the inside and how does a leader know when their team is nowhere near it? And it may be a little bit redundant, but that's okay. Just take it and run with it. That's an excellent question. I love that you asked.
(28:35-28:59) Daria Rudnik
Well, Clicking stands for the five pillar framework that I use with Teams, Click, that if you want to have a self-sufficient, high-performing team, you need to have those five pillars, which is first is clear purpose. And we talked about this, how important it is for teams, organizations to be shaped around one purpose. If you have all the people and you have a manager, it doesn't make you a team.
(29:00-29:14) Daria Rudnik
can make you a unit. If you are in the same box, an org chart, it doesn't make you a team. If you have a shared purpose, that does make you a team. So a clear purpose, what is it that we want to achieve together? That's the first thing.
(29:14-29:44) Daria Rudnik
The second thing is linking connection, is how you connect to each other on your team, not only to your manager. What managers usually do a lot is they do those one-to-ones, which is a great tool, but what they don't do is they don't connect people between each other. They're connected with the manager, but they're not connected between other team members. And even more, they're not connected with their board organization. They don't know their internal clients most of the time. They don't know their customers, where they should be.
(29:44-30:13) Daria Rudnik
So having this connection really helps him understand the bigger picture. The third one is integrated work. How you work together as a team. What are the team norms? What are the team rules? How fast do you expect to reply on email, on WhatsApp message? How do you hold your meetings? That creates so much clarity and reduces frustration and anxiety from people who don't know what's expected of them. So work norms is about integrated work.
(30:13-30:36) Daria Rudnik
the fourth one is collaborative decisions how you make decisions as a team and the final one is knowledge sharing and feedback how you give feedback to each other how you request feedback and how you basically learn together as a team so when you have clear purpose linking connections integrated work collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing your team will click
(30:37-31:06) Dr. John Dentico
I think it's great. Yeah, I think that makes a great deal of sense. One of the other things that I've looked at too, though, Daria, is what do you measure? What do you measure? How do you measure? So all of that flows to me. So for example, I'll give you an example. You work in an organization and they're hiring people, for example. Do the people who are already working there
(31:07-31:28) Dr. John Dentico
reach out to their friends and say, hey, you know what? You should join this company. They're great. Do they help you recruit their friends? Because if they say, no, stay away from this company. I'm leaving soon. That's a pretty good sign that something's not right. The purpose may be misaligned. We talked about that already.
(31:29-31:46) Dr. John Dentico
But I absolutely agree. I think part of the collaborative leadership model that I've worked on for the past over 30 years is based on one premise. And the premise is contribution. Do you have the ability to open the door and say, we have a problem.
(31:47-32:13) Dr. John Dentico
I'm looking for a solution or solutions. Can you help me? Can you contribute to this? Contribution matters. And everything else falls by the wayside in my mind. You know, that to me is this, again, collaborative leadership model. We're all in this together. We're all working for a common purpose. We're all moving down the road. So I absolutely agree. Clicking sounds like it's right on the money, as we say. So I appreciate that very much.
(32:15-32:40) Dr. John Dentico
I want to ask you this question if I can. Next question. You help the telecom company team, excuse me, reach four times growth without adding a single person simply by proving how they work together. And again, we may be a little bit redundant here, but that's fine. That is a remarkable result. What was actually broken before you arrived and what changed first?
(32:43-33:05) Daria Rudnik
You know what I want to start? That was an incredible transformation. It was an organizational transformation. The team completely changed the way they're working together. They changed their processes. And more than that, they actually included the executive team. They created another team pretty much equal to the executive team. And they invited all the employees to join this project that they were working.
(33:07-33:34) Daria Rudnik
Even like finance people were involved in production. HR people were involved in production. Everyone was involved because they had this shared purpose. What was working, what really helped and made this happen is that this team, this organization, they already had strong culture. What I did was actually help them talk and find the right language and think together to make it happen.
(33:34-33:46) Daria Rudnik
But they had the foundation. Without that foundation, that either would be possible or would take much longer than it took them. It took them less than a year to increase this production speed.
(33:48-34:13) Daria Rudnik
They had this amazing culture where they had this trust when they said, hey, here is our purpose. We need to move faster because otherwise we'll be out of the market. And when they said that, everyone believed them because they had this trust. So in terms of like me working with the team, we worked mostly on the integrated work, how they want to work together, what are the new rules and what are the new norms of them working together.
(34:13-34:41) Daria Rudnik
the new decision-making because they invited new people on the team, how these new people will be included in collaborative decisions and how they learn together. But they had a purpose and they had this trust and connection. So if you want transformation, stop building your strong culture now. Yeah, I agree. Really now. Yeah. As you talked about the structure, AI can't fix what structurally broke it.
