The five ingredients every strong team has, before they even touch AI - with Daria Rudnik

0:01 Welcome to the show Mind Blend. I'm your host, Karen Chong, and I'll be diving into the minds of incredible people, each an expert in their very own way. Together, we'll uncover insights and share ideas so you can be inspired and empowered to navigate your own unique journey in life. Ready to get curious and discover what's possible? Let's blend. So a few episodes back, I'm mind blended with Collette Mason about how we can make AI work for us, not replace us. But the conversation doesn't stop there.

0:37 There's so much more we have to explore about what happens when AI and human truly start working together. So today I'm joined by Daria Rudnick. Daria sits right at the intersection of AI, leadership and human connection. She's a leadership coach, team architect. And then we'll go a little bit more into that and hybrid intelligence strategist who helps leaders in their teams build clarity, trust and real connection in an AI driven world. Hi Daria, welcome to Vine One. Hi, Cameron. Thanks for having me here.

1:09 It's it's yeah, I'm very excited to have this conversation. Yeah. So I'm sure our listeners are intrigued by now. What do you mean by team architects and hybrid intelligence strategies? So tell us a little bit more about your journey and how you got to where you are today. Yeah, well, my, my background is an HR and organization development. I started my career in Deloitte and then I moved to achieve people officer for mostly tech and telecom companies. And look through throughout my career, I, I, I've seen disruptions that you said various disruptions that teams face, teams face like merges and acquisitions like setting up in other countries.

1:52 And what I've noticed is when organizations have strong teams, they are much more successful in any organization transformation that's happening. They are much more successful in dealing with, I mean, global disasters like financial crisis or COVID or like whatever it is. But when the teams are not strong, when like the culture is very diluted, it's, it's very hard for leaders to move their organization forward. And I've seen examples of like failures where the companies were just acquired and, and dissolved.

2:23 They were not existent anymore or they, they go bankrupt. A lot of it because the teams were not ready for for this change. So since ever that time I started to study and see how to design amazing teams, how to build those teams because they don't just happen on the road whenever like families of the team, universities are the team, schools on the team. And the first time we really join a team is when we're joining workforce. And now we're expected to be a team player, like work in a team or when manager grows into his first managerial role, they say we need to build a team.

2:59 How do you do that? Yeah, they didn't teach it. It's not about delegation and control. I mean, no. So you need to design the team, you need to build a team. And so it's a special effort, it's a skill. There are certain tools and techniques that you can use in order to practices that you that you need to implement in order to build this this great team. That's why I kind of call myself A-Team architect because I helped leaders build those kind of teams and design them. But he also mentioned about hybrid intelligence and that's kind of a new thing when AI is joining the workforce and influencing team dynamics, organizational dynamics, how we work together.

3:36 It's and it's not just work how we think, collaborate and make decisions. And that's a totally used skill and kind of understanding of how to work with the AI so that you don't delegate too much, you're still in control, that you still own the work that didn't have intelligence to do that. So let's set the scene a little bit for our listeners. We are at the time of this recording close to the end of 2025, we've seen layoffs with reasons such as we're optimizing our resources and now we don't need nearly as many people with the help of AI.

4:12 And you also see sort of like this pressure coming up from leadership or founders level C-Suite of mandates of we need to use more AI or we need to use AI and all these projects and things like that. Because you work with teams and leaders directly, what have you, What sort of emerging patterns have you noticed? It's, it's kind of from the employee perspective, there's sort of fear. There's a fear that AI will replace me. And even more, it's not that AI will replace me, it's the manageable thing that AI can replace me, which is not like you mentioned layoffs.

4:54 There were a lot of layoffs labeled like AI driven lay layoffs but like to be honest most of them are economically driven layoffs and AI is just a nice cover for many of them. And we've seen, I think so too. Yeah. And we've seen situation when people kind of think, OK, now AI can do that for them, we can save some money. They have to rehire those people back because, well, no, AI cannot do all the work for humans. It can support you can do more with the same amount of people, but doing more with less people.

5:28 Well, not. Not yet. Yeah, I am glad you pointed out the not yet because you know, we're actively training it. The models are getting improved. At some point it can do more than what it can do today. However, we need to keep the lights on. And it's, I definitely believe that it's more how you can make your people more efficient so you can do more of what's important for the organization, not just do more. Yeah. What about leaders like, what are like the ones who advocate like, yes, we should just use AI and replace half of our workforce or the ones that are sort of pressured by their management of incorporating more AI in like your team.

