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A Strategy For Team Building – a conversation with author Daria Rudnik
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A Team Building Strategy for Overloaded Leaders Who Want Stronger Team Trust, Better Results, and More Time
Daria Rudnik is a Team Architect who helps leaders design self-sufficient, high performing teams.
In her book, CLICKING: A Team Building Strategy for Overloaded Leaders Who Want Stronger Team Trust, Better Results, and More Time Daria provides a practical guide to implementing the five pillars that support self-sufficient high performing teams that thrive in a crisis.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Daria and host Michael Millward discuss
They discuss the
- Five pillars of effective team work
- Difference between collective action and combined action
- Responsibilities of team leaders
- Conversations that hppen within teams
- Psychology of teamwork
- Team work in an individual world
- Trust within teams
- Remote teams
- Multi-cultural and multi-generational teams
- Transferring between approaches
- Team leaders as team facilitators
This podcast is essential listening for anyone who needs to build or lead a team.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that makes every stage of the podcast production process so easy.
00:00:16
Speaker
All the details are in the description. Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:34
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward, the managing director of Abbasida.
Guest Introduction: Daria Rudnick
00:00:39
Speaker
In this episode of The Independent Minds, Daria Rudnick is going to explain how overloaded leaders can gain better results from their teams.
00:00:49
Speaker
Daria is the author of Clicking, a team building strategy for overloaded leaders who wants stronger team trust, better results and more time. Daria is based in Israel.
00:01:02
Speaker
I have never been, but if I get the chance to visit Israel, I will make all of my travel arrangements at the Ultimate Travel Club. Because, as a member of the Ultimate Travel Club, I get access to trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, all sorts of travel-related purchases.
00:01:19
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You can do the same by using the link in the description, which has a built-in discount. Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds,
00:01:30
Speaker
That will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to. Very importantly, on The Independent Minds, we do not tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
Daria's Career Journey
00:01:42
Speaker
Hello, Daria. Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me here. I'm looking forward to this conversation because I think it's a really interesting topic. But what's your career journey that led ultimately to writing this book?
00:01:55
Speaker
I started my career in Deloitte and then moved to chief, being a chief people officer for mostly tech and telecom companies. And through that time, I'm not going to tell you how many years that was. but I shall interview you then for a second and tell you that later this year, i will celebrate being a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which I joined 40 years ago this year. yeah Oh, yeah.
00:02:23
Speaker
It's a lot of experience, Michael. A lot of experience. is It is. is. Thank you very much. Thank you. But we're not going to ask you those sorts of questions. But you started in one of the big consultancy firms and then moved into high-tech organizations as a chief peer people officer.
00:02:38
Speaker
I've been through lots of major like lots of projects like mergers and acquisitions, setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations, global financial crises and things like that.
00:02:50
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But through my work, I've seen how strong teams can actually really make those disruptive experiences or very challenging, ambitious projects successful.
00:03:04
Speaker
I've also seen when when there was no team, when there was no real teamwork, organizations just went out of business. That made me think, okay, how do you build those kind of teams?
About Daria's Book: 'Clicking'
00:03:16
Speaker
For about five years now, I quit my corporate career and focused on what I love doing best and can do best, which is helping leaders build strong teams that are able to navigate various disruptions and challenges of the modern fast-pacing world. And I wrote a book that will help them go step by step through the exercises, checklists, templates and all sort of advice I give in a book and build their self-sufficient, high-performing team.
00:03:45
Speaker
So it's not a text-based book, it's an action type book with lots of activities for someone to to get involved in. Absolutely. Let's talk about the title because it is a fairly long title.
00:03:59
Speaker
A team building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team, trust, better results and more time. But it starts off with this one word, clicking.
00:04:11
Speaker
As soon as I saw that, I was intrigued. Why? Why use the word clicking in the title of a book about team building? well Thank you for that question because clicking stands for click. So ah the book has five main chapters and those chapters are about one pillar that when leaders have that and when teams have that, they become self-sufficient teams. And those five pillars are clear purpose. Every team starts with the purpose. what is what What is that that brings us together? What is that that we can only achieve together collaboratively and we cannot achieve by combining and summing up individual contributions? the second one is linking connections how we as team members are connected to each other how we communicate what's the trust level on our team and more importantly is how we as a team are connected to the broader organization to our stakeholders so that we're not isolated but we are part of a bigger team because every organization is a team of teams
00:05:13
Speaker
The third one is integrated work. What are the work norms and rules of our team? How often do we meet? What are our metrics and KPIs? How do we measure success?
