In this empowering episode, Daria Rudnik, Team Architect and Owner of Daria Rudnik Coaching & Consulting, shares how to shift from founder-led decisions to empowered team ownership in stage 4. If you struggle with being the bottleneck in leadership meetings and slow decisions, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why constant founder input kills team confidence and slows scaling.

- How to create psychological safety so your team speaks up first

- What structured questions train leaders to own outcomes independently

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

With a proven track record of guiding leaders and teams through global challenges, Daria Rudnik is a Team Architect and Executive Leadership Coach. She is a former Chief People Officer and ex-Deloitte professional, bringing over 15 years of international executive experience in tech and telecom. Throughout her career, she has helped leaders from fast-growing startups navigate global financial crises, wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Daria supports busy leaders in building high-performing teams. Her approach blends team and leadership coaching, organizational consulting, and assessments. She also developed an AI-powered coaching tool to further enhance her clients' success.

Want to learn more about Daria Rudnik's work at Daria Rudnik Coaching & Consulting? Check out her website at https://dariarudnik.com/

You can get her book Clicking at https://www.amazon.com/CLICKING-Building-Strategy-Overloaded-Stronger/dp/1968318054

Connect with Daria through her LnkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariarudnik/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a

founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and today I want to

talk to those founders who are sitting there or over the recent

past, have been sitting there in their leadership team meeting,

and they've had this moment and like, you'll laugh when you hear

it, because it's like it just happened, but it happens to

everyone at this stage, and that is, it's that moment in the

meeting when a decision needs to be made, like not an easy one,

but like a real decision needs to be made. And instead of

offering their insights and ideas, all heads turn to you and

look directly at you and you realize it's still all up to me,

and the challenge of that is like it's been that way for a

really long time, and in the past it was fine, right? You

were probably pretty good at it. That's probably how you got

here. But if you're honest, right now, what it actually

means is that every conflict, every like cross functional

issue between teams. Every little squabble between two of

your managers or leaders ends up landing on your plate, and

frankly, you're tired of it. And here's what you may not realize,

though, something we've never talked about on the show is that

it's probably not just, or even at all, a skill, knowledge or

ability issue from the individual team members. In

fact, I think our guest today has got a pretty good she'll be

able to point you in a direction. I'm not going to FOIL

it just yet, but here to help tell us where it went wrong,

where it's going wrong, and more importantly, what you can do

about it is the one person who actually wrote the whole book on

it. It's Daria Rudnik, who, with a proven track record of guiding

leaders and teams through global challenges, is a team architect

and executive leadership coach. She's the former chief people

officer and ex Deloitte professional, bringing over 15

years of international executive experience in tech and telecom.

Throughout her career, she's helped leaders from fast growing

startups to navigate global financial crises, wars and the

covid 19 pandemic. Daria supports busy leaders in

building high performing teams. Her approach blends team and

leadership, coaching, organizational consulting and

assessments, and she's also developed an AI powered coaching

tool to further enhance her client success, and she's here

with us today. Daria, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here.

I've been really looking forward to this conversation.

Well, thanks for having me here, Scott. I really

enjoyed your show, and being here as a guest is a great

opportunity for me. I'm so excited to have this

conversation with you today.

That's fantastic. So you've got a book,

a fantastic book on this, and many other things, but the

book's called clicking, and I want to jump to a story you tell

about a CEO named Sam. So Sam's got something like 20 or 30

direct reports. I don't remember the exact number, but he's got

his leadership team. Some people are in it. Some people aren't in

it. It is like, Sam is basically like half the people listening

to the show. And so tell us a little bit about Sam. What was

Sam's problem and and what do we do from here?

Well, I, like, love what he said that, like,

we, it's not about the individual team members. We, we

very often we overuse the word team, because we kind of get

people together, your team manager, you're a team. It's not

it's not going to happen. It's not happening like that. To

really be a team, you need to have a shared purpose. You need

to have interconnections between team members, and we need to

have a certain structure, like, these are the people on the

team, and these people are not because otherwise you don't know

who's going to make decision. You don't know, like, what roles

are on those teams. And like, with Sam this, the story was

that it was an executive team when they were, like, from five

up to 30 people joining executive meetings, and no one

actually knew, like, why those people were called for this

meeting and they were not called for the other meeting. There was

some inner circle, and people were kind of frustrated about

the T like, the power dynamics and how they what decisions they

are making, what decisions they cannot make. And that all landed

up on CEO, because he was eventually the one who was

solving all the problems. And if, for example, they decide

something with a group of five, the other person could come in

to see you and said, Hey, like, you didn't include my voice.