6:11 Like what have you seen with that layer? A lot of companies are experimenting with AI and we are at this experimentation stage when lots of AI projects are initiated from various parts of organizations, sometimes from the top, sometimes from the bottom, sometimes like multiple AI projects in various functions. But together with that, we also see that AI is not bringing regional investment as a as we hope it will. So I mean we're still like trying to figure out how that how that should work. So the latest, the main question is they will have to use AI, Everyone will have to use AI.

6:48 We we can understand that. But the question is like why? Yeah, I'm not against that at all. Yes, why and how? Like what is the reason? What is that we want to use AI for and what are the norms, how we're going to use it? Because I've seen situations where kind of people just dive in, OK, let's use AI for everything, and then that causes team disengagement, loss of motivation, and eventually loss of productivity and effectiveness. So you you help companies build effective teams. High performing teams.

7:20 Name some characteristics of a high performing team. Oh, I can have you 55. Yeah, name as many as you want. I guess while while working with teams and like not just the favorite, not just in practical, but like, yeah, reading literature and scientific literature about how like great what what does it make to be a great team? I came up with five major pillars of any successful team, high performing team, team that is more self-sufficient, more autonomous, that can manage themselves and they don't need leader for every decision.

7:54 So the first thing is they have they have a clear purpose and that's pretty obvious. Yes, you need to understand why you're together. And the tricky part here is not every team has that. So if if you have a bunch of people and like just being reported to one manager, that doesn't make them a team. They become a team only when they have a shared purpose, something that they can achieve together by collaborating and and working together and not just by combining the individual contributions. So that's, that's the one important part.

8:25 The second one is linking connections. When people are connected within the organization, there were a lot of connections manager to employee, but what about like people employee to employee, people, team members to team members And more importantly, what about the connections of this team members to other, to their stakeholders. So it's not just the manager who goes out to the boss, to the stakeholders, to peers presenting the results. So it's people, team members go now to their stakeholders, understanding their needs, presenting results, taking responsibility for the mistakes that they've made.

9:01 So that's the second part, linking connections. The third one is integrated work. And that that's what many leaders are missing is how do we work together as a team? What are our team norms? What is what do we support in terms of behaviour? What kind of behaviour do you want do we want to see in our on our team and what kind of behaviour we never want to tolerate? So what is not tolerated on our team? So this team knows how many meetings do we want to have? Like what are the communications channels that we're going to use?

9:32 It creates a lot of clarity and it removes frustration from people. OK, what's next? The 4th 1 is collaborating decisions. How do you make decisions on your team? Because you as a manager, you don't have to make all decisions on your own. And then finally, knowledge sharing and feedback. How do you as a team learn and grow together? How you learn from your mistakes, how you give feedback to each other, how you collect feedback from your stakeholders? So those five pillars, clear purpose, linking, connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing is what will make your team click.

10:08 Have you seen anything that like you, let's say you have a client that you help them build high performing teams. Do you, have you seen any cases where they used to be performing great, but recently they've started phasing out certain things that they're doing because of changes in technology? Have you seen anything like that? Well, I have AI have an example of a of a team. I'm not sure they were like super high performing team, but they were recently like they were pretty decent before AI, it was a customer success team.

10:45 They were like working with the clients, pretty happy together, engaged, working well. It's a good team and at some point, and they were a good team, they were curious about new things. So they implemented and started using AI quite a lot. So they they had that conversation with clients. The conversation was recorded. They had a transcript of this conversation. AI generated insights from the conversation. They uploaded it to CRM. Some of the items went to backlog and then AI helped them generate agenda for the next meeting with the client.

11:19 So I mean, a lot, a lot was automated. Everyone was happy. They had lots of time. They had to like pick up the projects that they didn't have time for before they had some time to breathe and kind of OK, relax and not behind all like the days all the time. But here was what happened next. At some point during the, the team meetings, they, they couldn't like recall some of the things they used to know about their clients. They used to know they're like, like, you know, but now they, they keep forgetting they need to go to the, to the CRM to look at their insights that they have not generated that were created by AI.

11:58 They couldn't prioritise items for, for the backlog because, OK, they didn't have this understanding what's more important for their clients because again, they, they were not the ones who generated those items. It was AI and they started to feel like they're losing connection with their work. They became just operators, putting data from one source to another operate, helping AI do the work for them. But they lost the meaning. They lost meaning, they lost engagement and like eventually they lost productivity because they were not so much involved in everything that's happening by their clients.

12:30 And that's when I joined this team and kind of helping them to, to be like, to regain their like get the engagement back and productivity and become more efficient with AI and how they use AI. And So what they did is well, they started again with, with why with a clear purpose. Why, why are we using AI? Like what are we using AI for? What's what's in it and what is what should stay with us as a team? What's our word value proposition for organization for our clients? Again, this, this understanding and feeling of what the clients need and being able to support their needs the best way possible is what should stay with them as humans, as teens.