00:05:25
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How we know what's what's right and what's wrong on our team? The fourth one is collaborative decisions, how we make decisions as a team, what decisions need to make be made by a team leader, what decisions can be made by individual contributors, and what decisions we absolutely need to make together.
00:05:43
Speaker
And finally, the fifth one is knowledge sharing and feedback, how we grow as a team, how we collect feedback, how we give feedback to each other, how we evolve and learn together.
00:05:53
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So when you have clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing, your team will click.
Defining 'Overloaded' Leaders
00:06:02
Speaker
So it's like all the pieces of a jigsaw clicking together to form the picture, or everything in a machine clicking together to work properly. We have an expression in the UK, which is like, we just clicked, we got along, we just clicked. It is like all of the things about a group of friends they just click it just works nobody really knows why but it works as a group of people yeah it's a really good really good word to to be using in that sort of context i like that i like that a lot oh that's brilliant let's break down the rest of the title a little bit because they'd say sorry a team building strategy for overloaded leaders and
00:06:47
Speaker
You've heard me slip up slightly there because I almost said overworked leaders, but the title is overloaded leaders, and I'm thinking there must be a particular reason why you decided to use the word overloaded, even though it's not the one that you would expect to use.
00:07:01
Speaker
coach a lot of leaders and teams and what I'm seeing year after year, like while I was working in HR and now as a team architect and executive leadership coach, I i see leaders, a stretch thing with all the multiple demands that's happened to them. And it's not just work and it's not just workload. they they experience they they kind of carry a lot of responsibility. The responsibility ah to motivate and engage their employees and teams, the responsibility to perform great and provide excellent service to their customers, the responsibility to like be profitable for their shareholders.
00:07:42
Speaker
Everyone is expecting something from those leaders and no one is actually helping them. What good leaders tend to do is they tend to carry it all alone because they they do know that their team members are busy, they also have lots of work to do, and they don't want to sort of bother them or give them even more low workload. So they carry lots of things on their own. But instead, what they should be doing is go back to their teams and facilitate conversations so that they are stronger together. So in our world, when everything is changing so fast, when there are so, again, multiple constraints, economically, politically, like supply chain, global supply chain, everything, AI, there's a lot of constraints and a lot of challenges that ai that leaders are facing.
00:08:32
Speaker
Instead of being a hero and trying to save their team and carry all the load themselves, what I'm trying to tell them is go back to your teams, start having those conversations, and it'll make your life better, and it'll make your team's life better.
00:08:48
Speaker
Yes. I like that. like that a lot because, yeah, when you just focus on your overworked, it's just the tasks that you can see in front of you. There are a lot of them.
00:09:00
Speaker
There probably always going to be a lot of them. When you use the the word overloaded, you're actually recognizing that there is an awful lot of other pressures on a team leader, the emotional, psychological, physical pressures, which may have absolutely nothing to do with their tasks or the tasks of people in their team.
00:09:22
Speaker
But one of the best ways to start resolving that status of being overloaded is like say, have the conversations with your team members about what they're doing, what they're contributing to, and how you can help them and they can
Challenges of Leadership & Delegation
00:09:40
Speaker
help you. And you know there's a picture in my mind at the moment, which I've seen so many times in real life, where as the HR person in an organization, I'd perhaps make a walk around the office building at the end of the day and just see what was happening after hours,
00:09:58
Speaker
And very often you would see leaders in their department by themselves working away. yeah Everybody else is gone, but they'll still be there. And you know that they come in before every everyone else, but they're there after everyone else is gone.
00:10:15
Speaker
And the reason why is very often that they just haven't had that conversation with their teams, either individually or collectively, and haven't worked out. what it is that they should be delegating to their teams.