Like, here is my opinion this year's Okay, well, that's

reasonable, boy, and let's change our decision. And he

changes the decision so and again, the lead is overloaded.

Team members are not, like engaged, because they know, I

mean, they don't have this clarity in decision making

process. And this story actually didn't like and very well,

unlike some other stories I'm happy to share, when CEOs

actually changed the dynamics and team started to make

decisions and bringing decisions to him without even involving

him into conversations only for approval.

Yeah, I love that, and that's. Kind of the

dream and the aspiration. What I and what I enjoyed about Sam's

story was that it is a cautionary tale, right? And many

times in business books like everything goes well, we only

tell the success stories. And I was really glad that you

highlighted that, and I think it goes to the heart of of what's

going on at this stage for the founder, and that is, they have

to move beyond this group that they've assembled to help them

make great decisions and actually start building a team

that makes great decisions together. That really is the

heart of it. And I think your framework is just fantastic for

someone in this this space. So just the least, we need to know

just 62nd version of what is the click model. I know that's

totally unfair, but I want to dive into one of these in

particular in just a moment. So just give us an introduction.

What's the framework? What are the five different parts?

So very briefly, the click framework is about

having a clear purpose. Because, again, the team is defined by a

shared purpose. Linking connections is how people are

connected with each other, not just with the CEO or the team

leader, but with each other and with external teams and the

broad organization. The third was, is integrated work that's

like very overlooked one, the team norms and team rules and

how we work together and who's on the team and who is not

collaborative decisions, how teams learn how to make

decisions together. What decisions are stay within Lida,

what decisions within individual contributors and what decisions

need to be made collaboratively. And the fifth one is knowledge

sharing. It's about how team learns and grows together. So

clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work,

collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing will make your

team click.

I love that. I love that so easy to remember as

well. So the one that really jumped out to me as I was

reading through the book, because we've touched on on

parts of this and with different guests. And folks that are

familiar with our work will know that a lot of this falls in the

realm of what we call lateral management, which is really

boring phrase for a really important concept. But my

question is, how do how do we, especially in this, this linked

connections. First off, why is it not enough to think that if

you just put the team together that and you work well with all

of them, that they will work well with all of them?

Well. Again, the team is not just happens. You

cannot just get people together and say, land. Now you're a

team. You need to figure it out how to work together. The teams

are designed, and they designed by, again, the rules, the

purpose and everything that goes with it. So what leaders often

like, miss out. They have those one to one conversations like, I

think everybody knows how important they are, and they

have those one to one conversations trying to help

people grow, people develop people. What they're not doing

is not connecting those team members to each other, and

especially an executive team, I see a lot of competition for

resources for CEOs attention, who is always like very, very

busy. So what they're trying to do is trying to get this more

one to one conversations, rather than collaborating on some

projects, some mini initiatives, some decision making frameworks,

anything that will connect them to each other. And with the

story I wanted to share with you is there was a CEO of a small

manufacturing company. They had conflicts on the team, on the

executive team, and it happened that the conflicts were not

because people were disengaged so they didn't like each other.

It's just because they didn't understand how they want to

reach the same goal, which is building an amazing company. So

they all had different ideas. Some people thought about

equality, some people thought about distribution channels,

some people thought about raising prices or something

else, and they were in this constant conflict. So what we

actually did is CEO kind of step aside, not left the room, but

let people talk and discuss their ideas and share their

opinions, so that they learn about their approaches better.

They learn better about like they each other as their

personalities, and eventually they come up with a list of

rules, how they want to work as a team. What are they keep it up

and cut it out behaviors. So the keep it up behaviors are

behaviors they want to see on the team, like sharing feedback,

talking about problems when they race and cut it out. Behaviors

is behaviors that they're not going to tolerate on the team,

like, I don't know, gossiping or something else. So they were

good to go. I mean, we worked for six months, and about a few

months after that, CEO called me and said, Hey, I have something

interesting to share with you. Like, everything's going fine,

business going right. We have less conflict. People talking.

But the team decided that the sales leader needs to go why?