13:12 And some of their automated work can be created by AI. And the next thing they did is, I don't know if you've heard about it. There's a research called Your Brain on ChatGPT that tells that if you like ask AI to do something and then like try to edit it, your brain is disengaged and it stays disengaged for like the whole project. But if you do something, if you initiate the draft, if you do something 1st and then ask to edit it or get some input, your brain stays engaged longer. So what they did is they before generating insights from the conversation and from the transcript at the end of each conversation, when the conversation was over, they kind of just was speaking, speaking some things that they thought of this conversation, their feelings, they got the insights, the idea, and then AI generated insights based on what manager said and they're trusting the conversation.

14:08 So they were the first one to give this input. They still own the conversation, they still own the result. And then, well, they had team meetings when they looked at those insights, looked at the backlog and they were like, really, really go deep into that and analyzing what's there and saying, OK, this is relevant, this is not relevant. So they they they became part of the process rather than just the observable support AI is doing for that. Yeah, you know what? That sort of made me think of two real life scenarios.

14:40 One, phone numbers. So now you just hand your phone to whoever they put the phone number in, you call them to like give them your own phone number. That was the transactions. So the numbers have not even gone into your brain at all. So it's kind of similar to that. Another one is if you are, if you work in a restaurant and you're the person taking the order and you pass it to the chef, you may remember what it is, but that was like really just the level. And you may not even remember if there's like 100 customers.

15:15 So what you pointed out about you being the first engaging your brain, I think that's like a really, really good point because there are many things that we are starting to do it like that. If you have to go somewhere, put the address in the GPS, you may not remember how you get there. I know that happened to me a few times. So by them kind of taking back that ownership of the insides of the idea, how have you seen them gone back on track?

15:48 Well, they started having this conversation, well, first of all between themselves when they started, when they, they engaged in team meetings discussing the outputs, the inside the backlog. Well, not only they understood it better because they. Understood it better. OK. But they also had again had a chance to talk. We love connection with people. We love working together. We love like seeing how ideas are built on ideas that we share. Something someone fixed it up, what's the question? And that not only helped them understand better their clients, but it also helped with the team climb and how they feel together.

16:26 Yeah. And I feel like they may have insights that AI will never be able to generate for them because we understand situations differently. And you sort of have to feed all the new ones into AI for it to give you like a well-rounded suggestion or insights. So I'm glad. So what you were describing like it never touching their brain, is that what you call cognitive offloading? I mean it's it's it's a, it's a term and this term is actually what you like properly described with phone numbers and GP and GPS.

16:59 It's deal with that for quite a while right there when we offload some of the information from our brain to technology, which is good. I mean, there's so many, like there's so many things we need to remember. So that's so much information. We don't need to remember it all. So at some point, cognitive of loading is helping us to, to live with this excessive data that we have around us. But when you offload too much, when you like, one thing is a floating data numbers and things like that. The other thing is when you offload decision making.

17:31 And that's when things go wrong. And that's, that's the difference between like automation and AI, because with automation, you don't expect anything from a machine. But with AI, we kind of think we're talking to a human being. We kind of have a real conversation. We kind of assume that this thing is telling us the truth, that this thing knows, which is not true. So that's why it's very important to be mindful about how much do you want to upload to AI and at this, you know, lose this connection with your work.

18:05 So what in your opinion? So besides data and like everyday business scenario, what else would be suitable a suitable category of information to offload and what they people should definitely not offload like you mentioned decision making. Yeah, I mean, there are lots of things we can offload. Whether we cannot and should not offload is something that needs empathy and and human to human connection. And a great example is you never, should never fire a person with AI, with the help of AI. And there was A, and it's true and it sounds ridiculous.

18:39 There was a company that was a post on LinkedIn and some CEO or CEO or some of the company they mentioned, like a relay of lots of people here was an AI tool you can like reach out to and talk to make you feel bad about that. Oh, that's that's, that's so bad. This post was bleeded but Internet remembers everything so the screenshots are there. But yeah, things like that should never be delegated to AI. And if you work with again, high sensitive data, obviously, and be very mindful about like who is getting access to that data.

19:15 And again, it thinks AI telling us they're not true. I mean, it depends on how you train this AI, but it's if it's generated AI, they're not true. They have probabilities that AI predictions based on what it knows. So and always checking, rechecking their output that AI gives you is a critical skill. For now, at least, we'll still need to do that. Do you have any good success cases like we can step away from just focusing on AI? How has your biggest success been going into a team and trying to fix, quote UN quote, fix their issues and turn them into a high performing team?