(34:42-35:09) Dr. John Dentico
All AI will show you is how bad things are a lot faster. So I think people have to look below just the AI, what's going on in the hubbub of the office today and say, hey, this is a structural problem, a cultural problem. We have to fix that first. If we fix that, the rest of it comes to fruition. I want to give you a metaphor, and I'd love to get your response to this, because I think it really focuses on what we've talked about so far, and that is
(35:10-35:37) Dr. John Dentico
I have said many times on the podcast before with other guests that, you know, we've raised a generation of Jedi Knights as leaders. Right. You know, bring your light sword, banish your light sword and take it out and banish the issues and the problems that pervade our organization. And we've done that. That's how we treat leaders. Right. They're Jedi Knights. Right.
(35:37-35:44) Dr. John Dentico
And I said, you know, what occurred to me is the leaders of the CEOs of organizations today have to be much more like Yoda.
(35:45-36:09) Dr. John Dentico
They have to be the teacher, the facilitator, the person who puts the challenges before the other Jedi Knights in training, you might say, you know, that kind of a thing, and says, hey, these are the issues and the problems. And the leader is really the Yoda who brings people together and trains them to take the next level so that when that person becomes a CEO,
(36:10-36:32) Daria Rudnik
They're not a Jedi Knight anymore. They're the new Yoda. I'd love to get your reflection on that idea. I do agree on the Jedi metaphor, because like I said, leaders are perceived to be heroic leaders who need to save, who need to fight, who need to protect, who need to be at the front. So I would say we need people who have different skillsets.
(36:32-36:58) Daria Rudnik
And who can take leadership position based on the need right now? If you need a source, then we'll have Dr. Strange. Right now you need someone who can fly. So depending on the need of organization right now, anyone can be a leader and you can only win when you are together. Yeah. And the responsibility shifts based on the need.
(36:59-37:25) Dr. John Dentico
So we need the flying guys today. Okay. All right. You got it. That's a great metaphor. We need somebody. We need a sorcerer. Get up here, you know, and let's do some magic. Yeah. So I absolutely agree. So we're getting close to the end here. So I'd like to ask you this question. And that is, what do you see for your future? Where do you want to take what you're doing and what you're working on into the future?
(37:27-37:49) Daria Rudnik
Well, I want to see more happy workplaces. And my personal mission is to create and help leaders create more happy places where people feel well together. They feel that they have meaningful, they're doing something meaningful. They're helping and they're serving other people and they do it together. We deserve happy workplaces because we spend most of our lives out there.
(37:49-38:17) Dr. John Dentico
When people are happy, they feel well, they perform well. It's a win for everyone, for employees, for leaders, for shareholders, for their customers, for communities. So that's my mission. Yeah. And for their families. Absolutely. Yes. And for their families, because if you work in a toxic organization and you're just putting up with the toxicity every single day, you bring that home to your family and it's a poison.
(38:18-38:46) Dr. John Dentico
And it's a poison you're feeding your family slowly but surely. So when you have a happy, upbeat, fully engaged employee, the Gallup report says only 32% of the global workforce is engaged right now. So what have we done? Again, all these things we see on the surface and what we have to understand is that the structure really needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
(38:46-39:15) Dr. John Dentico
So it's very interesting to see. So anyway, listen, this has been a delight. I'm glad you didn't have to go into the shelter, knowing that you are transmitting today from Israel. And I hope the issues there will be worked out very quickly and in a positive way. So I can't thank you enough. This has been a real joy and an honor to have you here with me today. And I look forward to keeping in touch with you in the future. Thank you so very much for being on the podcast.
(39:15-39:19) Daria Rudnik
Thank you, John. It was a great pleasure. I love your questions. And that was really insightful conversation.
(39:20-39:48) Dr. John Dentico
Thank you. This is Dr. John D'Antico. Remember, meaning is the new money, but it requires building the structures that deliver it. If today's conversation challenged your thinking or gave you a framework worth implementing, share it with the leader who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit ThrottleUpLeadership.com for more resources. Until next time, keep throttling up and keep the people at the center of everything you do.
Welcome to the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast. Our theme for 2026 continues, The Future of Work, Meaning is the New Money. Because meaning is simply the greatest motivational force on earth.
(00:19-00:35) Dr. John Dentico
But 68% of the global workforce is disengaged, leaving $9.6 trillion in productivity on the table every year. Gen Z, the canary in the coal mine, is exposing structural failures everyone else learned to ignore, rationalize, or endure. I'm Dr. John D'Antico, your host, bringing over 30 years of experience in leadership, strategic thinking, and designing solutions that solve real problems. This podcast delivers boots on the ground intelligence, real conversations with CEOs, fractional executives, coaches, and small and medium-sized business leaders navigating the same crisis.
(01:01-01:25) Dr. John Dentico
Mitigating the talent hemorrhage before competitive viability disappears. We go beyond symptoms like engagement scores and wellness programs to focus on the structural failures beneath them. Frontline intelligence, actionable frameworks, hard truths. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Now let's throttle up and dive into today's episode.