Because she constantly violated those keep it up and cut it out,

behaviors that they decided as a team are important for them to

perform well and feel well at work. So they didn't go to CEO

and say, Hey, what should we do? They got together. They had

decisions. They made this decision. They went to the CEO,

they kind of shared their thoughts with him, and well, she

was gone, and. And he didn't have to do that. It was done

because they had those rules, because they talked to each

other, and they created those norms of how the team works.

Yeah, this really goes to the heart of the

transition from what I call stage four, that, you know, kind

of being the leader, to stage five, being a CEO and leading an

executive team, and as you're telling that story, I can

imagine folks listening who are both like terrified and excited

by that. The idea that your team could make that big a decision

amongst themselves without you is terrifying and exactly what

they want. How do you help someone who's so used to being

in the middle of every single thing, to be able to step back

to the sidelines like that and without abdicating their role as

the leader of the organization.

I love the question, and I totally, I

totally get it. I mean, it's, it's scary, especially when

you've been into like every single detail, and now you just

have to what, stop running your business. How do you do that?

But you don't have to do it, like, all at once. You can do it

step by step. Like, for example, these are decisions that I don't

want to, like, think about it. Just do it. These are decisions

just come to me for advice. Like, ask me for some input.

These decisions come to me with ideas, and I'll choose one.

These are totally mine. Again, you decide with your team how

you divide decision making authority, and then go with it,

and then you can change it.

Yeah, this whole idea of deciding how

you'll decide is so powerful, and it keeps coming up in some

of your answers. You touched on something Daria that I think's

really important, and I don't want to gloss over it, because

it's different than what a lot of other folks say to some

extent, and that is your opinion on at least the degree to which

we use one on one meetings right now. So for a lot of folks,

their coaches are telling them, You have to meet with your team,

you have to meet with your team, you have to meet with your team,

you have to meet with your team, and they're driving these one on

ones. But there's a downside to doing that, or at least doing it

wrong. What? What could possibly go wrong with one on ones?

It's not just one on ones, because it's a great

tool. It's just they don't have anything else apart from that.

Again, I'll tell you a story. There was a chief cyber security

officer. She she was, she wanted to be a good leader, and she

wanted to support and protect her team members. What she did,

she had one two, like one on ones she but she also had

handled all the communication outside of her team, talking to

stakeholders, getting feedback from them, like understanding

their needs and kind of sharing it with with the team. What

happened is that, instead of felt that like they're

protected, the team felt disengaged, and they started to

lose motivation, because they kind of lost connection with the

broad organization. So it changed when this cyber security

officer started to bring them into conversations she was

having with broader organization. So those people

went to their stakeholders, started to having conversations

with them, and that made them understand, here are the people

we're serving. Here are the people who receive benefit from

our work, who are impacted by our work. Here is the broader

organizational vision. We now understand that. So by being

connected to other members, rather than just with their

team, with their leader, they became more engaged, more

motivated, and they could better serve their organization.

I love that, Daria, I've got one more

question for you here. It's a question that I ask all my

guests. I'm very interested to see what you'd have to say. But

the question is this, what would you say is the biggest secret

that you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's that one thing you

wish everybody watching or listening today knew?

Well, that's that's a very interesting

question. And I think, like for me, I wish I knew that it's okay

to say I don't know that yet, because I see a lot of leaders

struggling when there is sort of, like uncertainty and they

don't know what to do. And a lot of CEOs like do that they can.

I'd rather not say anything, because I don't have all the

answers, and that creates a lot of like frustration among team

members and employees, but going out there and saying, Hey, I

don't have all the answers yet, but I know how to figure out. I

know the first step. I know, like, who to talk to. I know

something, and we'll figure it out together.

Yeah, I love that, that vulnerability is

really the Root of Trust and opens up so much more creativity

as well. It's really, really, really great point. Darya,

there's some folks listening that love to know more about

this. Where can folks find out more about you? Where can they

get a copy of your book?

Clicking? Well, you can find more about me on my

website, daddy.com my book is available on Amazon in all major

book retailers. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very

open to connections. Send me a message. Let's keep this

conversation going.

Brilliant. Daria, thanks so much for being

on the show. Really was a privilege and honor. Having you

here with us today. Loved the book and loved this episode.

Thank you. Appreciate it. And for those of you watching and

listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to

us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I

did, and I cannot wait to see you next time, take care.