19:57 Great question. I'm a lot of indicators of of high performing great team. One of them is how much revenue they can generate, how much they can perform. I've been working with company that. Increased performance 3, three or four times. But they were really pretty good team to be honest. So the transformation they they've been through was, was successful because they're very good team. But I have an example where there's a lot of conflict on the team. It's it's a manufacturing company and the CEO reached out to me say, hey, like I have a lot of conflict on my team.

20:32 People cannot make, make decisions together. They think the ID is better. So when I joined the team and we started having those conversations, team sessions, it happened that that well, people, all of them, they were really engaged and they're really motivated in company success. They just saw it differently. Some saw that they need to focus on quality, others so that the, the, the most important thing is distribution channels and things like that. So one of the things we did together is apart from like being clearly, clearly being clear on the purpose of the team, we created a list of behaviours like what are the behaviours that the team wants to see and wants to support and want to see more of like sort of the keep it up behaviours, behaviours that need to stay on the team.

21:22 And what are they cut it out behaviours, behaviours that they're not going to tolerate. So they had the list, they had the list of keep it up behaviors and carried out behaviors and all. Eventually they, they had like they started to have meaningful conversations with each other. They learned how to work together. They moved forward and I think it was a success. But the most interesting thing happened about six months after when the CEO reached out to me and said, you know what, we're moving fine.

21:51 We're going in in that direction. A lot of conversations, lots of argument, but they're not like personality conflicts, but people really bring in some ideas and challenging them. Yeah. And the team decided that the sales leader needs to go. Why? Because she didn't follow the keeping up behaviors and she constantly demonstrated some of the cut it out behaviors and the team mentioned that several times. She didn't change and and the team, they decided that she needs to go. It wasn't C the CEO, it wasn't like the divorce.

22:26 It was the teams that she's not part of our team because she's not following what we agreed to follow altogether. I think that's that's a great example of TNB more self-sufficient brand. They don't need their leader to make every decision. They can make decisions on their own. If they can solve problems on their own, they can be more autonomous and they moving without delay because they can make those decisions and they can, they can do that. Are the clients that you work with, are they like more concentrated in certain geographies or you work with different people in different continents?

23:02 I actually, yeah, I was counting, OK, how many countries? I've been working with people in India, in Zimbabwe, in Latin America, US mostly it's North America and Europe, but Australia, yeah. And it's, it's, yeah. I I love this opportunity to work with any like people from any country like due to again, due to technology. Yeah, 'cause what I wanted to ask is, you know, like I know one of your effort is to help teams be like, to avoid burnout, both burnout for the leaders and burnout for the team.

23:36 And in the example that you gave, the team can make decisions themselves so they don't have to go to a leader every single time. That hierarchy sort of depends on the culture. To some cultures, that is fine. Some cultures you the final say, still come from the top. So how? How do you balance the culture versus the nature of a high performing team and how to keep people from burning up? That is, I mean, that's I love that question. And and the the the best thing about like a high performing team and how they're formed is that the team themselves, they people on this team, they decide what works for them best.

24:16 If they think that the manager need to have a final word, they can do that. The cultures were like company organizational cultures. When they say you work hard, you work 1212 hours a day, like you're not getting promoted for five years, but you'll get in return like rapid growth or healing skills or whatever. So it's it's a very clear contract and a very clear agreement. So you can have any type of culture you want I guess, as long as you sit together and agreed on your team norms and team goal.

24:54 I haven't really thought about it that way, but that is a very good tactic to kind of frame people's mindset before they go into how do we get to become a high performing team. So there's this like cycle of you have farming, storming, norming, performing. So that's a typical cycle of any team. Some teams may skip some. Some teams may be stuck in Yeah Storming, for example, and they come to you. Yeah. But again, it's not a cycle. It's it's more like a spiral because like with with any new challenge, with any new member coming in, coming out, you go through the same cycle again over and over again.

25:37 So and then it's important for men to kind of catch those cycles and make sure that to help team go through that cycle because they will repeat. Yeah. Now with technology like what would be something that any leader or team members who are burned out, anyone listening who wants to make a change so that they can use AI to help them better, What would be something that you would suggest they start?

26:05 To actually depends on the on the stage of AI and like wireless. Yeah yeah in the company like personally for themselves where they are because I mean I know there were people who are using AI daily, but companies just OK thinking should we do it? Should we not So they are in the different like levels. But well, first is being curious about what's there, like how it works, being curious about like not only how should I use it, but also like what's really happening when AI produces some outcomes.