(01:25-01:53) Dr. John Dentico
Hello again, and welcome to the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast. This is your host, Dr. John D'Antico. With me this morning is Daria Rudnick. Daria has worked with leaders and teams across six continents, helped over 5,000 people build healthier and more collaborative work cultures, and built an AI-powered coaching tool from scratch. But what makes Daria Rudnick's perspective genuinely different is what she has lived through personally.
(01:54-02:21) Dr. John Dentico
An unexpected relocation to a new country and culture, followed by the experience of war. Those are not credentials you earn in a classroom. That is the kind of forging that either breaks you or produces something the world needs. Daria is a former chief people officer, an ex-Deloitte professional, an ICF professional certified coach, and the author of Clicking, a team-building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team trust, better results, and more time. She is also the co-author of AI Revolution, Thriving Within Civilization's Next Big Disruption. Her life's work comes down to one conviction. Leaders don't need to carry everything.
(02:47-03:06) Dr. John Dentico
I'm so pleased and privileged to have Daria with me this morning. Good morning, Daria. How are you? Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me here, John. I love listening to your show and I'm so excited to be here and talk to you about AI and leadership and all that. I appreciate that so very much. It's great to have you here.
(03:06-03:18) Dr. John Dentico
So let's begin with my most favorite question for everyone. And that is, tell me a little bit about yourself, your travels and all, and what were some of the influences in your early life?
(03:21-03:48) Daria Rudnik
I was lucky enough to work for great companies. And like you said, I worked for Deloitte, which is an amazing company with great culture, great structures. I've learned a lot there. I worked for some great startups where I had experiences of setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations, mergers and acquisitions. So I was lucky to go through some experience of great projects, great people and leaders helping me out.
(03:48-04:17) Daria Rudnik
But together with that, I also experienced toxic workplaces where leaders' behaviors were actually draining energy and destroying confidence in people, myself included, and kind of making hard decisions. Should I stay or should I go? If I go, will it be a failure? Or if I stay, would I fail in this environment? So these experiences
(04:18-04:43) Daria Rudnik
taught me and I learned through them how important it is to have a great team. Because what I've seen is when organizations have strong teams that are united by values, by shared purpose, they can do anything. They can survive through financial crisis. I was working for a bank during global financial crisis in 2008, and we did it.
(04:43-05:13) Daria Rudnik
We made through that, we survived as an organization because we had this strong culture. And I've also seen organizations failing because they were saying one thing, but doing the other thing. They're not on the market right now. So ever since that time, I'm focusing my time and my energy on helping leaders build strong, self-sufficient teams that can operate on their own, work collaboratively, make decisions and make better products for their customers.
(05:14-05:34) Dr. John Dentico
I couldn't agree with you more. Just before we started, I was talking about a report I'm about ready to release to get it to the printer. That's kind of where we are right now. It's almost finished. I'll tell you the title of the report. It's called Throttle Up from the Field, Volume 1, Canaries in the Coal Mine.
(05:35-06:00) Dr. John Dentico
the workforce crisis gen z is exposing so what i did was i i looked at the generational issues and the report draws from gallup gallup's 2025 state of the global workplace talks a lot about what you just said development dimensions internationals global leadership forecast 2025.
(06:00-06:29) Dr. John Dentico
18 of my podcast guests' interviews, boots on the ground, as I like to call it. And then Edelman's trust barometer, which is another piece, which oddly enough, I couldn't believe it when I read the report, agrees completely with what I was saying. But the interesting part about these different data sources from different places is they all converge at one spot, right on top of one another. And they say the same thing.
(06:29-06:53) Dr. John Dentico
And here's the crux of it. And then I'd love to get your comments on it. Three frames are failing in organizations. Number one, values alignment. People want to make sure that they work for an organization whose values echo their own. Okay. You said it just a few minutes ago. When you say one thing and reward something else,
(06:54-07:15) Dr. John Dentico
That's a value misalignment, okay? The second one is personal agency. Do I have the ability to act here? Can I actually do something, engage in something, or am I constantly running around looking for empowerment? You know, the permission slip to go to the next level.
(07:16-07:39) Dr. John Dentico
And the third one, and it's a big one, it's one that I didn't think had that big an effect, but found out it has the biggest effect. And that is growth trajectory. Can I grow in this organization? Can I move up? Is there a pathway for me to do that? These are the three big things. And I'd love to get your, based on your experience and your background, I'd love to get your reflection on that.
(07:40-08:01) Daria Rudnik
That resonates a lot. When I work with leaders as a coach, the things I'm hearing a lot is I want to do some meaningful work. I don't feel that the things that I'm doing right now bring any value to our customers. They may be kind of, I'm playing some political games and I know how to do that, but I don't want to spend my life doing that.
