(00:01-00:21) Tim Hughes
Hi, everybody. Tim Hughes here. I'm the CEO and co-founder of DLA Knight. With me today, I've got Daira Rognick, and we're going to be talking about her book, Clicking, a team-building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team trust, better results, and more time.

(00:23-00:51) Daria Rudnik
Thank you so much for coming on. Love the book. I think it's just exactly as you describe it in the title. Where can people find you? Well, first of all, thanks, Tim, for having me on your show. The easiest way to find me, since we're here on LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn, but you can also go to my website, daddyarudnik.com, where you can find all the links to my book and all the additional resources that go with the book.

(00:51-01:14) Tim Hughes
Excellent. Thank you. So I really enjoyed it, as I said. So what was the inspiration behind the book? Well, I always wanted to be an author, just an author. I wanted to write a book, some book, any book. But the thing is, is you bring a lot of your worldwide experience into the book. It's not a theoretical book, is it?

(01:14-01:41) Daria Rudnik
It is absolutely a practical book. But again, my first motivation was to be an author. And then I thought, okay, what do I want to write about? And who do I want to write about? I mean, who is my audience? Who do I want to help with that book? And since my work is helping leaders build strong teams, I started thinking about writing a book for leaders, for team leaders, how they can do that. And there are lots of great books about teamwork and leadership out there.

(01:41-01:52) Daria Rudnik
What I was lacking is, what do I do with that? I mean, it's great. I'm inspired. I want to be a better leader. I want to build strong teams. I want to fight those dysfunctions. How do I do that?

(01:53-02:14) Daria Rudnik
So to write a book on how is what I started doing, I think in 2020 and then 2022. And then again, in 2024, I actually started doing that. And in 2025, I finished my book. It's now published. I mean, I can hold it. I'm an author. Yeah.

(02:14-02:40) Tim Hughes
So, yeah, that that was my inspiration, helping leaders build teams so that they can read the book, do something out of it and see the result. And I think one of those things I've got some questions I was going to say in terms of my view, which is it's very practical because you've got loads of here's a questionnaire. Here's a here's the things that you can ask your team when you're running this.

(02:40-03:05) Tim Hughes
when you're running this particular workshop, these are the sort of things that you, you, you can be asking. So, and I think certainly in leadership, you know, we quite often get the, Oh, what you need to do is to do a start, stop, um, um, continue, um, uh, workshop or something. And then you go, okay, so how do you do it? Um, and then, but you actually, you actually explain in the book about, um, about how to do that. So, um,

(03:06-03:30) Tim Hughes
You talk about in the book moving from a heroic leadership. Why do high achieving leaders find it so psychologically difficult to stop being the prime problem solver for the team? Well, that is a great question. I'm biased. I work with leaders who want to be better leaders because otherwise they wouldn't come to lead.

(03:31-03:49) Daria Rudnik
But what I see is they want to be there for their teams. They want to help their teams. They want to succeed as leaders and they want their teams to succeed and grow. But sometimes like some parents do that as well. Some friends do that as well. We kind of try to save them instead of...

(03:49-04:15) Daria Rudnik
empower them and let them make their mistakes. And when leaders are trying to be heroes for their teams, whether it's because of their ego or because of their good intentions, they protect them from negative feedback. They are like sharing, defining the path for them, giving them goals, giving them tasks, try to motivate them. But they don't need to do that because they're not kids. The team is, they're adult grown up people who

(04:15-04:35) Daria Rudnik
who choose to be on your team, who choose to be in this company and who choose this profession. And just giving them space to make those mistakes and fail is what leaders need to start doing now. Because otherwise they'll be, I mean, now they are overloaded with multiple demands from the

(04:35-04:54) Daria Rudnik
from stakeholders, from customers, from team members, from families, they're overloaded. And the only way to fight that is to empower their teams, give them more, make them more independent, more self-sufficient so that they can solve problems on their own. They will be more happy, you will be more happy.

