What if the biggest leadership mistake isn’t doing too little but trying to do too much alone? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Daria Rudnik, former Chief People Officer and ex-Deloitte professional, who shares a powerful shift in modern leadership. Drawing from her global executive experience and transition from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship, Daria breaks down what it really takes to lead in uncertainty, reduce overwhelm, and create teams that thrive without constant direction.

This conversation is a must-listen for leaders who feel stretched, responsible for everything, and unsure how to keep their teams engaged in a rapidly changing world.

What You Will Learn

How leadership is often developed later in life through experience, not just natural ability.

What it means to uncover a clear vision and why clarity is the key to execution.

How external challenges can accelerate major life and business decisions.

Why trying to do everything at once slows growth and how focus creates momentum.

How to determine when to pivot versus when to keep going in business or leadership.

What separates disengaged teams from high-performing, self-sufficient ones.

Why modern leadership is shifting away from control and toward collaboration.

How leaders can create environments where teams feel empowered and motivated.

What causes employee disengagement and how leaders unintentionally contribute to it.

Why clarity remains one of the biggest challenges even for experienced leaders.

FAQ:

How can leaders reduce overwhelm in fast-growing companies?

Leaders can reduce overwhelm by shifting from doing everything themselves to trusting their teams, involving them in decision-making, and creating systems that allow shared responsibility.

Why do so many employees become disengaged at work?

Most employees start motivated, but become disengaged due to lack of autonomy, poor communication, and leadership styles that limit their ability to contribute meaningfully.

How do you know when to stop pursuing an idea or strategy?

You evaluate whether the effort supports your larger vision, whether you are still learning from it, and whether it continues to energize you. If those elements are missing, it may be time to pivot.

Connect with Daria Rudnik

Website

Book: Clicking

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LVP 131 Daria

Now here's your host, angel b Hartwell.

Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries Podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time. And provide our listeners with world class examples of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.

Having lived in three countries and worked with clients across six continents. Daria has helped leaders from Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startup. Navigate global financial crises, wars, and the COVID to 19 pandemic. Daria helps leaders build high performing teams in a world of rapid change and disruption.

She does this through a mix of team and leadership coaching and an AI powered coaching tool that she developed. And I do have to say before I welcome her to the show, when I was reading about, you know, when I was talking about this show. Is about courage and clarity and confidence. Daria is coming to me today from Israel where we may get interrupted at any point in time because there's a war going on over there.

Were you the, the child who was the leader in your family or on the playground or in your class, or was leadership something that you grew into or got trained into as a result of your life trajectory? I was never a leader on the playground. I was kind of clumsy and more into being reading books, doing my homework rather than playing outside, which is not because I loved learning, but it's because I never felt like being leading or even sometimes being [00:03:00] accepted on the playground.

So leadership is something that came to me later in my. University and corporate experience when I was focusing on building myself and building my career. Mm. Beautiful. And so I'd love to have you just share with our listeners maybe like the first experience of leadership that you stepped into and what that was like for you.

Well, the first time I realized I, I, I do have some leadership skills and I, I can be a leader, was when my boss. Told me Stop the way she said. It was kind of funny. We had, we were in some interactions, we onboarding some new employees. I was a learning manager there and I was kind of helping them around and, and she said like something like, stop leading.

So I need to be in control of that and I can develop it. Beautiful. So let's talk about vision next. Is that again, something that you feel was part of your childhood? Like are you a natural visionary or did vision and coming into the role of being a visionary again happen later in your trajectory? Well, to me, vision is something that kind of, we consciously.

Not about uncover my vision. Mm-hmm. And, and that's slowly step by step. It didn't happen once like straight away, but slowly it happened. And I now I see something like helping leaders feel well and perform well at work because that's where we spend most of our times, most of our lives. And we deserve to be happy at work.

We deserve to have happy employees. It's great when we have so many happy people producing amazing products to make their customers happy. So it's a win, win, win situation. Beautiful. I love, that's a beautiful vision. So, you know, it's interesting that you said that you did work to uncover the vision for some of our guests and some of our listeners.

Thinking about things I love doing, most, thinking about things that I, I help people with. Thinking about things that people come to me for advice or for help, kind of getting it all together, uh, helps me understand what is that, that I can, where is that I can bring the most value, and that also will make me really happy.