(08:01-08:13) Daria Rudnik
I want to do something meaningful. I want this organization to succeed and I want it to bring happiness and great service to our customers. But I don't feel that I'm doing exactly that. And that's question number one.
(08:13-08:41) Daria Rudnik
Question number two that I'm hearing a lot is we've been such a great company aligned with our values, but then leadership has changed and everything's changed. And we're not the same company anymore. And we're chasing, we have the same name, we have kind of the same people, we have the same values on the wall, but we're chasing different objectives. And I don't feel that for me. And as for growth, I mean, personally, I see like on the low levels, there are a lot of
(08:41-09:03) Daria Rudnik
opportunities to grow because you can go to team member, team manager, and then hire above. But at some point you kind of get stuck because again, people don't want to play political games for the sake of playing political games. They want some meaningful growth and they say, okay, I could potentially go into VP level. Do I want to?
(09:06-09:29) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, I agree. In fact, one of the reports, I can't remember which one, I think they all kind of alluded to it, but one specifically stated, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I think it was the DDI report. The DDI report said that people are not looking to be in those positions. Do you want to be the CEO or senior vice president? No, I don't want to do that. No, that's not for me.
(09:29-09:55) Dr. John Dentico
Too much pressure, too much on top of me that will force me to live a wholly different life, if you will. And this is an interesting key point, and I'd love to get your reflection on this as well. You know, when we talk about leadership, the typical leadership conversation or definition of leadership that everybody presumes everybody else knows is,
(09:55-10:20) Dr. John Dentico
is the people in charge, the people in the upper strata. I see leadership as a process. To me, it's a leadership process. What is it that you do? How do you affect leadership? And I make the differentiation between leadership and management, okay? Management, you need them both. By the way, you need both. They go hand in hand, two sides of the same coin.
(10:20-10:40) Dr. John Dentico
Management is about incremental change, efficiency. Leadership is about transforming change and effectiveness. And you have to understand what the leadership practices are about. That's what my book Throttle Up is about. These are the leadership practices. So as opposed to someone
(10:41-10:58) Dr. John Dentico
sitting in the corner office as the leader or the leadership. And I've been tracking this for over 30 years with the democratization of information and knowledge. And someone who is 28 years of age and has AI tools at their fingertips
(10:58-11:26) Dr. John Dentico
has as much knowledge or more knowledge than the people in the corner office. And where also you can see leadership as an influence relationship and anybody can have influence. To me, that's one of the biggest mind shifts that people have to make when it comes to leadership. I'd love to get your reflection on that. I love how you say it. And again, like people think that leaders are people in trust, like you said, but it's not like that.
(11:28-11:34) Daria Rudnik
I agree that leadership is a process, but I also want to make another kind of dimension to that is...
(11:35-12:02) Daria Rudnik
We tend to think that leaders are some kind of heroes saving the world, saving the organization, saving their people. And sometimes, I mean, they're doing it with good intentions. I want to be there for my people. I want to help them grow. I want to protect them from challenges. I want to protect them from negative feedback or from too much information or from too little information. I want to protect them. And sometimes it's ego. Sometimes it's good intentions.
(12:02-12:20) Daria Rudnik
But still, leaders kind of tend to take a lot of responsibility on themselves. And with this speed of change, with this level of uncertainty, where there's so many multiple demands that come into those managers, no person can handle it on their own.
(12:20-12:39) Daria Rudnik
What they need to do is they need to make a shift from being a heroic leader to someone who facilitates, who does leadership as a process for their teams so that teams are more empowered. Not when they say, hey, can I do this? But just take and do it. And leaders are not involved. That's why I say delegation is a myth.
(12:39-13:05) Daria Rudnik
If you need to delegate, if you need to think, okay, what should I delegate? You're in the wrong spot. But if you have processes in place where your team members know exactly what they're working on, or if they don't know, they get together and decide, and you don't have to be in every conversation as a leader. That's the process that can help teams move forward, organizations move forward, and you as a leader, you can breathe. You can finally breathe.
(13:06-13:35) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, a few months ago, I interviewed Sarah Daw from the UK. And Sarah is the CEO of the Liberty Group, spelled L-I-B-E-R-T-I, in the UK. And they have 1,500 fractional people, chief technology officers, mostly, I think, in the finance area, chief financial officers, who go to small or medium-sized companies and fill that position.
(13:36-13:58) Dr. John Dentico
And one of the things that she did, she did a LinkedIn learning thing, and I watched it. I was there listening to her. And one of the issues she's struggling with, as she looks at the world she's involved with, and she's everywhere, let me tell you. When I interviewed her, she was in the UAE. And so we were having this discussion. And she said one of the things that she thinks would work...
(13:59-14:28) Dr. John Dentico
is what they now call co-CEOs. In other words, so instead of one CEO, we got two CEOs, in a sense, dividing the work. But I have to tell you, to my way of thinking, it's still not enough. They're gonna be overwhelmed. But here's the thing, and I think she's an absolutely spectacular individual. I mean, there's no question about it. And she's brilliant, working on her doctorate, and just really has it together.