(04:57-05:24) Tim Hughes
What is the one litmus test a leader can perform this week to determine if they actually are the primary bottleneck in their team's credit? Well, the best test, I mean, the evergreen test, go on vacation and see what happens. Yeah, absolutely. See if it all just comes crumbling down. If they reach out to you, if your boss is reaching out to you, if your customer is reaching out to you, something is wrong. Yeah, absolutely.

(05:25-05:42) Daria Rudnik
This is another one, actually. It's silence. Everything is fine. Everything is okay. People agree with each other. You say something, people say, yeah, let's do that. You say something, yeah, let's do that as well. I mean, we agree. We are on board. We're with YouTube.

(05:44-06:08) Daria Rudnik
It means they're not thinking, they're not processing, they're not challenging, either because they don't want to or they're afraid or they don't want to upset you. So there are multiple reasons for people to do that. But if you don't have challenging conversations and if people don't challenge you and then they discuss and challenge your ideas, it means something is wrong. Yeah. Yeah, I like it when my team say to me, Tim, you're wrong.

(06:10-06:38) Tim Hughes
I actually get that. I always come out with a big smile because it means that there's an empowerment there. Yeah. Well, it's not usually they're right. They are always right. So let's talk about your click framework. So strategic alignment, the C. Many leaders think that they've set a clear purpose for their teams, are still misaligned. Where is the gap between the leader's vision and the team's daily execution?

(06:41-06:58) Daria Rudnik
If you go to, there are two actually answers to the question. The first one is, we usually have a purpose, a vision for organization, maybe for executive team. But if you go to a functional team, a project team, and you ask them about their purpose, they'll say, what?

(06:59-07:19) Daria Rudnik
Because people assume that if you work with the same manager, if you are on the same box in the org chart, it makes you a team. No, it doesn't. You need to have a shared purpose. Why are you here together? What is it you want to achieve together that you cannot achieve individually by combining your individual efforts? Yeah.

(07:20-07:38) Daria Rudnik
That's the first thing. Most people don't have it. And the second is even when you go to the executive team and ask them, okay, what's our purpose? You'll hear different interpretations. And I've been there. I was working with a team and they all wanted one thing. They wanted their company to be number one in what they're doing.

(07:38-08:01) Daria Rudnik
But when I asked them, how do you become number one? One person said, we need better suppliers. The other said, we need better distribution channels. The other one said, we need the better quality of our products. They all saw it in a different way. So until you have everyone saying the same thing in pretty much the same words, you don't have a shared purpose.

(08:03-08:21) Tim Hughes
So the friction of connection, the yell in a remote or hybrid world, linking connections can feel forced. How do we build genuine team trust without falling into the trap of the forced fun? I've seen that many times or endless Zoom happy hours.

(08:23-08:38) Daria Rudnik
You don't build connections through happy hours and then through kind of fun and wine clubs, although I do love wine. But you build connections through understanding people and aligning and building trust on multiple levels.

(08:38-08:54) Daria Rudnik
So the easiest way to do that is start with every conversation with understanding where the person is right now, like emotionally, physically, what's happening in the world, because you don't see them every day. You don't have that feeling and connection. So start with that.

(08:55-09:16) Daria Rudnik
The other thing is make sure they know what expected from them, make sure everything is clear, make sure you can trust, again, you can trust them to challenge you, you can challenge them and there's no offense, people accept that. But the most important thing that I'm writing in my book and I want leaders to change, I mean, today is that

(09:16-09:40) Daria Rudnik
When you have lots of one-to-one conversations with your team members, you overload yourself. It's important you need to have those, but it's not the only way people need to be connected with other people, especially in remote teams. People are usually connected with their manager, but they are not really connected with each other. So instead of having one-to-one conversations, start connecting people in micro-projects, body groups,

(09:40-10:02) Daria Rudnik
reverse mentoring, whatever works for your team so that they talk to each other first and then reach out to you second. And that would make it more natural and to be honest, more effective. Yeah, I've seen this. Well, I've seen it and I've been in a situation where you're having so many one-to-ones that you don't have time for anything else.

