How to Build a Team That Runs Without You - Daria Rudnik

Hi everyone, and welcome to Behind the Numbers. This is a show where we go beyond the data to explore the people, stories, insights, all that stuff that really drives business success. I'm Dave Co-Finder. I'm known as the author, and I thank you for joining me today.

Most business owners think that growth is limited by the market, but more often, it's limited by them. I mean, everything runs through the leader, team stall, decisions slow down, and it becomes hard to steal, and harder to sell. So how do you build a team that actually works with you, a center of everything? My guest today is Daria Rudnick, the coach and author of Clicking, framework for helping overloaded leaders build stronger, more self-teams.

And she's also the author of The AI Revolution, Driving Within Civilization's Next Big Disruption. We're going to have a great conversation about why leaders become bottlenecks, how to fix it, and what it means to performance and business value. Daria, welcome to Behind the Numbers. Well, hi, Dave.

Thanks for having me on the show. I love listening to your podcast and being here's a guest is a great honor. Thank you. I appreciate that.

It's an honor to have you on the program. So thank you and thanks for all the stuff that you're doing out there. But let's kick this off by covering your backstory a little bit. You've worked with leaders across six continents through a variety of major transitions.

What are the patterns that you see in leaders who struggle versus those who are scaling? That is a great question. And from all my work as a former chief people officer, ex-Deloitte professional, now team architect and executive leadership coach, I work with leaders who want to be good leaders, to be honest. They come to me because they want to be good at what they're doing.

And what the biggest mistake they're making now is they're trying to solve their problems on their own. They're trying to be hero to save their teams, to save their companies, to save their organizations. But in the complexity that we're living in right now, it's not possible for one human being to save it all. So instead of being a heroic leader, the shift that successful leaders are making that can scale and grow is when they facilitate teams conversation instead of trying to save their teams or save their organizations and be hero of that.

Yeah. Is that something that you would consider to be a blind spot? Yes, because, I mean, it's kind of we have this notion of a team as someone, when you say a leader, you imagine someone standing on the hill with a cape flying behind them with a sword and they're going out there and saving the world. There was the leader and there was some kind of people behind them.

So it's not how modern world works right now. Right now, one person leading a team is not, they're just not able to solve all the complexities that are out there. So only if we have a team that has multiple skills, that have many strengths, and they share leadership depending on the goal right now at this moment, this team is more agile, is more fluid, and more capable of surviving and helping organizations grow. So yes, it is a blind spot.

Yeah. And you talk about overloaded leaders. And I know, as I say the words, overloaded leaders, there are folks out there listening to this who are nodding, heck yeah, I'm overloaded. What does that look like in practice?

You might think it's a lot of work. I mean, you have lots of work to do. You have lots of tasks on your to-do list. You have lots of meetings.

But it's not so much a lot of work, but it's a lot of thinking and a lot of decision making and this decision that when leaders need to understand lots of things and make decisions. And sometimes those decisions are not for them to make. Sometimes those decisions can be made by their teams. But once they build this habit of team members coming to them for questions, coming to them for approval, coming to them for advice.

They have to decide for their team members as well. And I'm not saying leaders need to isolate themselves from the team. What I'm saying is leaders are not the only go-to people for their team members. The most important thing is for team members to be able to reach out to each other, to discuss things collaboratively together, and then when they have a solution or when they hit a wall and cannot find a solution, then they go to the leader.

Because for now, many leaders encourage people, come to me with questions. Good. But counter me with questions only after you discuss it with your team members. That's a great subtlety because I've seen so many leaders who either feel like they have to be the answer for everyone, have the answer for everyone.

And like you said, they're trying to encourage, right? So there's good intention here. I'm available, open door policy, all that stuff. But they're taking on more than they need to.

What's behind that? Is it an ego thing? Is it well-intended, a combination of both? It depends on the personality.

sometimes it's eager sometimes it's expected because like what's expected from the leader from every corner you can hear you need to be there for your team you need to like support your team you need to develop your team you need to motivate your team engage them do something for them and i think that's wrong leaders do not do anything for them they need to do something with their team's members. So when they kind of take a step back and, okay, I'm not there for you. I'm here with you and we're here together and we are sort of equal in how much value we can bring because if we're missing one person, we cannot solve our goal.

We cannot solve it. Yes, there's a leadership role and there are all the different roles that are equally important. So instead of being there for them, change it to being there with them. How do you know, or for folks who are listening, how can they know and learn when the leader or the team is too dependent on their own?