(14:28-14:40) Dr. John Dentico
is that if you still see leadership embodied in one or even two individuals in the world we live in today with things happening so fast,
(14:41-15:04) Dr. John Dentico
it's still not enough. You have to see leadership as something that, as I like to say, leadership is what people do together. That's leadership. You know, we have a team, we have a group. I don't have to be part of every, like you say, I don't have to be part of every conversation. We just have to set the tone, the direction, go for it, you know, do it. And if you don't have that,
(15:04-15:32) Dr. John Dentico
What I see is a lack of trust. It really is about a lot. Do you trust these people to go off and do what they need to do without you being in the middle of it? It's just so obvious to me. But anyway, I'd love to get your reflection on that as well, if I could. I mean, I agree with you. I know examples of, I actually worked for a company with two CEOs, but they were kind of running different side of the same business.
(15:33-15:48) Daria Rudnik
We do have destruction place. We have executive teams. It's just they're not teams. They're called teams, but they don't work for the shared purpose of that team. When you go to CE4 and ask, what's your team? What would they say?
(15:49-16:09) Daria Rudnik
they would say, my team is finance. If you go to a CMO, they would say, my team is marketing. And it's not the wrong, I mean, it's the wrong answer. Their team is executive team, well, their peers. And once they realize that, once they become this, the crown table, that's when they can start working together as a team.
(16:09-16:38) Daria Rudnik
They can take some burden from the CEO. They can make better decisions together because they have shared purpose of their team. And then the marketing team, the finance team are the secondary teams. And I write about this a lot in my book, Clicking, about how to build these kind of teams and how to build that kind of trust. Because again, trust is not something you either have or you don't have. When you ask your team members, do you trust this person? Yeah, sure, I trust. He's a professional or she's a professional.
(16:38-16:50) Daria Rudnik
Yes, you trust them as professionals. But do you trust them to make right decisions? Do you trust them to say, I don't know, I'm not sure, I'm confused? Do you trust them with that?
(16:50-17:14) Daria Rudnik
So these are different levels of trust you need to build on your team. Like first you need to trust yourself as a leader. I can lead those people. I am capable. Then you need to trust them as human beings. Okay. They're dangerous. Most of us, like we have that. Then we start trusting them as professionals. Okay. They can do the task and maybe even more complicated tasks and maybe become more complex tasks.
(17:14-17:41) Daria Rudnik
And then you start trusting them, like your emotions. What do you feel? Are you confused? How you make decisions together? And then you have this team synergy when you actually have trust on all multiple levels. And that's when you become a real team. Yeah, I agree. I agree completely. And I think we were talking about this before we started. And companies who don't do that in the world today may not be around tomorrow.
(17:43-18:12) Dr. John Dentico
because the rate of complex change is overwhelming. And if you don't have an ability to shift and be agile in this world, and you're still stuck in this very, you know, top-down level, mechanistic approach to how the, you know, quote-unquote, bureaucracy runs, because bureaucracy is a mechanistic machine,
(18:12-18:20) Dr. John Dentico
then you're not going to be able to respond to the needs of your clients or your customers or the people involved.
(18:20-18:44) Dr. John Dentico
inside the organization and i and people and and everybody i think i laugh at this see so much of this on linkedin everybody keeps scratching their head going what do we do how do we do this and the answer is it's right in front of you if you just take the time to look at it so it's very very interesting to me so let's move on i want to ask you a couple of more questions
(18:45-18:58) Dr. John Dentico
You built Adra AI. I think I said that right. Your own AI-powered coaching tool. You are also the co-author of a book on the AI revolution. I want to go down this path with you for a bit.
(18:59-19:28) Dr. John Dentico
Most of the conversation around AI and organizations right now is about productivity and efficiency, productivity, efficiency. You seem to be approaching it differently. What is AI actually capable of in the leadership and team development space? And where does it fall short? Well, that's actually an incredible topic is a very interesting, very complex.
(19:30-19:55) Daria Rudnik
The thing that interests me the most is how AI influences how we think, how we work, and how we collaborate. And lots of research, first of all, there is a research called Your Brain on ChatGPT that tells us that the cadence of how you work with AI actually matters a lot. So if you have something to do and you think about it first, and then you ask AI to give additional input or...
