How to Build Self-Sufficient Teams

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: If you're a leader who feels like your team can't make a move without you, listen in to learn how to build self-sufficient teams that thrive on their own. Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. I'm Kelly Callahan-Poe and today's episode is called How to Build Self-Sufficient Teams with Daria Rudnik. Daria is a team architect, executive coach, and author of the book Clicking, a team building strategy for overloaded leaders who want stronger team trust, better results, and more time. With global leadership experience as a former chief people officer and ex Deloitte professional, she advocates for hybrid intelligence, combining human connection with AI to empower teams rather than replace their thinking. Welcome, Daria.

Daria Rudnik: Thank you, Kelly. It's great to be here.

Kelly: So you believe that the traditional model of leadership where leaders solve every problem for their team and carry the whole team on their shoulders is not sustainable. What do you recommend instead?

Daria: Absolutely, because the world is changing so fast. So many, it becomes so complex with so many things happening economically, technologically, socially, that no human being can handle it all on their own. So instead of kind of trying to be the leader who saves it all, I've seen leaders who go to their teams and co-create the future together.

It means that they let their teams make decisions. It means that they let their teams make mistakes and then take the consequences of those mistakes. And that's how they learn. That's how they grow. And that's how they move and solve problems together. Because if it's just one leader, well, you know what's going to happen. Burnout is on the rise. There's so many leaders burned out. So instead of being the heroic leader, they need to be to build more empowered teams.

Kelly: So that's the telltale sign when the leaders become the biggest obstacles when they're burnt out.

Daria: Well then burnout when they just are not moving fast enough and then I'll share a story when there was a leader and she's, I mean, she's very well intentionally that she wanted to support her team members. She wanted to protect them. And so what she did she was the like the go-to person for the whole organization, people were coming asking her questions, coming to her with problems and she thought that she's protecting her employees from all of that and what happened when she saw that the team became disengaged. They lost motivation. They felt that they're useless. They didn't see the meaning in their work and she didn't understand why. But then it came to her and when we worked together with her kind of looking at the team dynamics, well, she had lots of connections. She knew what's going on in the organization while her team members were isolated. They were amazing experts, but instead of protecting them, she was isolating them. So when she kind of steps aside and lets them talk and let them build their own connections, let them go to stakeholders and solve problems. Well engagement was back, performance was back and everyone was more happy and fulfilled and performing even better.

Kelly: So your book has a framework for building self-sufficient teams. Can you walk us through the framework?

Daria: Yeah, that's my book Clicking. And it's again, it's for overloaded leaders who want to build self-sufficient teams. And like to do that, you need five pillars. I've seen teams that can handle mergers and acquisitions, like cultural transformations, digital transformations, launching new products, cutting costs without sacrificing people. The first thing they had was a clear purpose. They knew why they're together, what is that that they can only do together? It's not a kind of, cannot sum up individual contributions and say, hey, we're a team. You need to collaborate and work together towards that shared purpose. The second thing is linking connections. Like those people need to be connected with each other, but they also need to be connected with their stakeholders. Like with this story with the previous team, they didn't have connections with the wider organization and they were isolated, but when they started to have those connections, they became more engaged. They became more operating as a team and they could make better decisions. And those two are pretty obvious. I'm sure you know about them. But the third one is kind of tricky because not every leader has that and it's integrated ways of working together. How you work together as a team. What are your team norms? What are the rules? What behaviors do you want to see on the team? What behaviors do you want to tolerate?

That creates a lot of clarity in how you work together. How many meetings do we want to have? What are the tools we're using for work? When you do that, it becomes more clear to team members what the expectations are and how you want to work together as a team. The fourth one is collaborative decisions so that you can make decisions as a team and what decisions are made by the leader, what decisions can be made by individual contributors and what decisions are made by a team altogether. And the final one is knowledge sharing feedback. So it's how you learn together and grow together, how you give feedback and how you collect feedback. So when you have a clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing, that will make your team click.

Kelly: So one of the challenges that we see in today's workforce is, you know, obviously a lot of us are remote or we're hybrid. How do you balance autonomy and accountability?

Daria: That's a great question. It's kind of, you feel like when you let go, it means you're not connected with those people. But the connection comes not through controlling them and kind of delegating them and setting tasks to them, but through shared purpose and rules of how you work together. So first you get together and agree, okay, what is our purpose? How is it connected with the wider organizational purpose? What is it that we want to achieve? What are the goals? What are the KPIs? And then the next thing is how you work together.

Do you wanna have weekly meetings? Do you wanna have more one-to-ones? Do you wanna have micro-collaboration groups? Like what kind of tools you're using? When you have that, it creates clarity and people can work on their own while still maintaining those connections. And obviously you need to regularly monitor and see, like is it working? Is it still working? Do we need to change something? So this cadence of connections and clarity in terms of goals and work norms that creates autonomy and keeps accountability.

Kelly: So even with using all of these collaboration tools that we all utilize in the course of a day, communication and knowledge sharing is really the most important part of team building, correct?

Daria: Absolutely. Yeah.

Kelly: And how do you make sure that that is being promoted?

Daria: Well, again, more doesn't always mean better. One of the things that teams recommend you go through is talk about your communication channels. Like what you are communicating, how you communicate, how often. And again, I'll share an example of a team. They had the collaboration tools. Like they had Zoom, they had WhatsApp, and the manager liked calling people. I mean, on the phone.

And some of them are pretty young and they were kind of freaking out because they were not expecting that and they're okay, what's going on?

Kelly: It cracks me up that the younger generation doesn't like to talk on the phone.

Daria: Absolutely. And they kind of say, is it an emergency? Did I do something wrong? And the manager didn't know about that. He had no idea that the person on the other side of the phone was kind of stressed because of that. But once they had a conversation, once they talked about like, is he calling? And like this employee knew that it's okay. And they agree that, okay, I'll send you a text before I call so that you're prepared.