Well, that is a great question. And, well, what I'm seeing when leaders come to me with that kind of problem, they say, I don't have time to do my work because I'm stuck with one-to-ones. And I do want to listen to my people when they come to me with their problems. But I cannot spend the whole day just talking with them and kind of solving their individual challenges.

That's one thing. The other thing is when you have a team meeting and you ask a question and no one says anything, or if you give a suggestion and people say, yes, let's do that, we support that, totally agree, no one questions your ideas, no one questions your decisions, no one challenges you, no one is curious enough to understand what is the other way of doing things. Kind of having this debate on your team, if you don't have that, that's not a signal of alignment. That's a signal of people just are not participating.

They're not engaged enough to question or maybe there was lack of trust. Maybe just they don't want to disappoint you. I've seen teams, they don't want to disappoint their manager and that's why they agree because they like this person. I mean, it's good.

There are a lot of good intentions there, but the application is not always right. Yeah. And there's a real cost for that, right? I mean, it would impact business value from the standpoint that the leaders are too hands-on, but maybe some of the operational challenges.

Well, I tell you that there was a team, and it still is a team. And it's a cybersecurity team. And their leader, she was, again, she had very well intentions, very good intentions. She wanted to protect her team.

She wanted them to feel good. And she was the go-to person for the company on cybersecurity questions. And she also received some feedback, positive or negative feedback, on how her team members were doing. Some things she delivered to them, some not.

But she thought that she was protecting them. Really was happening as she was isolating them. And she saw that on the engagement survey when the engagement of the team was falling down. And she said, why?

I'm here to help you. But they felt isolated without having these connections with the board organization, and that impacted their work and the results that they were doing. So when she changed that, when she said, okay, I'm not the only one who's going out there and talking to stakeholders. You go there, you take this feedback, you understand their needs.

Things changed they became aware of big organizational goals they knew their stakeholders they understand why they're working and that improved their both well-being they felt well and performance as well because they had the they had a better understanding of what they were doing yeah we'll talk a little bit about now about how maybe to solve this little challenge and i alluded to your book clicking at the top of the program the full title is clicking a team building strategy for overloaded leaders to want stronger team trust better results in more time and who doesn't want that talk to us about the click framework and what inspired you to write well the click framework is it's basically five pillars that will make you that will help you build great team self-sufficient team team that does not rely on leader for like any question and decision and the first one is clear purpose like why we're here together what's the purpose of us being here as a team, because it's not just the sum of our individual contributions.

If people working with the same manager doesn't make them a team, a shared purpose makes them a team. So once team members understand the shared purpose, they can all contribute to it. The second one is linking connections, how team members are connected with each other. And that's what I was saying.

They're not only connected to their manager and the leader, but they are connected with each other. They can solve problems together. and they connected to the broader organization like the cybersecurity team. When they became connected to the broader organization, they were more effective and they felt better.

The third one is integrated work, the basic norms and rules of how your team works together, how you operate. That removes anxiety. Okay, should I reply to this email right now? Like, what's expected from me?

What good work actually means in our team? The fourth one is collaborative decisions, how you make decisions, what decisions are staying with manager, what decisions you need to make collaboratively as a team, what decisions go to individual contributors. And the fifth one is knowledge sharing and feedback, how we learn and grow together, how we collect feedback, how we give feedback to each other. So when you have clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing, your team will click.

What inspired you to write this? Through my work, I've noticed how great teams and strong teams can actually drive organizational growth. I'll tell you a story. It's a story about a call center in a company, a telecom company, that was going through some difficult times.

This company had a great culture. They were super clear on the purpose. Everyone knew the purpose, what we're doing, and everyone knew that how we're doing that, We're doing it through delivering exceptional service for our clients. But they had to cut costs.

And one of the ways to cut costs is to cut the conversation time that call center had with their customers. So what CEO did, he didn't apply any KPIs on their call center team because he knew as soon as he has some KPIs, okay, you need to have one minute conversation no longer. They will not be able to deliver exceptional service because sometimes you need more time to support your customers. So what he did, he actually came to this team and he said, we're going through the hard times.

We need to cut costs. One of the ways to cut costs is to make these conversations shorter. I'm not going to tell you to, like, I'm not going to do this, a KPI. I'm going to ask you to try and keep these conversations no longer than two minutes.