Once that vision kind of got uncovered? What was in you that said, okay, yes, this is where I'm going to put my energy, my focus, my time, my intellect, my intuition, my creativity. It didn't come out of nowhere. I, I was doing that. It was part of my work. It wasn't just, like I said, I didn't realize I was doing that, but once I got more clarity on what is it I'm doing and what is it that brings me joy when I have this clarity and I have this vision, say, oh yeah.

That was a, a hard question for me because, uh, my previous career was chief people officer in tech and telecom company. So I was pretty in inconsistent with my vision, helping people feel well at work and perform well at work and be happy at work. And that's what I was doing. And when I said my business, I was thinking, okay, well how does it translate to my business?

What is it that I'm doing? To be honest it's just the next step. It's not something completely different. I keep doing what I'm doing. I keep helping leaders. I coach leaders. I coach teams so that they feel well at and perform well at work. That they build amazing teams that collaborate and communicate, and again, that are happy to like to wake up on Monday morning and join their teams.

Uh uh, but. Once you get an offer and say, here's your paycheck every month, very nice paycheck. I mean, it's hard to say no to that, and especially it's hard to quit. But four years ago, I moved from Moscow Rescue to Israel, quit my corporate career, and decided that this is the moment. All right. Was there something internally that was like calling you to that moment or It was a combination of external things going on, like help us to understand, because a lot of people can have vision.

Which is not easy, but I thought I'll build it, and then once it's up and running, I can quit my corporate job and start my business. But things happen that are out of our control. And at that time, the war between Russia and Ukraine started and I decided, okay, it's time for me to move somewhere else. We moved to Israel and okay, when the, what's, what's the point?

First you have to say yes to the vision, and then you have to start taking actions. And especially if you're going to, you know, if your vision is starting a business or starting some kind of initiative outside of what you're used to generating money in. Like one of the first steps is figuring out what you're offering.

Kind of combination of those two, they define my offering. They define. My value proposition, they define my, the focus of my business. And when the world changes, this also changes a little bit. And now again, with all this uncertainty, with all this too, like instability, I see a lot of leaders overloaded and stretched and, okay, I wanna help them and let's focus on that.

This is my focus. Helping leaders feel well in this uncertainty and turbulence. Yeah, beautiful. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna talk more about your AI tool. We're gonna talk about your book, and we're going to let people know where they can find out more about you. But right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role of leading other visionaries?

Discover more about this opportunity@leadingvisionariespodcast.com slash creative age leader lab. Or you can click the Connect with Angel button on the website to apply and qualify for conversation for more personalized access and support, be sure to share this show in your own spirals of influence with the people you think might benefit from our content.

The Leading Visionaries podcast is brought to you by the Creative Age Consulting Group. Are you the one who thinks differently, who is called to create a significant conscious change in the world? Who is seeing and dreaming of a better way for your industry, your community Humanity Creative age consulting group is hired to guide leading visionaries just like you, who want to break through the static in order to clearly express and confidently enroll support for their vision in a way that makes it inevitable that it will come to pass.

Your word is your wand, and as the leader, your ability to articulate and communicate your vision is essential to its materialization and monetization. Please enjoy with our compliments. A free copy of the book, be Heard By Millions and Live Your Destiny, which was a number one new release in three categories to get you started.

And we are back with Daria Rudnick. You can find out more about her and her services@dariarudnick.com. We will have that for you in the show notes. It's pretty easy. Just her name, daria rudnick.com. And of course you can also connect with her on LinkedIn. So before we went to the break, Daria, I mentioned that we would talk about your book clicking.

Nothing, nothing survived. Uh, but in 2024, I, I had a clear vision. That's when I finished my book because like having the idea, I wanna write a book, but like having no clarity, it didn't help me to write a book. But having this clarity about what is this book about? Who is this book for? What are the important steps leaders need to take in order to build self-sufficient teams?

Because the book is about for overloaded leaders, how they can build self-sufficient teams. So what are the steps they can take to build those kind of teams? When I have this clarity, nine months later, the book was out there, nine months. Perfect. So it's funny, women often take nine months to get to get things birthed.

