David Espindola: 0:22

My guest today is Daria Rudnik. Daria is a team architect and executive coach. She helps leaders build high trust, self-sufficient teams. She's the award-winning author of Clicking and co-author of the AI Revolution. She's also the creator of idra.ai, an AI-powered coach for leaders. Daria is a former chief pupil officer with over 15 years of global leadership experience. Hi, Daria. Welcome to the show.

Daria Rudrik: 0:56

Hi, David. I'm excited to be here. Really love listening to your episodes, and now be a guest here is just an honor.

David Espindola: 1:02

Okay, yeah, that will be great. Thank you. Also joining us today is my co-host, Zina. Zina is an AI that's been trained on my work. And if you want to further interact with Zina, you can reach her at brainyws.com slash Xina. Hi, Xina. Welcome back to our podcast.

Zena: 1:28

Hi, David. It's always great to be here. I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. Sounds like we're in for a rich discussion on team engagement and AI. Let's get started when you're ready.

David Espindola: 1:41

Yeah, let's go. We're going to talk about the impact of AI and specifically on team engagement. Before we get started, I wanted to learn a little bit more about our guest. So, Daria, please tell us a little bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in AI.

Daria Rudrik: 2:01

Well, uh thanks for the question, David. My background is in HR and organizational development. I studied my career in Deloitte, and then I moved to Chief People Officer for Mosty Tech and Telecom companies. And I've I've been through lots of stuff, like mergers and acquisitions, setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations, digital transformations, if you remember what that was. But I always wanted to do like something that really I can do best, and I love doing best, which is helping leaders build amazing teams. Because I've seen how great teams can actually help companies overcome challenges. And it is team, it is great teamwork that helped that bank to be viable during those hard, hard times. But I've also seen teams that destroyed companies. So what I do now is I help leaders build self-sufficient, high-performing teams that can navigate multiple disruptions. And AI entering the workplace is yet another disruption because it influences how we think, how we work together, how we collaborate, how teams become engaged or disengaged. And that's why I'm a lot into this AI collaboration topic, helping leaders navigate through this.

David Espindola: 3:20

Yeah, it's such an important conversation, right? Because everything that we do as humans that is scalable, that brings a lot of benefits to business and society is done through teamwork, right, and collaboration. And now we have this entity, AI, that's coming into this relationship, and we're not quite sure how that's going to play out. But I think it will be uh very interesting to see how we adapt as humans to this new way of doing business, new way of doing work. I think we're uh going to see a lot of uh interesting things happen here in the future. But I wanted to uh dig in a little bit more and ask you about your books, because so you have this great background working with people, you're interested in AI. You wrote a book about team building, and you also wrote a book about the AI revolution. So tell us a little bit about, you know, give us an overview of the main ideas in your books.

Daria Rudrik: 4:23

Both books, the clicking book and my contribution to the AI revolution books about teams. So the chapter I wrote for the AI revolution is about skills that teams need to have in the era of AI. And the book was published early last year. There's so many, like there's so much change going on. There's so much new research about how teams and AI collaborate, so probably it's not relevant at the moment. Uh I I'd love to share some new um kind of research uh findings about how teams actually interact with AI and how AI influences team dynamics. But the other book, clicking, is is about how we as humans collaborate. And I believe it will stay relevant for years ahead because no matter with AI, without AI, we're still working together. We're still working, we still have these human-to-human connections, we still have these teams. Yes, AI agents will be part of the teams, but the way we work together is critical. And so I'm trying to explore and I to share my knowledge with leaders so that they read the book, uh, get some practical tools from the book, and build engaged, self-sufficient teams that can navigate this complex environment.

David Espindola: 5:37

Right. So let's talk about the big picture then. Give us your thoughts on how you think AI is changing the landscape of team engagement, human collaboration, and the way we we do work. Give us the big picture.