(10:03-10:29) Tim Hughes
So decentralizing decisions to see how can a leader distinguish between a decision that must make and a decision that are simply making out of habit? How do we build the collaborative decision muscle? That's an amazing question. And again, sometimes leaders ask me, OK, how do I what decisions I need to keep to myself? I'm not sure I can leave it to my team. I'm not sure if they are capable of doing that.

(10:31-10:47) Daria Rudnik
This book is not about these are decisions for leaders, these are decisions for team members. It's about how you get together and decide and agree and then change when situation changes. So you get together and say, okay, I want to keep those decisions to myself for now.

(10:47-11:06) Daria Rudnik
Because I feel like that. I feel that's important. I know I can do that. And I'm giving those decisions to you as a team and those decisions to each individual contributor. And these decisions will be going for approval for senior leaders, for example.

(11:06-11:27) Daria Rudnik
And then in a quarter, in a month time, in a year, you meet again and say, okay, let's see what kind of decisions we're making here. Let's see if this structure is still working, if it's still valid. And say, okay, now I'm ready to give some decisions to you. I'm getting some back. I mean, you can always agree and talk. So it's about talking and bringing clarity to who makes what decisions.

(11:29-11:42) Tim Hughes
OK, so the K, the knowledge trap, you emphasize knowledge sharing as a way to reclaim time. Why is reflection usually the first thing busy teams cut? And what is the hidden cost of skipping it?

(11:44-12:10) Daria Rudnik
It's not even hidden. I mean, there's research that tells you that if you skip reflection, you're not learning. You're missing a lot of learning opportunities if you don't do reflection, whether it's formal learning or whether it's how teams learn through their work. So it's a very important thing. But with humans, most humans, and especially in the workplaces we have now, we kind of have this bias for action. Mm-hmm.

(12:10-12:38) Daria Rudnik
And reflection is, doesn't look like action. It's kind of, okay, what have we done? And I've practiced Tai Chi for the last year, almost every day. And I love it because there is this yin and yang when you push something and you're active doing something, but then you need time to reflect and let go and release. And that creates a lot of strength. So like,

(12:38-13:00) Tim Hughes
Missing reflections, you're losing some strength. Yeah, I totally agree. But today wouldn't be today without a question about AI. So as AI begins to handle more integrated work, how does the leader's role shift from managing tasks to managing the system of people and machines?

(13:00-13:23) Daria Rudnik
That's a great question because there was a research, Harvard Business Review, together with GitHub. They did an experiment and they looked, okay, what happens when AI is like people are actively working with AI? And they found out that a lot of kind of managerial tasks like delegation and control, setting tasks, controlling the results, AI can handle that.

(13:23-13:39) Daria Rudnik
AI cannot handle leadership, and by leadership, I mean facilitate conversations with your team on how we use AI, how we not use AI, what stays with humans, how we critically evaluate AI outputs, because it's huge.

(13:39-14:02) Daria Rudnik
AI is influencing our brain. If we don't think through that, if we do not evaluate AI's outputs, we might fall in the trap of cognitive offloading, making bad decisions. And one person can do that, but when you do it collectively as a team, it is much more powerful. Yeah. So for a leader who is currently drowning in 60-hour weeks,

(14:02-14:10) Tim Hughes
How soon after implementing your click strategy can they realistically expect to see white space return to their calendar?

(14:11-14:36) Daria Rudnik
That's a great question. Depends on the leader, on the situation. What I've seen is I was working with a VC fund and there were two founders and they were like overloaded with tasks. They kind of said, we want our team to be independent, but there was a lot of unclarity. People didn't know what kind of decisions they can make, what kind of decisions they cannot make. They were not clear about the roles and the tasks.

(14:36-15:05) Daria Rudnik
So the visible change happened after two sessions, like we had two sessions when people defined the rules and they understood, okay, I'm doing this. That's my work. This is kind of decisions I'm making. And these are decisions that we're not making. We'll get together and decide on that. So this, at least like this removed some tension and anxiety from people and from leaders. And then in about six months, the leaders felt that they can go on vacation. Yeah.