That's it. No KPIs, no strong, like, no strict metrics. just sharing their objective and respecting that they do their job well. And they did that.

They did save this company millions of dollars by cutting this time for their conversations. Some conversations were only 30 seconds, some conversations were five minutes, depending on what the customer need. But they kept the customer satisfaction and they managed to cut their... Nice.

I appreciate you sharing that story. For folks who are listening, If they're thinking they might want to apply the click pillars today, where would you recommend they start? Well, I love that. Every time a leader comes to me with a question, how do I start?

I tell him, go to your team. Have your team meeting and ask one question. What can we change and what can we do together that will make us a better team? Start with one question.

Like, I don't have all the answers for your team. You don't have all the answers for your team. Only they have all the answers. Like, you can find those answers together.

And then once you start having those conversations, then you can go and get clarity on the purpose, ask them how do they see the purpose, and find the way that everybody can say it in the same, pretty much in the same words, the purpose of the team. And then go through connections and integrated work and decision making and how you grow together. But start with one question. How can we make our team better?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think underpinning the answers that leaders are going to get from their team members is trust. Team members need to be able to feel comfortable and confident that they're able to share candidly so that they don't get penalized for responding to that question. Yeah, well, trust is important.

You cannot do that without trust. But if you don't have that trust yet, that shouldn't stop you. By asking that question, that's the first step of building that trust. By listening to what they're saying is a step to building this trust.

By implementing what you agreed on doing is another step of building the trust. Even if they don't say anything, respecting that, okay, it's not the right time. I'll ask it next week. It is building trust.

So trust is not something you either have or not. It's something you build. Yeah, really, really well said. I want to talk about AI.

It's on everybody's mind and conversations and headlines and so forth. I think you focus on building teams for an AI-driven world. How is AI changing what great needs? I can tell you that.

AI is influencing the way we think, feel, think, and work together. And there was lots of research telling us that AI is influencing the way we think and that there is a right and wrong way of working with AI. That AI is influencing the language that team members are using. For example, if a team is using AI in solving some of the tasks, they start using AI language.

And on one hand, it's a good thing because they kind of share the same vocabulary, the same language. They easily understand each other. On the other hand, you don't always know if that is a good language or not, if it's the right way to talk about the problem or not. So the role of the leaders in this world is not to tell people what to do.

They know what to do. They can find information. They can ask AI and gather this information easily. But the role of the leader is to facilitate conversations where people challenge AI output, when people make sure they collaborate, when people know when to apply human judgment and when they can use AI.

So that's the role of a leader in an AI-driven world. Yeah, great point about the need for the human judgment and trust but verify, because I think we all have experience if anybody who dabble with AI knows that it hallucinates. And it also tries to champion you. If you say things to it, it tries to encourage you that you're the greatest thing since like thread, and that can lead to some bad outcomes.

When we talk about human connection inside of teams and how that works, culture and what leaders are doing about that, is AI increasing or decreasing the need? AI is increasing the need for human skills on the team, for sure, like critical skills, critical thinking, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence. And it means, and we cannot, like when you work with AI, you need to have someone who will help you think through the AI outputs because it's hard. I mean, well, I work with AI.

I have my blind spots. I don't see it. So I need someone else. So yes, when teams work with AI, they need team members to support them.

They need more team discussions and conversation around AI's outputs. Again, we need to understand where humans need to step in and know AI is needed. Because there are situations like emotional support, difficult conversations, questions about growth, questions about firing people, promoting people. They need to be handled by humans.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That human element is so critical and it will always remain, I think, anyway. Continuing the AI thread, Gary, co-authored the AI revolution, civilization's next-to-date disruption. What's the central thesis of it?

It's actually a collection of different stories on how AI is impacting our world. And this book was published early 2025. And I think many of the things that are irrelevant right now because the world is changing so fast. But many are still very relevant.

I was writing about the skills that teams need in the AI era. The way I work with it is changing right now. But the idea is still the same. We need human skills while working with AI more than we need technical skills.

Yeah. So for the business owners who are listening now, what are a couple of the challenges they should make to build a stronger and more autonomous team, especially in light of how AI is in fact? Well, that is an amazing question. Because the main role of the leader is to build this team.

And no one can do that but you. And to build this team culture and organizational culture. And even if you're an early startup, if you're just starting the business, but you want to grow, you know that your team will grow, you know that your organization will grow, start building this culture early on. Because...