Daria Rudrik: 5:55

I mean, I love that question. And it's it's hard to answer because all the companies and all the teams are at different levels and different scales. And I can share a few. So the beginning, at the beginning, there was a lot of fear in terms of AI. When leaders start talking about AI, people get scared because sometimes they think AI will replace me, sometimes they think they're afraid that my manager will think that AI can replace me. Um and things like that. And people resist using AI because there's no clarity about the consequences of like if I use it, what will it replace me or what happens next? So that that is kind of the first and a and a lot of organizations are at that level, and this fear of AI is not only at the level of individual contributors, but it's also on the middle level and and then the executive level as well. Executives are they're not afraid that AI will replace them, but they are afraid of using AI of violating some rules and and like being incompliant with uh regulators. Middle managers, well, they do see they also see that AI can do a lot of project management stuff. They can the AI can do task monitoring, delegation, goal setting, control. A lot of it, what managers used to be doing. So they also can be uh subject to replacement with AI, with this, at least with this project management things that they're doing. But there is another kind of layer of people who are more into AI, who integrate AI, teams that use AI. And the challenges I see there is when they start overusing AI or over-relying on AI. Like I was working with a team and they uh they started they were early adopters and they started to use AI for multiple of their uh processes. But what happened is at some point they kind of started thinking, okay, what am I doing here? Am I just an operator of AI? Do you just give input to AI and AI does everything, creates summary of our meetings, creates items for the backlog, prioritize backlog, creates agenda for my next meeting. Who am I? Why am I here? And then they started to lose engagement and it influenced performance because they couldn't recall their client conversations. It was a customer success team and they couldn't recall customer uh client conversations. They didn't know what was the most important thing for their clients. They couldn't prioritize backlog for the product team because they were not the ones who created this uh summary, they were not the ones who uh gave input to backlog, and they were not the ones who made decisions about what's important, what's not. So they had to rethink and uh restructure the way they work with AI, and they did that by that by creating norms of how they work with AI. So they created a list of keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors, the keep it up behaviors and behaviors that they want to see and encourage on their team, like think first before interacting with AI, talk through like your insights and emotions and kind of thoughts after client conversations, and only after that ask AI to generate summary and things like that, and cut it out behaviors for uh things like accepting AI output without judgment or giving personal information to AI and things like that. So they created certain set of rules and norms for them to work with AI and they restructured the work process so that they are always in the loop. They always monitor what AI is doing, they always think first and then ask AI to contribute. So, again, different teams at different uh levels of AI adoption, they face different challenges.

David Espindola: 9:39

Yeah, you know, it's such a fascinating discussion, right? Because AI can be very helpful in making us productive, it can help us be better at what we do, and yet we don't want to lose our voice, right? We don't want to lose our purpose. We want to be engaged with other people, with AI. And so striking that balance is uh is a real challenge for some teams, right? And it impacts team dynamics, but it also impacts the individual. And you know, it goes back to another conversation that I wanted to get your thoughts on, which is, you know, on the one hand, we have this cognitive overload, right? Because there's so much for us to learn and absorb, and things are changing at a speed we've never seen before. And then on the other hand, we have this cognitive offloading. We're just offloading to AI, letting AI do its thing, but you know, we can go too far with that, right? And then we lose our voice, we lose our identity. We don't know what our purpose is in a workforce anymore. So I wanted to hear from you your thoughts on some of the risks uh with cognitive overloading, cognitive offloading, and then how do we detect some of those risks early on so we can intervene?

Daria Rudrik: 11:03

That's a great question. And uh people, when people work with AI, they face uh challenges and it changes how our brain works. For example, it influences a lot. There was a research about the teams that interacted with AI, they studied they adopted AI language. So if AI suggested some of the terms or words, team were using it, they adopted AI frameworks and they started to operate with those frameworks. Sometimes they were useful, sometimes not. But even that, AI influences how we think, how we talk, how we collaborate. So it's very important to kind of keep this balance between absorbing too much from AI or delegating too much, or being overloaded with every decision we need to make when it comes to AI. And I like this the framework that suggests that we can have three approaches to AI, and they are augmented creativity, hybrid decision systems, and oversight-driven automation. So, in the first augmented creativity, AI is our thinking partner. We talk to AI, we c we ask questions, we ask AI to ask questions back to us. We kind of use it as a thought partner. The the second one is hybrid decision system, is when AI provides uh analytics, some data, and we make decisions based on what AI provided. And then oversight-driven automation is like something that's automated, AI does that, and humans only oversee it from time to time when they need this integration. So the first questions leaders need to ask themselves and answer is where what is decision point? How do we make decisions with AI? And if it's something that doesn't need our oversight, just forget about it. Let AI do that. We don't have to uh overload our brain with it. But if it's something that's really important, it's a high-risk um environment, we need to be involved. So let's be involved in those areas. And kind of that creates this balance. Things that we don't have to have to think about it, we can offload it to AI, and things that we need to think about it, and that reduces the overload.