(19:55-20:22) Daria Rudnik
change it somehow but you think about it first and then ask ai to update then you stay engaged with the task and you own the task but if you go to the ai and tell them give me an article on this topic or give me a presentation or give me a slide deck it'll give you something you try to edit it but your brain becomes disengaged very quickly and you lose ownership and i've seen teams struggling with that because
(20:22-20:51) Daria Rudnik
when they had ai implemented across many of the processes the recording conversations making summary of those conversations updating backlog updating crm like ai was doing everything because it can and you have text and you can get some data points out uploaded to another system ai can do that but what people started to feel is that they lost connections with their clients they don't understand the backlog because okay
(20:51-21:14) Daria Rudnik
how do we prioritize that because i don't have the context i wasn't involved and when they changed the cadence ai was still doing the work but they were uploading their initial thoughts first they kind of had a conversation then thought about it and said okay these are my takeaways from these conversations they gave it to ai and then ai generated
(21:14-21:38) Daria Rudnik
data, insights, points for CRM, for backlog, but people were staying engaged and they kept this in their memory and they had that context so they could prioritize backlog, they could make decisions. And that is important. And again, AI is influencing how we work together in many different ways. And that's one of it, how our brain reacts to AI. So it's a very interesting kind of thing.
(21:39-22:03) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, the thing that I think is, and I'm working on this personally for a course I'm about ready to put on maven.com, which is a cohort training site. And it has to do with helping. The bottom line is it has to do with helping people do better in interviews. So, for example, you know, people show up. I'm sure you've seen this. People show up.
(22:04-22:26) Dr. John Dentico
They're ready to answer the 42 questions they're expecting to be asked. They've done all the tactical stuff, right? Prepared their resumes, updated them, LinkedIn profiles, you know, all those kinds of things. And I want to concentrate more on the strategic. But first, let's figure out who you are. What are your non-negotiables?
(22:26-22:47) Dr. John Dentico
sometimes you have to take work i get that no question about it you got to feed your family put food on the table you got to take the job i get it but there are times when you want to look back and say wait a minute if i go work for this company am i going to stay with this company are we meant to be together
(22:48-23:14) Dr. John Dentico
Almost like a marriage, right? Are we meant to be together? That kind of thing. So I'm working on that. And one of the areas that I'm working on right now, and I'm processing it myself and learning it myself before I go do it. And that is this idea of four levels of prompting. We can't just teach. We just can't use AI as a chatbot.
(23:16-23:37) Dr. John Dentico
And the four levels are simple prompting, right? Contextual, which is people are starting to get into. The next one's called intent. What is the overall intent? Something that Klarna had a problem with. You know, they laid off 700 people and then hired them back because the intent was save money.
(23:38-24:04) Dr. John Dentico
And it did that. AI saved the money. But then they lost on customer satisfaction and customer support. They didn't see that. And the last one, which is really an interesting one, is called specification engineering. So you go from intent to specification engineering. So I'm going to introduce those concepts to help people build a tool that they can now, and here's where things turn around.
(24:06-24:35) Dr. John Dentico
diagnose an organization before they ever go to the interview. What are these folks all about? What is it that they say? What is it that they do? Can I find values alignment? Can I act in this organization? Is there growth here? Those are the three frames. That's the lens. And through that lens, I want to be able to help them create a tool that goes much beyond where AI prompting is today.
(24:35-25:00) Daria Rudnik
I'd love to get your reflection on just the idea. I mean, I think it's an incredible idea. The thing is, AI can help us make baddest decisions if we apply it in the right way. If we have those different lenses, if we know what we're looking for, if we kind of see different perspectives, AI can help us a lot. If you just ask a question, take the response and use it, that's not a good thing.
(25:00-25:16) Daria Rudnik
I'm also preparing some courses on decision-making with AI. How do you use AI for better decision-making? And I like your four levels of prompting. What I do is also ask to push back, to criticize, to find blind spots, because
(25:16-25:37) Daria Rudnik
It tends to, hey, great idea. Let's do that. Absolutely. You're so right. No, I'm not. I have no idea what I'm doing here. And I need someone or something to actually criticize what I'm thinking to find other perspective. So that's the way AI can help us make better decisions, not by asking it what to do.
(25:37-25:53) Dr. John Dentico
Yeah, I agree. It's a phenomenal tool. And there's these reports that CEOs come out and say, okay, in two weeks, we want to be using AI in two weeks. Let's go team, right? And everybody goes, whoa.
(25:53-26:22) Dr. John Dentico
We don't even know what it can do at the administration or at the execution level. Someone down in finance, for example, okay, AI, what am I going to do with this? So again, there's a pushback on this. The CEO may decree it, but it's not necessarily getting done or infused in the areas that it needs to be accepted. And then, of course, you have this interesting question.
(26:22-26:52) Dr. John Dentico
Which AI tool do you use? Does the company sponsor or officially recognize a particular tool? And is that available to everybody? Or are people going to bring their best friend AI to their work? You know, somebody may say, well, the company may say, we're going to use ChatGPT. And someone says, I like Claude a lot better. Yeah, they're going to use Claude, that kind of a thing. So it's just so, it's chaotic.
(26:53-27:12) Dr. John Dentico
I mean, the infusion, the acceptance of AI and the money, the absolute money that they're throwing at it. And then, you know, for these data centers, building data centers, power, cooling, those kinds of things. And then, of course...