When you are in this scale-up, fast-growing, it'll be hard for you to go back and think, okay, what's our values? What's our culture? What are we standing for? What kind of people do we want to hire?

What kind of people we don't want to have on our team? All those questions need to be answered beforehand. It doesn't have to be a constitution or a huge manuscript, but some ideas and core principles behind your culture, they need to be set at the very beginning. And that's how you hire your people.

And that's how you build all the structure and processes around that. Because I've seen teams stumbling because they had 50 people and they all understand each other. We know, we feel, we have this connection. And when they're 250, okay, who are these people in the I don't know them.

And if your team is remote, that's even harder. To be very clear on what is the culture, how we work here, how we connect, what's expected, what good looks like in your team, start building it from day one. I am curious about your perspective, given your background and the extensive work that you've done. How has your own definition of knowledge worked?

I remember a story when my manager first told me, stop, stop showing your leadership something. She said something like that. Stop showing your leadership here. It's not for you.

And that meant that for me, I was always everywhere. Like I was doing this and I was doing that. I was answering all the questions. I was everywhere.

And that's not what leaders do. Leaders like step back. Do the work, let the team grow, let the team shine. And that's how my personal view on leadership changed and evolved.

I mean, it's not that I switched from the be everywhere mode to kind of a be facilitating mode. It was a process. It took me some years to change. So yeah and a lot of organizations especially the smaller ones may not necessarily have the resources to allow their teams and junior staff to learn leadership skills what would be your advice for those aspiring managers who maybe don't have access to adequate training and who are basically just looking at role models inside the organization say okay i like the way that person leads or okay I don't want to be like that person ever.

Well, through my work as a chief people officer, I not always had budgets. And we can learn. Anyone can be a leader. You don't have to have a managerial role or title or anything to be a leader.

You don't have to have a complicated leadership development programs to grow leaders. What you need is you need an opportunity. Find someone and let them lead a project. Help them collect a team.

That could be one one day event or that could be one process or one project, anything. There are always opportunities for people to grow leadership skills through work by doing something. And of course, yeah, if you have my book, you can take the steps in this book and learn as well, because it is very practical. Right.

I don't really believe in inspirational books. They're good. They make you feel good and they make you want to change. But how you change is what I'm writing in my book.

Yeah, and how about for those folks who are currently in leadership roles as you look out on the horizon for the next three to five years in this ever-changing AI-driven landscape, what are some of the skills that those folks need to be developed? Clarity on the decision-making. Who is making what decisions? And that's absolutely critical.

And that's not only about you as a leader and your team members. It is also about you as a team and AI. So who is deciding what? What is that you're delegating to AI?

What stays with humans? What kind of humans? What is individual decision? What is collaborative decision?

Clarity on decision-making will make your life so much easier because you will not be drowning in multiple decisions you don't need to make. And you will not suffer from decisions made by AI that shouldn't be done by AI. And I can only begin to imagine what those decisions could possibly look like without human intervention. Dara, you're down to the short strokes here.

I know we can't give you the final word here, but when a leader gets this right and when their team really clicks, let's use your term, what changes for them personally and professionally? The changes that I see in leaders when they have their team working is that they feel well. They feel that they're not behind. They feel that the work will be done by people that have fun working together.

It's this joy of going to work every day and knowing that you're there with people you like, with people you have shared goal, with people who support each other. I think it's worth it. We spend so much time at work. We deserve to be happy at work.

And leaders need to be happy at work. And team members need to be happy at work. So by building this great team, everybody is trying. Happy going to work every day and creating something meaningful for their customers.

Yeah, and that sounds so idealistic, but I love it. And whether it's aspirational or reality, when you do achieve that state, I can tell you that it has such an impact not only on the performance and culture, but from my lens as somebody who values businesses, it does make a big impact on company performance and the value. Absolutely. I know, like I was working for the company that the only reason they were acquired by another company is because of their amazing culture so they were growing yeah daria thank you so much for joining us today tell the folks out there who are listening how they can find you where they can find your books that's wonderful thanks so much for sharing and thank you for joining us today behind the numbers and thank you out there for joining us today behind the numbers as i like to say if you enjoyed the episode, please give us a review on Apple or Spotify.

Until next time, I am Dave Bookfinder reminding me that the numbers tell the story, but the people bring it to life. Thank you, everybody.