David Espindola: 13:20

Yeah, that's a great framework. And I think you know, the word that you use there that I think is really important for all of us, it's striking that balance, right? It's it's a balancing act where you need to know when is the time to engage AI, when is it time to you know provide oversight, when is it time to let AI do its thing. And I think we're all going through this learning process, right? And it's um it's it's not necessarily intuitive because we've never had uh a tool like this before. And I think we're all going through this uh incredibly important learning process. Now, I would like to get Zina uh to ask you a question, if I may. Zina, given Daria's expertise and the impact of AI and team engagement, team collaboration, what question do you have for her?

Zena: 14:11

Daria, since you've worked on fostering high trust teams, I'm curious how do you see AI reshaping the way leaders build trust and emotional connection within their teams, especially in hybrid or virtual environments?

Daria Rudrik: 14:24

Well, that's an interesting question. Thank you, Zina. And the first step of building high trust teams, especially in virtual and hybrid environments, especially when AI agents can become part of the team, is transparency. So transparency on multiple levels. And as I describe in my book, clicking, so the first level is clear purpose. So leaders need to be very clear about what is the purpose of the team. Because the team is defined by its purpose. If you have one manager, that doesn't make you a team. If you have a shared purpose, that does make you a team. The second one is linking connections. It's very important for leaders to build to sustain trust and build trust through connecting with team members, but also very important to facilitate team members connecting to each other. So it's not just them connecting to you as a manager, but it's them connecting to each other and talking to each other and collaborating. That creates the sense of belonging in the team and increases the sense of trust. The third one is integrated work. Norms, work norms, work rules, things like those keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors, make work easier. It removes friction. People know what's expected of them. They don't have to guess. The fourth one is collaborative decisions. Be very clear about how you make decisions, what decisions are made by the leader, what decisions are made by individual contributors, what decisions need to be made collaboratively as a team, and what decisions can be delegated to AI, probably. And the final one is knowledge sharing, how you learn together and how you evolve as a team. So when leaders work on clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions, and knowledge sharing, well, they build high trust teams.

David Espindola: 16:14

Yeah, and that is so important, right? I think trust is such a fundamental component of collaborative teamwork that if you don't have trust, then everything else falls apart. So um I I love that. Now, Daria, you said that AI isn't just transforming work, it's transforming how humans think about work. Tell us a little bit more about your thoughts there.

Daria Rudrik: 16:41

Well, it changes the way our brain works. Uh, there is again an interesting research called Your Brain on Chat GPT. I think it's very popular right now because it does reveal some very interesting things that the cadence matters. The way we work with AI, the way we operate with AI matters. If we think about something first and then uh give it to AI to analyze or adopt, our brain stays engaged. And that actually what helped this customer success team because they thought about insights of client conversations and then they uh asked AI for that input. And their brain stayed engaged and they were they they remembered those conversations. But if you ask AI to do something first and then edit it or do something with it, interact with it, your brain becomes disengaged. And that's why when AI generates summary for your conversation, you probably don't remember what it was about because it wasn't you. I mean, you had this conversation, well, it's gone, and now AI generated this summary, and it's very hard to process, it's very hard to stay engaged with this. So those little things like adopting AI language or being disengaged, uh using the cadence of working with AI, they influence how like we as individuals work, but it also influences how teams work. Because if we as a team adopt AI language, if we as a team adopt AI uh suggested framework, that will uh obviously impact our performance.

David Espindola: 18:11

Yeah, and you know, one of the things that I have observed, just dealing with AI myself, is I am very intentional about doing the preliminary work myself. So I have, for example, a newsletter that I put out every month. And, you know, it takes a lot of effort to do the curation for the newsletter. It takes a lot of effort to put together the editor's note to uh share on social media. And obviously, I leverage AI to help me with that work, but I'm very intentional about doing the work first myself and then giving it to AI to help me make it better. And AI is absolutely amazing as an editor, you know, it can write beautifully, but I think it's important for us to have that ownership first of all, and then to just keep our minds sharp to do that initial original work. Otherwise, we we're just gonna lose it, right? So you shared with us a particular case with a client and how they were trying to improve the way they collaborate with AI. Are there any other use cases or any other research that you'd like to share with our audience about uh AI and team collaboration?