(27:12-27:33) Dr. John Dentico
have those guys at apple who are traveling a different road who say well maybe what we'll do is we'll build a really powerful machine and you can run ai locally rather than in a data center and they have i saw the number the other day something like 3.2 billion
(27:33-27:43) Dr. John Dentico
devices all around the planet that they can distribute their stuff to instantaneously. You just have to maybe have a little bit more powerful laptop.
(27:44-28:12) Dr. John Dentico
You know, and they're doing it. I mean, the M5 Pro is, you know, eye-watering what its ability to do. So it's so interesting because it's so chaotic. But again, I think you'd agree with me. Within chaos, we find opportunity. So the question is, how do people find the opportunity that they want to pursue? Let me ask you another question, if I can. You wrote Clicking. And I want to ask you about the title itself.
(28:12-28:34) Dr. John Dentico
What does a team that is clicking feel like from the inside and how does a leader know when their team is nowhere near it? And it may be a little bit redundant, but that's okay. Just take it and run with it. That's an excellent question. I love that you asked.
(28:35-28:59) Daria Rudnik
Well, Clicking stands for the five pillar framework that I use with Teams, Click, that if you want to have a self-sufficient, high-performing team, you need to have those five pillars, which is first is clear purpose. And we talked about this, how important it is for teams, organizations to be shaped around one purpose. If you have all the people and you have a manager, it doesn't make you a team.
(29:00-29:14) Daria Rudnik
can make you a unit. If you are in the same box, an org chart, it doesn't make you a team. If you have a shared purpose, that does make you a team. So a clear purpose, what is it that we want to achieve together? That's the first thing.
(29:14-29:44) Daria Rudnik
The second thing is linking connection, is how you connect to each other on your team, not only to your manager. What managers usually do a lot is they do those one-to-ones, which is a great tool, but what they don't do is they don't connect people between each other. They're connected with the manager, but they're not connected between other team members. And even more, they're not connected with their board organization. They don't know their internal clients most of the time. They don't know their customers, where they should be.
(29:44-30:13) Daria Rudnik
So having this connection really helps him understand the bigger picture. The third one is integrated work. How you work together as a team. What are the team norms? What are the team rules? How fast do you expect to reply on email, on WhatsApp message? How do you hold your meetings? That creates so much clarity and reduces frustration and anxiety from people who don't know what's expected of them. So work norms is about integrated work.
(30:13-30:36) Daria Rudnik
the fourth one is collaborative decisions how you make decisions as a team and the final one is knowledge sharing and feedback how you give feedback to each other how you request feedback and how you basically learn together as a team so when you have clear purpose linking connections integrated work collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing your team will click
(30:37-31:06) Dr. John Dentico
I think it's great. Yeah, I think that makes a great deal of sense. One of the other things that I've looked at too, though, Daria, is what do you measure? What do you measure? How do you measure? So all of that flows to me. So for example, I'll give you an example. You work in an organization and they're hiring people, for example. Do the people who are already working there
(31:07-31:28) Dr. John Dentico
reach out to their friends and say, hey, you know what? You should join this company. They're great. Do they help you recruit their friends? Because if they say, no, stay away from this company. I'm leaving soon. That's a pretty good sign that something's not right. The purpose may be misaligned. We talked about that already.
(31:29-31:46) Dr. John Dentico
But I absolutely agree. I think part of the collaborative leadership model that I've worked on for the past over 30 years is based on one premise. And the premise is contribution. Do you have the ability to open the door and say, we have a problem.
(31:47-32:13) Dr. John Dentico
I'm looking for a solution or solutions. Can you help me? Can you contribute to this? Contribution matters. And everything else falls by the wayside in my mind. You know, that to me is this, again, collaborative leadership model. We're all in this together. We're all working for a common purpose. We're all moving down the road. So I absolutely agree. Clicking sounds like it's right on the money, as we say. So I appreciate that very much.
(32:15-32:40) Dr. John Dentico
I want to ask you this question if I can. Next question. You help the telecom company team, excuse me, reach four times growth without adding a single person simply by proving how they work together. And again, we may be a little bit redundant here, but that's fine. That is a remarkable result. What was actually broken before you arrived and what changed first?
(32:43-33:05) Daria Rudnik
You know what I want to start? That was an incredible transformation. It was an organizational transformation. The team completely changed the way they're working together. They changed their processes. And more than that, they actually included the executive team. They created another team pretty much equal to the executive team. And they invited all the employees to join this project that they were working.
(33:07-33:34) Daria Rudnik
Even like finance people were involved in production. HR people were involved in production. Everyone was involved because they had this shared purpose. What was working, what really helped and made this happen is that this team, this organization, they already had strong culture. What I did was actually help them talk and find the right language and think together to make it happen.