00:10:29
Speaker
So they end up with a lot of work. The lack of confidence they have in their own ability to delegate and lack of confidence in the team's ability ability to be delegated to is a big cause, I think, of people ending up overloaded and eventually burnt out. And I actually have a story, an example that clearly illustrates that when leaders overloaded, team is disengaged and not vice versa. I mean, you cannot have a great motivated team and overloaded leader. You all you also need you need to have this balance because there was this leader who was kind of
00:11:05
Speaker
she was She started with protecting her team from feedback, from uncertainty of the senior management. And she was the go-to person for every question about her department. She was in cybersecurity. But the team members, they were not protected. They were isolated because they they didn't have maybe tough conversations with their stakeholders, but didn't have they didn't have any conversations with outside of organization. And she was thinking she she protects them, but she was basically isolating them. And once she found out through the engagement survey that her team was disengaged, was they were losing engagement and motivation, she turned and asked, okay, how can we change that?
00:11:48
Speaker
And she changed that by making sure that she actually lets them go out and talk to stakeholders, be connected with the broad organizations, take more tasks sometimes, get some negative feedback sometimes. But they felt connected. They felt that they they've now know the purpose of the organization. They're serving a bigger goal. And they got the engagement back and the leader could finally have some room to breathe.
00:12:14
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It makes me think or it makes me wonder, Is this a situation that is the result of leaders not receiving any training or knowledge about how to do things differently?
00:12:28
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Or is it something that evolves once people are in a leadership role? It's almost like their safety net is not to communicate, not to share, not to involve the people that actually work for them and keep those people in the bare minimum of activity for as long as they can.
00:12:44
Speaker
From my experience, it's definitely a lack of training because we never learn how to to be a team. School is not a team. Family is not a team. University is not a team. The first time we join a team is basically when we join a workforce, unless you are are in some like team sports. That is then a good reason why...
00:13:04
Speaker
Schools should focus on, like you say, team sports and musical groups like orchestras or bands, things that put people at an early age into an environment where they have to work as a team.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, and together with that, also explaining how actually teams work, that it's not the violin needs to be the loudest or someone else needs to be the fastest. It's explaining to those two kids how teams work, because we never learn, leaders never learn how to design a team. When they go to leadership training, what they see and what they hear amazing. The delegation cycle, delegate, control, ah set tasks, give feedback, provide one-to-ones, be a good leader, be a good listener.
00:13:48
Speaker
All of those are very important skills and traits, but they are focused on one-to-one communication, leader to employee. But how do you design teamwork? How do you design interconnection between team members? There's not so much training about that.
00:14:05
Speaker
We don't teach leaders how to build teams. We teach leaders how to empower, listen, but it's not the same as designing a good teamwork.
00:14:16
Speaker
It feels a little bit, a from my perspective, as if the team training that or the team building teamwork training that many people get is about the administration of the team. yes The paperwork that needs to be filled in, the appraisal documents, the objective setting.
00:14:34
Speaker
But it's not about the psychological, emotional side of running a team, communicating with a team, making sure that the team works for the individual members as well as functioning as a team.
00:14:49
Speaker
but That's the bit that is missing. And the the other thing is we teach leaders how to be leaders. We will never teach teammates how to be good team members.
00:14:59
Speaker
Because it also takes understanding of where to put team priorities first, where to how to collaborate with your leader, with your peers, with external team members.
00:15:11
Speaker
you You can build team by being together and doing things together understanding how things work. It's not just leader who needs training.
Trust and Vulnerability in Teams
00:15:20
Speaker
That is very true. Another time we'll talk about the sorts of things that we're both trying to do on that front as well. but Let's though could talk about clicking a little bit more at the moment.
00:15:31
Speaker
One of the things that you've put in the title, which I think is very important, is leaders who want stronger team trust. And it's only a little word at the end of that, but trust is a key element of of a high-functioning, effective team, isn't it Absolutely. And the the thing about trust is that sometimes people think that trust, you either have it or you don't, which is not true. And sometimes I ask leaders the question, do your people trust you or do you trust your team members? And they say, yes, absolutely. But what they say yes to is, yes, I trust they're good professionals.
00:16:10
Speaker
Yes, I trust that they will do what I tell them to do or they tell they they'll do what they said they'll do. But there are different levels of trust and I describe them in my book. And so the first one is actually trusting in in yourself, trust that you are a good team member or a good leader.