Daria Rudrik: 19:30

Yes, there was one case that I'd like to share. It's it's it's not a rare case here. I know many companies are going through that stage. It because a lot of companies are at the AI experimentation try and error stage. And what happens is that they let teams use AI. They might approve some AI tools, but anyway, like every team has their own individual AI tool. Every team has their own individual way of working with AI, their own methodologies, their their own metrics of success of using AI. And at some point it's good because we kind of get we we it enables us to get more information, try more new tools, try different approaches. But for this particular company that I was working with, it they had a challenge. Okay, how we how we unify it now? I mean, we're right to scale. How can we do that? It means we need to go out and tell people you're not using that tool anymore, and it'll upset them. But we don't know what kind of tool they should be using because we don't have like unified data to make this right decision. So the good approach would be to be upfront that now we're trying, but then we'll we'll need to eventually get rid of some tools, get rid of some workflows, and change them for the better ones, be ready for that. And then again, that comes back to transparency that I mentioned before. So, what this particular company did is they collected a team of people uh working with AI in different units, and they started to collaboratively come up with better solutions. They analyzed tools that they were using, they were analyzing metrics, uh, they came up with the again unified approach uh of how they evaluate AI, and slowly, slowly they came up to uh the best AI tools and the metrics and the frameworks that they were ready to scale and use for the whole organization. But it was a painful transition because some teams were not uh ready to like let go of the favorite tools.

David Espindola: 21:35

Yeah, and this is uh a common problem, right? With any change management initiative, it's always difficult to make the transition, to let go of the old tools, to let go of the old ways of doing things. But I think you said something that is very critical in that process, which is you need to let the people, the owners of those tools and those processes, to make the decisions, right? So they need to feel ownership of the decision. Because otherwise, if you just throw it over the wall to them, they're not going to like it, they're not going to accept it, right? So I think that's one of the key uh ideas behind you know a well thought out change management process. Now, I'd like to get Zina's thought on this whole idea behind you know how AI. Is impacting teamwork. So, Xina, how do you see AI being either beneficial or detrimental to team engagement and overall team collaboration?

Zena: 22:35

I think AI can be a catalyst for stronger team engagement when used thoughtfully. It can automate routine tasks, freeing up time for deeper collaboration and creativity. It can also provide personalized insights that help teams understand each other better. But if overused, it can lead to less human interaction and potentially erode trust if decisions feel opaque. So balance and transparency are P.

David Espindola: 22:58

Yeah, I agree. I think again we're back to that word balance. We gotta find balance. You also mentioned trust. So all of these components are so essential as we transition into this new world of team collaboration and uh leveraging AI to help us do better work. Now, Daria, you also have created something called idra.ai. Tell us a little bit about what Idra is all about.

Daria Rudrik: 23:25

Well, uh, since everyone is playing with AI tools, I'm also playing with AI tools, so trying to figure out what they can, what they cannot do. Uh IDRA is uh supposed to be a coach. It's not a coach in uh in how we mean what we mean by coach, but it's a tool that will help leaders think through their challenge and come up with like identify one most important thing that they want to change right now and act upon it. It's still work in progress because again, AI is evolving, no new tools uh like pop up every day. Uh but now if you ask Idra about some frameworks or tools, it'll give you information from my content, from what I created.

David Espindola: 24:15

And that's wonderful. I mean, that's what I've tried to do with Zina as well, right? I just try to give her the frameworks that I like, I trained her on my work, I bring her into these conversations, I have her help me with other content that I create. And I think that's the evolution that we're gonna see of more and more of these AI agents or AI assistants or coaches being engaged with people to help them be better at whatever it is that they do. So, Daria, this has been a uh great conversation. Really enjoyed talking with you. Now, tell us where people can find you, and is there any final message that you'd like to leave for our audience?

Daria Rudrik: 25:01

Well, thank you, David. It was it was a great conversation. I'm I'm very open to connections on LinkedIn. Please reach out, send me a message, let's keep this conversation going. Um, you can find uh me on my website, daddyning.com, or you can also chat with Idra on my website, and and some find some downloadable resources uh for building strong, self-sufficient teams in the AI era. And then my final message would be there's there's so much unknown. There's so much we don't know about AI at the workplace. And the only way to make it right is through collaboration, is through teamwork, but people get together and talk and discuss what the next step should be, how they want to move forward, what's what's working, what's not working. Because if you if you bring an AI officer in your organization, this person will not be able to solve problems for everyone. It's a collaborative effort.

David Espindola: 26:00

Yeah, I love that message. You know, this podcast is all about human AI collaboration. So uh I think that is such an important message for all of us to understand and to engage with. So thank you again, Daria, uh, for being uh a guest on our show. And uh thank you, Zina, for being a great co host once again.

Daria Rudrik: 26:21

Thank you.

Zena: 26:22

You're very welcome, David. I'm always happy to help you navigate these conversations. Let's keep making each episode insightful and fun.

David Espindola: 26:31

All right, thank you both.