26:37 Like the thing I mentioned that it's not true, it's predictions like how actually LLMS work and start trying it out, make mistakes, be mindful about the outcomes again, like repeat the cycle, learn something else, try it out, share with other people, see what they're doing. And that's how we learn. Yeah, the theme of curiosity, what has been floating through the whole Mind Blend series so far, is like to keep an open mind and iterate, learn from your mistakes. Yeah, well, that's that's the drive of the progress.

27:13 Yeah. What would be your worst case study? That it's always something that you talk about as like casual family gathering or dinner party or something. I have AI, have an. I have an example. I was, I was having a conversation with the CEO when I found one company and well, they said that they value, I think it was either transparency or honesty, like transparency or honesty, probably honesty was their value and and they wanted and they want to build honest relationships with their customers. And he talked a lot about that.

27:48 But like throughout some conversations, trust, hey, it was trust. So he was talking about trust and he wanted to build trustful relationship with with the customers. But like while talking to that person I found out that he's not paying full salary for the employees. OK. Like using some like kind of schemes to minimize taxes as OK. You talk about trust, how people can trust you if you're doing things like that and like the response was OK, You don't understand how to lead a business. You cannot lead a like you cannot run a business if you don't do things like that.

28:26 I mean, what happened a few months after that? Is that one of the suppliers so brought bad product and and some of the customers got quizened because of that product. Wow. OK. And I mean, if you if you build your relationship on trust, you need to make sure everyone can trust you. But if you build, if you like, if you're trusting here and not trusting there, make sure you control everything like very, very thoroughly. Because the trust is one thing, but like if you're lying on some other things, it like it destroys your culture and finally it destroys your business.

29:07 So that is a great example of how I declare values and not actually part of the company and how it can do in a company. Yeah, like you mentioned it in the beginning, like the pillars of high performing team, like shared values. Yeah. So for this last part, let's play something out of the ordinary. So I have a few rapid fire questions. Just like really quick whatever comes to your mind, say it. What's 1 human skill you think is underrated in the age of AI? Well, we simply talked about curiosity. I have this curiosity in my mind.

29:44 I think like we, we underestimate curiosity and we underutilized curiosity to be more curious and open to new things. Yeah, I am 100% with that. So you've worked with, like many, many continents, What culture taught you the most about teamwork? It's it's not like culture, it's again that don't put labels from people based on their origin. Like see the human we as a leader, you have 10-8 people on your team. We can learn about them as human beings without labeling them like based on their culture.

30:20 Yeah, yeah, I see this a lot. It's not intentional, but people will be called Oh the the, the Scottish guy like the Chinese guy. Yeah, know them by their name. Call them by their name. OK, When you feel mentally overloaded, what's your go to way to reset your mind? I studied practice in Tai Chi was in Canada. I love it. Tell tell me more like I'm interested. Well, like I used to do yoga like long, long time ago. And I went, OK, I need to get back to yoga. I could get back to doing yoga, but I couldn't do that.

30:57 It's important. My husband shared a video with me and like a lesson and I was, I was impressed with the wisdom is that can't let go together with with the body movement and and the wisdom for me was very important. And the point is that we you cannot achieve anything with force. This force is just one black powder, one thing, but you need to be able to release, and that is as powerful as force if you do it right in the right way. And this balance between like moving forward and releasing and letting go is what I'm practicing in my business and life.

31:43 And Tai Chi is is really helping me with that. Interesting because I see people in parks sometimes doing Tai chi in the morning and like I have a mental image of the movement just because like I grew up in Asia. But interesting that helps with business too. So complete this sentence. I wish AI could. I wish AI could change the world for the better. I'm not sure if it's possible. Well. This is why we're having this conversation today. Like, I think if we can early on adopt A healthy mindset of using AI and how we should use it to help us, partner with us, even not just like an operational tool.

32:31 If more people can think of things like this, then yeah, we can change it for the butter. Like we have so much more information. Humans. Can yeah, it itself will not do anything. I, I do want people to walk away with like knowing this AI shouldn't be used on its own. We should always be the humans in the loop. Well, thank you very much for having this conversation with me, Daria. I will leave your information in the show notes so anyone who would like to continue this conversation, they can get in touch with you or you can leave us a comment and we'll keep the conversation going.

33:09 Thanks for having me.

33:13 Thanks for listening to this episode of Mind One. Maybe you enjoyed the conversation. Don't forget to follow and share it with anyone who needs to hear it. And let's keep the conversation going. Connect with me on LinkedIn or leave me a comment. Until next time, stay curious, keep exploring, and let's continue to blend our minds and discover what's possible.