00:16:28
Speaker
The next level is the basic trust we have towards people that they they do what they tell you to that will do, they yeah that they'll do what they tell you they'll do.
00:16:39
Speaker
Then comes to trust that they are professionals and they actually know what they're doing and you trust their professional judgment. But there is a next level where you can trust your team members to share your concern. you You can tell them, I'm not sure, or I don't know, or let's figure it out together, or you are wrong.
00:16:57
Speaker
This kind of trust that requires psychological safe environment, that requires strength, and requires a real good connection between team members. This level of trust is is rare. so but Building trust, it's not just about one level of trust.
00:17:16
Speaker
It's up to, like from understanding that your people are professionals to being able to say, i don't know in front of them. Yeah. Just thinking about all of those years of experience, the number of people who would Tell me that they're professional, but they would never really, i don't think, no, they would never admit that they were wrong or say that they didn't know in their mind because that would not be professional to do that.
00:17:45
Speaker
And yet it's when you are vulnerable and confidently vulnerable enough to say, I don't know the answer or I've got something wrong. That's when you've got the trust, proper trust. And that's why you need a team.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. At the same time, I can remember having a manager and something going wrong and going to him and saying, look, I want to tell you that this has happened.
00:18:11
Speaker
And he said, I told him and then he said, well, why did you want to tell me? He said, because I want you to hear about it from me before you hear about it from someone else. And it was like, I know it's happened. i know it's wrong.
00:18:23
Speaker
This is what happened. This is what we've done to but try and put it right. And this is what we're doing to make sure it doesn't happen again. And it's that confidence, that trust that you have in your manager that they're not going to be making a mountain out of a molehill and are actually going to listen to what you've got to say.
00:18:43
Speaker
And they go, right, okay, I can now go off and talk to my manager about what's happened and talk confidently about it as well.
Connecting Remote Teams
00:18:51
Speaker
Even just you talking about the book is really...
00:18:56
Speaker
gives me confidence in the book, if that makes sense. You're talking an awful lot of sense in a way that I haven't heard described in exactly the the way that you're doing it at the moment. know it's youre You're explaining the common sense that's within your book in an extremely interesting way. in notepa I thank you for that. But let's think about some of the other things and the way in which teamwork itself is changing and how now as a when i first time i was a team leader everybody in my team was in the same room with all of us were there but now you're more likely to end up i think as a young team leader with your first team and they could be anywhere and you may never actually have physically met them and now you're going to be leading them you've seen them on screens but how does the clicking approach to a team building strategy
00:19:54
Speaker
work when the team is all about Well, I'd say it becomes even more important because when you have a remote team, there's lot of isolation. People feel isolated. They're not connected. Although for me personally, the best team I worked with was remote team because we did something amazing. we we We were creating something that we fully believed in and we loved that and we were connected to each other, although we never met before.
00:20:27
Speaker
So all the steps here are applicable for remote settings. I would pay attention to one more thing is that ah when you build connections with your team members, what most leaders do is they make one mistake. They focus too much on one-to-ones.
00:20:44
Speaker
One-to-ones is a great tool, no question about it. But you cannot solve all the problems by individual conversations. As I mentioned, you need to build connections between all the team members. And it's especially important in remote settings.
00:20:57
Speaker
So instead of having a lot of one-to-one connections that what that create one-to-one conversations that create connection between you and team members, and you as a team leader have many connections, and your team members have only one, you as a leader. So what happens next? If they have a question, if they have a problem, they reach out to you and you again become overloaded.
00:21:18
Speaker
What you do instead is you create micro groups of two or three people. That could be reverse mentoring or mentoring, buddy groups, mini projects. When people are connected to each other on the team and those groups are changing and shifting so that you make sure that all the team members of your remote team know each other very well and they had an opportunity to work together on some sort of project.
00:21:43
Speaker
And so when they have a problem, they reach out to their team members first, try to solve that and then come to you either with a solution for approval or ah additional questions, but they're not alone anymore.