I lot of the question about securing resources and kind of having energy to do many things, and I recently, for about a year I started practicing Tai Chi. And in Tai Chi there is a like there is an kind of understanding that you can do an action, but then you [00:18:00] need to release the tension. Let it happen.

Like what? You push it into the world. So what I do is I'm not trying to push everything at once. I'm focusing on a book, I'm writing a book, I'm pushing it out into the world, and then I'm releasing it and seeing, okay, what's happening? And it frees some time and some energy. Okay, now what do I want to do next?

I wanna. Uh, write articles for Forbes Coaches Council, or I wanna focus on something else, or I wanna be a podcast guest. So it's doing one step at a time and the compound effect is what actually makes my business moving. But it's, it's never like doing all everything at once, no matter how I want it. Mm.

We also have our support, you know, system, whether it's colleagues or uh, team members or anything that. Any other entities, stakeholders that come in to support the vision. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about also this idea of sometimes as creators, as leaders, as visionaries, we will start something and then it ends up in the trash.

Get to a place where it's like, oh, this isn't gonna work. I've gotta throw it in the trash. I'm pretty easy on sort of say failure. I don't see, like if I haven't finished the book now, it is a failure. I don't see that. I've tried a new resource to get new clients and I didn't go well, and I spend like invested some time, some money there and some time there.

It's a failure. It's, I mean, you're gonna hate me, but it's a learning opportunity. No, I don't actually hate you. Cliche. I don't hate you at all. Cliche. It's a learning opportunity. It sounds like a cliche. It is, yeah. And I cannot do anything about it. It's, I'm trying new things. I'm ready to experiment. I like experimenting.

Well, but I have a kind of a few questions that I ask myself. The first question is, is this like the thing I'm doing, is this like critical for the bigger goal for the vision to succeed? Yeah. The second one is, am I learning something while doing that? And the third one, does it give me attitude, reins me.

Where are they located in their leadership or in their vision or in their flow of, of bringing initiatives out into the world? Well, I worked a lot with leaders from scale up and fast grown companies, and I know the tensions and I know the, the challenge that they're facing When everything is changing so fast, when you don't know the next step, you, you cannot tell your people what the next step will be, and you feel bad about that.

And kind of changing this narrative of me as a leader, being like, I need to be hero. I need to have all the, all the answers I need to make the, I need to make tough decisions. And. Making the shift to being a facilitator for the team so that together with the team, they can make those decisions together with the team.

Hmm. I love that comment that you believe that the era of heroic leadership is over and it's the new era of empowered teams. So that speaks to how do we source. Support in the form of teams that are going to buy into the vision. This, this goes back to enrollment as well. Securing resources includes enrolling people in your vision, including team members.

I thought the Gallup research tell us that only about 30% of people are engaged at work. And what does it tell us That people are disengaged, that we cannot motivate our people. To me, it actually tells that we, the organizations are great at demotivating and disengaging people because 100% of people joining your company are engaged and motivated.

What happens to them later, like they become disengaged. So for leaders to have those engaged employees, they, they join your vision, they want to contribute, let them be active contributors. Mm-hmm. So when leaders are overloaded. Teams become disengaged. When leaders go to their teams, work it out together, they have more time to breathe and they have more energy and teams stay engaged as they join the company.

Again, I wanna help I wanna work with overloaded leaders and help them feel well and feel supported by their teams. I want them to see their teams that. Happy to go to work. And they are valued and they are empowered and they can make decisions. They're not, leadership is not something that's done to them, but they are leading themselves.

Like the most important thing is if you're navigating uncertainty, if you dunno, what's the next step? If your bosses want great performance, your employees want you to motivate them. Your customers. What? Amazing, like, incredible service from you, your shareholders want. Money. When you stretch this stretch thing, that's where either eye or my book can help you.

Beautiful. All right. Well, in the last little bit that we have here, I'm curious, as you're thinking about this vision for, for yourself and for your business, what would you say right now is on the radar for you as your biggest challenge to bringing this vision to life?

All right. Well, I wanna say thank you for you showing up in the middle of a war zone. To do this interview. That's the first time I've had an interview with a guest who's in the middle of a war zone, and we're thankful to all of the angels that are surrounding you that have kept you from having to go to the shelter right now and really grateful for your contribution to today's show.

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