(15:05-15:26) Tim Hughes
Right. That's good. What should a leader do when they try to empower their team, but the team pushes back because they're confidently dependent on the leader's direction? There are two answers to that question. Well, first of all,

(15:27-15:55) Daria Rudnik
We know that Gartner Report says every year that 20, 30%, only 20 or 30% people engaged. But what we also know is when people join the organization, like 100% of people who join the organization are engaged. So somehow we're losing this 70% on the way. So, well, first of all, when people join, try not to lose them straight away. But if you do- And that's about having a proper onboarding process, I guess.

(15:55-16:08) Daria Rudnik
Onboarding, yes. And again, this teamwork, like build this team, invite people on the team, explain rules straight away. Here is how we work here together. Yep.

(16:08-16:32) Daria Rudnik
But if you didn't do that, just start slow and start inviting people to having conversations. If they like what they're doing, most people actually want to be good at what they're doing. And if they feel that they're progressing, if they feel that there is good connections and good relationships, they would want to do that. And if they don't, well, maybe they're the wrong people on your team. That can also happen.

(16:34-17:01) Tim Hughes
I mean, is there anything else, you know, I mean, I've seen people that I've also the other thing is where you take over a team. And and you find because that and you take over a team and they've been conditioned by that particular leader. And then you kind of expect them to speak out and they're all sitting there going, I can't speak out because I used to have to wait to see whether the great leader agreed.

(17:02-17:24) Daria Rudnik
Yeah, I agree. I've seen that. It takes time. It takes time to build trust. And again, as I write in my book, there are several layers of trust. You can trust them as they are professional, but you do not trust them that they will challenge you. And they trust you as someone who is a leader because you were appointed as their leader, but they don't trust you to ask questions.

(17:24-17:44) Daria Rudnik
So building this trust step by step, it takes time, several months, depending again on how bad the situation was with the previous manager. But I've seen situations when people were moving from, okay, I'm just executing the tasks that people, that my leader tells me to, hey, here's a great idea. Let's try it out.

(17:45-18:00) Tim Hughes
Yeah, I remember being asked to do something and the leader asked me to do something because they said, you will come up with something. I want it out. I want something really wild. You'll come up with something wild.

(18:00-18:27) Tim Hughes
come back and present. And she had all her people basically sitting around. And then I said, this is what I think we do. What do you think? And everybody sat there waiting for her to agree with it. Because if she agreed with it, they all went, yes, it's a great idea. If she said, no, I didn't like it, they were all going to go, oh, that's a rubbish idea. I mean, they didn't, they had, they just sat there and waited. Anyway. That's why leaders speak lost.

(18:27-18:48) Tim Hughes
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If a leader successfully makes their team click to the point where they no longer needed for daily operations, what does that leader's new highest and best use look like? Well, I'd love to tell you that if you read the book, do everything that's in the book, you can live happily ever after.

(18:49-19:16) Daria Rudnik
Well, no, you still need to do that work. Rules change, work change, people change, situation change. You need to constantly have those conversations. That's why I'm saying like the role of lead is not to save people, but to facilitate those conversations. Facilitate the conversation between team members or with stakeholders. And that's what leadership job is, to keep that culture and to guide it.

(19:17-19:33) Tim Hughes
Dara, thank you so much for coming on today and talking about your book, Clicking, a team building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team trust, better results and more time. There you go. So if I wanted to get a copy of that, Dara, where can I get one from?

(19:33-19:53) Daria Rudnik
Like in any bookstore, to be honest, Amazon and any of your favorite bookstores, Barnes and Nobles and whatever you are. Yes. But if you want a direct link, go to my website, thatairwritten.com slash clicking. You'll find all the links in there. Okay. And where can we find you?

(19:53-20:16) Daria Rudnik
Again, daddyarudny.com. You can find my book, Everything I Do. If you go to tools, you'll find downloadable resources for free that you can use with your team right now. And connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very open to connections and let's keep this conversation going. Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about your book. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. And thank you for sharing your wisdom and inspiration.