And I'll tell you, it's nothing urgent, it's not important. I just want to like it, it's easy for him to talk it through. And it became clear, okay, that's fine, we can do that. So kind of talking through different ways of communicating, how you talk to each other, like when do you need to use video on, when you can have video off, that creates clarity again. You have all the same expectations and you can communicate better.

Kelly: I hadn't thought of texting before calling and I think that probably makes sense for the younger generation. So why do so many team members fall short of their potential, especially when they're under pressure?

Daria: Well, first of all, we overuse the term team. Like most units in organizations, they are not a team. Because if you work in the, like, if you have the same manager and you have, like, you work on the same task, you're not necessarily a team. Because a team is defined by a shared purpose. If you have a shared purpose that you can only achieve collaboratively, that's the one thing. Then it's like, who is on the team? Like what kind of people are on the team. I used to work with a team, I mean, with the organization and the executive team had 15, from 15 up to 30 people depending on the task. And I mean, no one knew what the executive team was like because sometimes it was these 15 people, sometimes it was five people, sometimes it was the whole 30 people. So there was no clarity on that. It means they could not collaborate effectively because they didn't know how to make decisions. So, when you have those, it means that you have a team and you can start moving towards being a self-sufficient high-performing team. But again, leaders are always trying to solve all the problems on their own and they kind of break. It's impossible. That's why until you create a more self-sufficient, more autonomous team, more self-managed team, you will be stumbling on various issues in terms of speed and complexity and things like that.

Kelly: What are marketing leaders getting wrong about AI adoption right now? And what does hybrid intelligence look like done right?

Daria: Well, that's such an interesting topic right now because AI is definitely influencing team dynamics and how we work together and how we collaborate. And I don't know about you, but you've probably experienced something like when you work with AI too much, you have the fog in your brain and you go, okay, I can't handle it anymore and just take the answer and use it. Because that's the effect we call cognitive offloading when you delegate to technology something that you used to be doing with your brain. And it's not a new thing. We all have phone numbers on our phones, so we don't have to remember them. We just click and dial. Same thing with GPS. When you go somewhere, you don't have to remember the way. But unlike Google or GPS or your contact list, AI is not just a memory tool. It is a mind itself because it can give complex outcomes. You can have a conversation with it. And at some point you can delegate decision-making to AI and that's the thing you shouldn't be doing. But since it's such a complex tool, we kind of think of it as if it's a human.

So I was working with a team and they were, it's a customer success team and they were early adopters of AI and they loved it. They used AI for multiple processes. They recorded meetings with AI, they had transcripts, they had summaries, they had kind of major insights, they created items for the backlog. But at some point they started to feel that they don't remember their clients any longer. They used to know them in and out but now they need to go to the CRM to check if that's correct. They couldn't prioritize backlog because they didn't have this connection with client problems. They didn't know what mattered most for them. And they became disengaged. They kind of felt that they are operators of this AI machine and they're useless and they lost meaning. So what they did instead how to reverse that is that again, they created work norms and rules of how they work with AI. And one of those was that after each meeting, they first had to talk through their insights and thoughts and feelings, how they felt about this conversation, give it to AI, and then together with a transcript, AI will generate some insights and summary. So they had to process that first and then use AI to support it. And that is supported by science. There is research called Your Brain on ChatGPT that tells us that cadence matters. If you ask AI to give you something and then you work with AI's output, your brain stays disengaged or at least less engaged than if you do it the other way around. So if you think it through first and then ask AI to support it and kind of work it and give more input, then your brain stays engaged. So this team created a set of norms and rules for how they work with AI. They talked about their team purpose, what is their purpose as humans on this team and where AI can support them. They started to learn, they use the knowledge sharing pillar of this click framework where they started to learn about how AI actually works. So, when they changed this process, when they changed how they interact with the AI, they got their engagement back, they got their performance back, they became, okay, now we're doing the good thing.

Kelly: A lot of that's about memory because when you're writing down your notes, especially if you're handwriting your notes the way we used to do, you remember more, right? Versus typing it out or allowing the AI to recap it for you, then you're not processing things through your memory. So I can see why that would be a huge problem for the account service business or any sort of business where you're working with clients.

What other strategies do you have for building self-sufficient teams?

Daria: I'll tell you one thing that I think is really helpful. Good leaders, leaders who want to grow their teams, leaders who want to support their teams. They have a lot of one-on-ones, which is amazing. It creates connections with the team members. Leaders can catch early problems.

They know the people better. What they don't do is they don't connect people with each other, team members with each other. And it's even more important when we talk about remote and hybrid teams, when those team members don't have a chance to connect with each other. They don't meet in the corridors. So it's the leader's job to connect those people. Because otherwise, again, the leader has a lot of connections with all the team members and maybe stakeholders.

But team members have only one connection, which is their manager. So while connecting people to each other, mentoring, like buddy groups and mentoring groups and micro collaboration projects, anything that will help people work together more closely will create those connections and will strengthen relationships on the team. And I remember I was working with a project manager, like it was a project management team and what they did.

They had several stages of the project and each person on the team was an expert of each stage of the project, but still they paired and worked together on every stage, even though the other person was not an expert. Why? Because it gave them more information about the whole process and it created better connections and it created a better understanding of how they work.

It strengthened relationships on the team and improved their performance and they eventually became the center of expertise for project management in the organization.

Kelly: Well, thank you for sharing your insights today, Daria. I appreciate it. I will make sure to include links to your book Clicking and your contact information on our website twomarketingmoms.com. Please listen to the episode there or wherever you listen to your podcast. Thanks for joining.

Daria: Thank you, Kelly. It was great talking to you. I hope that was helpful.