00:21:57
Speaker
How many people do you have on your team, they have all of those connections. Yes, the collaboration element of the team working and also the trust aspects as well would all have to be coming to play to make that that sort of situation
Influence of Generational & Cultural Differences
00:22:12
Speaker
work where It's almost a little bit like having mentors within the team without having any hierarchy to it. It's just identifying different skill sets, even though they might not actually be applicable to a job, and then having people be given permission to ask about those and to ask for help.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Makes an awful lot of sense. And also, one of the other things that is happening within Teams more and more now is that your Teams can be multi-generational. you can have two or three generations of people working on the same team. I'm thinking in many cases, you have to put something in place to make the communication work between the different generations. But the structure of the clicking team would really do that without doing it in an obvious way. I'm i'm thinking, am I right? Well, the same thing goes multi-generations, multicultural teams. Like you have a half of your team in India and half of your team in in the US. yes What we don't want to do is we don't want to put labels, oh, this person is over 50 and this one is millennial or this one is someone else or this person is culturally there like from Asia or this ah European. And yeah we don't want to put those labels because, well, you have six, eight, 10 people on your team.
00:23:40
Speaker
You can learn, you can know about them, individuals, human beings, as individuals and understand their strengths, what they want to do, what they don't want to do, what they like, what they don't like. And like I said, create buddy groups, mentoring pairs.
00:23:56
Speaker
based on their individual skills, and create those collaborations and conversations with the team members so they learn from each other and they learn about each other, no matter of their age or cultural background.
00:24:11
Speaker
The learning becomes the knowledge which enables the trust to happen. And then when the trust is starting to happen, you can put in place all the different different elements or maybe it operates in parallel so you've got your clear purpose and you're building the knowledge of the people are going to fulfill that purpose which builds the trust and you can move the team forward it all them yeah i can see how in an ideal world with a new team you'd be able to pull all these sorts of things together and and start off from scratch but the world isn't ideal and you've got people with all sorts of existing teams
00:24:49
Speaker
If there is a team leader who's thinking, yeah, this sounds fantastic, but how would they know if their existing team was in a situation where they were ready to start having conversations about clicking as a way of working?
Implementing the 'Clicking' Methodology
00:25:04
Speaker
ah They won't know until they go and ask them that question. And it might be very hard for them to go to the team, especially if that team had a different manager, especially if they liked that manager before, because they didn't bother them with such questions and they didn't make them think. But I i ah worked with a leader and she she had she kind of inherited a team that was disengaged. And not that they just didn't want to work. They did, but they didn't want to do an extra step. They didn't want to think.
00:25:36
Speaker
of But by having those small conversations, just one conversation, one question at a time. How can we make our team better? What can we change to make your life better, to make you more happy at work? But asking those questions in it in a team meeting so that everyone hears, everyone listens, everyone has an opportunity to speak up.
00:26:00
Speaker
Not everyone will say something, but eventually, step by step, when you build this trust we talked about, when you show that you really have an intention to build a strong team, you really care about those people, some of them will open up.
00:26:17
Speaker
Some might be not. And that's a decision every manager needs to make. Some people just need to be let go because they will find the place where they will thrive. And it's probably not your team right now.
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah. It sounds as if the thing to do is not go in as a manager, a new leader, and tell people what's going to happen. You've got to allow the team to decide for itself as a result of asking questions and providing knowledge building around the answers of those questions to allow the team to identify what it is going to do, what would be best for the team to move it forward and improve.
00:26:59
Speaker
So, yeah. Lead as a facilitator. Because, well, facilitator knows where they lead the conversation. And you as a leader, you know what you want to build. But you don't, like, create this yourself because that will not work. You facilitate those conversations and that's how your team grows.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah, that is great. know, Daria, it is so fascinating.
Conclusion & Reflections
00:27:22
Speaker
And at the same time, it's also so practical as well. I really do appreciate your time. You've certainly made me think today. Thank you very much.
00:27:32
Speaker
Thank you for asking those thoughtful questions. Really appreciate that. Great. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Daria Rubnik.
00:27:46
Speaker
the author of Clicking, team building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team trust, better results and more time. You can find more information about both of us by using the links in the description.
00:28:00
Speaker
If you are listening to the Independent Minds on your smartphone, you may like to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data. So listening on 3.0 means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
00:28:12
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00:28:23
Speaker
I'm sure that you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of the independent minds as much as Daria and I have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes. Please subscribe.
00:28:39
Speaker
Remember, The aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.