(33:34-33:46) Daria Rudnik
But they had the foundation. Without that foundation, that either would be possible or would take much longer than it took them. It took them less than a year to increase this production speed.
(33:48-34:13) Daria Rudnik
They had this amazing culture where they had this trust when they said, hey, here is our purpose. We need to move faster because otherwise we'll be out of the market. And when they said that, everyone believed them because they had this trust. So in terms of like me working with the team, we worked mostly on the integrated work, how they want to work together, what are the new rules and what are the new norms of them working together.
(34:13-34:41) Daria Rudnik
the new decision-making because they invited new people on the team, how these new people will be included in collaborative decisions and how they learn together. But they had a purpose and they had this trust and connection. So if you want transformation, stop building your strong culture now. Yeah, I agree. Really now. Yeah. As you talked about the structure, AI can't fix what structurally broke it.
(34:42-35:09) Dr. John Dentico
All AI will show you is how bad things are a lot faster. So I think people have to look below just the AI, what's going on in the hubbub of the office today and say, hey, this is a structural problem, a cultural problem. We have to fix that first. If we fix that, the rest of it comes to fruition. I want to give you a metaphor, and I'd love to get your response to this, because I think it really focuses on what we've talked about so far, and that is
(35:10-35:37) Dr. John Dentico
I have said many times on the podcast before with other guests that, you know, we've raised a generation of Jedi Knights as leaders. Right. You know, bring your light sword, banish your light sword and take it out and banish the issues and the problems that pervade our organization. And we've done that. That's how we treat leaders. Right. They're Jedi Knights. Right.
(35:37-35:44) Dr. John Dentico
And I said, you know, what occurred to me is the leaders of the CEOs of organizations today have to be much more like Yoda.
(35:45-36:09) Dr. John Dentico
They have to be the teacher, the facilitator, the person who puts the challenges before the other Jedi Knights in training, you might say, you know, that kind of a thing, and says, hey, these are the issues and the problems. And the leader is really the Yoda who brings people together and trains them to take the next level so that when that person becomes a CEO,
(36:10-36:32) Daria Rudnik
They're not a Jedi Knight anymore. They're the new Yoda. I'd love to get your reflection on that idea. I do agree on the Jedi metaphor, because like I said, leaders are perceived to be heroic leaders who need to save, who need to fight, who need to protect, who need to be at the front. So I would say we need people who have different skillsets.
(36:32-36:58) Daria Rudnik
And who can take leadership position based on the need right now? If you need a source, then we'll have Dr. Strange. Right now you need someone who can fly. So depending on the need of organization right now, anyone can be a leader and you can only win when you are together. Yeah. And the responsibility shifts based on the need.
(36:59-37:25) Dr. John Dentico
So we need the flying guys today. Okay. All right. You got it. That's a great metaphor. We need somebody. We need a sorcerer. Get up here, you know, and let's do some magic. Yeah. So I absolutely agree. So we're getting close to the end here. So I'd like to ask you this question. And that is, what do you see for your future? Where do you want to take what you're doing and what you're working on into the future?
(37:27-37:49) Daria Rudnik
Well, I want to see more happy workplaces. And my personal mission is to create and help leaders create more happy places where people feel well together. They feel that they have meaningful, they're doing something meaningful. They're helping and they're serving other people and they do it together. We deserve happy workplaces because we spend most of our lives out there.
(37:49-38:17) Dr. John Dentico
When people are happy, they feel well, they perform well. It's a win for everyone, for employees, for leaders, for shareholders, for their customers, for communities. So that's my mission. Yeah. And for their families. Absolutely. Yes. And for their families, because if you work in a toxic organization and you're just putting up with the toxicity every single day, you bring that home to your family and it's a poison.
(38:18-38:46) Dr. John Dentico
And it's a poison you're feeding your family slowly but surely. So when you have a happy, upbeat, fully engaged employee, the Gallup report says only 32% of the global workforce is engaged right now. So what have we done? Again, all these things we see on the surface and what we have to understand is that the structure really needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
(38:46-39:15) Dr. John Dentico
So it's very interesting to see. So anyway, listen, this has been a delight. I'm glad you didn't have to go into the shelter, knowing that you are transmitting today from Israel. And I hope the issues there will be worked out very quickly and in a positive way. So I can't thank you enough. This has been a real joy and an honor to have you here with me today. And I look forward to keeping in touch with you in the future. Thank you so very much for being on the podcast.
(39:15-39:19) Daria Rudnik
Thank you, John. It was a great pleasure. I love your questions. And that was really insightful conversation.
(39:20-39:48) Dr. John Dentico
Thank you. This is Dr. John D'Antico. Remember, meaning is the new money, but it requires building the structures that deliver it. If today's conversation challenged your thinking or gave you a framework worth implementing, share it with the leader who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit ThrottleUpLeadership.com for more resources. Until next time, keep throttling up and keep the people at the center of everything you do.