EP046 - Solving leadership challenges remotely with Daria Rudnik
About the episode
This episode focuses on remote leadership challenges and how to solve them. How do we create engaged teams with purpose and intention? How can you engineer a team structure that allows remote productivity? To discuss, I have Daria Rudnik, who's helping businesses as a team architect and leadership coach.
About the guest
Daria Rudnik is a Team Architect and Leadership Coach specializing in leadership development and team effectiveness for remote and hybrid teams. A Leadership Speaker for Business School bachelor students, with a background as an ex-Deloitte and former HR Director for Tech and Telecom companies. Bringing 15+ years of international executive experience.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome, everyone. Today I wanted to talk with someone who's managing and helping remote teams for the last decade and, or even more but she will tell a little more about that. Here is Daria Rudnik and am I pronouncing this right?
Yes, that's right.
Thank you for taking the time to having this podcast episode with me. I'm sure it will be amazing. Tell me a little bit more about your background. How did you arrive in the remote work and what you are doing right now?
Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to talk about remote since I really love it. A little bit about my background. So my background is HR and organizational development. I was working for global organizations like Deloitte. I was working for a Swedbank, which is a big European bank. And then I moved to HR director roles for mostly tech and telecom companies. And it happened that like I started working remotely when it wasn't remote first, it was remote forced. We had to work remotely, probably because we had different locations. Like we had, I was working for a telecom company and we had teams in Peru, Nicaragua, in Belarus, Russia, and other countries as well. It wasn't that extensive. And then obviously and the COVID when everybody went remote and before that, like a few sort of side projects connecting people from different places that want to create something, but couldn't meet with each other for various different reasons. So that's when I started working with remote teams. And since it's a great opportunity to enhance both effectiveness and wellbeing of teams. I truly believe that's where the world is moving right now. And we will all have not just remote, but flexible work. I help teams to be better in what they're doing and how they can create better communication, decision making processes that makes their teams effective and engaged.
This is a great journey and thank you for sharing. And I think one of the most unique aspect of your personal story or personal journey is that you started in enterprise Deloitte is not a small company this is one of the big four consulting companies and you also work with telecom companies globally. So these were all I wouldn't say remote teams, but they were all global teams and they usually I mean with more most enterprise companies They usually had head offices in different locations. And one of the key insights that I usually share with everyone who think that remote work is so new and novel is that it is not. In most enterprise companies, in most conference rooms, in most of the enterprise companies, people still, and they worked together remotely for the last 10, 20, 30 years anyway, they just didn't use slack and stuff, but they still worked remotely as most of the startups and small and growing businesses do so today. So tell me a little bit more about how it worked for you when you were at work there in enterprise companies. So was there, what was the main difference in, if there was any or biggest challenges working remotely in an enterprise company. And I assume in most of the time, right now you're working with mostly growing companies or like smaller teams. Smaller meaning that less than a thousand people or so.
Yeah, you're right. You're right. I won't tell much about Deloitte because I actually traveled there a lot. But I can tell you about the Swedbank. And the Swedbank is, has a very interesting story 'cause it studied actually as a, like the bank that I worked with was a first Estonian bank, which was Hansa Bank that was acquired by Swedbank. And those huge merge between Swedbank and Hansa Bank. The countries like the offices in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia worked together to create leadership competencies for the whole organization. And obviously we couldn't travel as much, but the working group met regularly on a weekly or bi weekly basis on the phone.
On the phone. So it was a conference call.
It was a conference call. It was terrible. Yes. It was terrible, especially when some people were in the room and some people weren't. And yeah, it was the good thing when we exchanged emails with files. That was okay. But phone calls, like conference calls were just terrible experience. I'm so happy we have Zoom, we have Microsoft Teams, we have collaboration boards. It's, it makes like work so much easier and fun. But anyway, we had to work remotely because we leave, like we were working in different countries and we had a project going on. So we developed this leadership competencies and performance management system and lots of things that will help teams to work and perform and then went further and implemented them into other offices as well. But yeah, that was my kind of first remote work experience.
And what was the biggest challenge during that experience, aside from managing a conference call with, I don't know, I guess it's a board meeting. So probably 20 people on the phone. And I have no idea how... personally, I participated in conference calls like this when I was working agencies in London. And when the clients had multiple offices and they all dialed into the central London hub, and it was, yeah I can attest to that. It was a freaking nightmare. So to manage a conference call like that, and I'm so glad also that we do have things like zoom like that. But still aside from that, that managing a conference call, what was the biggest challenge?
I can say what would be a challenge, but the way the work was structured was actually good because we actually met in person at the kickoff. So I knew all the people like on the team. And I knew how to contact them. I had their phones. I had their emails. I knew their personalities at some point. Working together remotely, even on the phone, was easy because I knew the people who were there. And that's actually what I help companies do now, is when you have a new team, meet them. If you can't meet in person, no problem, meet on Zoom, but face to face, just have a look at this person, get to know the person, get to know them, the personality, not the title and the success story of their work, but personality, and it'll make much easier further on.
Yeah it certainly adds a little bit more flair when you do know a little bit more about the person that, that you are working with, aside from their Excel spreadsheet, like data chunks, like the CV and the background. When it's a project and you need to roll that project out to a multiple location, even in the enterprise setting obviously it's an enterprise setting. So the rollout is slower than for a startup company or a scale up. But still, the essence is similar. What were the biggest setbacks or learnings that you learned on how to roll out a project without meeting everyone in the office and gathering everyone in person to roll out certain projects?
As I said, like the first thing is kickoff, just get to know the people and get to know the goal. What is the shared goal? If someone joins in at the middle of the project, they don't understand what's going on. They'll feel lost and confused. So we need to make sure that everybody understands what's going on at any point of this project. Then again, one of the learnings was to embrace asynchronous communication. You don't need to be on the meeting all the time. There's no need to share emails, collaboration boards, chats, whatever. But make sure that Use specific channels for specific type of communication. I remember again, when we first transitioned, like during COVID, we had to rapidly transit on all the team remotely. And people were just confused because they had the similar type of messages coming from email, from WhatsApp or some people using enterprise systems or teams or whatever. There were lots of communication channels with similar purposes. So whenever you roll out a project, make sure you know what channel you're using for what purposes. Like emails for big updates. Messages for quick interactions, Zoom meetings for decision making and like brainstorming together. Although you don't have to brainstorm together at the same time. You can do it on the collaboration board asynchronically. So understanding the tools and the purpose of them.
And the, oh, by the way, these are all music to my ears because this is exactly the same thing that I teach to others one quick addition is that usually people don't really clarify what would be the emergency channel for when there is a fire. And I personally usually advise that you use a channel that you don't use for anything else. Because when that rings or when that has a notification, that means the house is burning. So you need to reply back pretty quickly. One thing that I wanted to ask is that Obviously, communication preferences are super important. And what do you think who would be the responsible person who will clarify these these details? Would it be the leader of the project? Would it be something like an external leader, like a COO, or something like that? And how should that work? Or how did it work for you?
It depends. It depends. Obviously. Sorry. So I'll tell you like if we talk about organizational setting, so it's very important to understand what are the current preferences so people don't have to change a lot, but adjust to the used ways of communication. But when we come down to a team it's not the leader who decides. Because it's a burden to think, okay how do we do this? How do we do that? And leaders don't want to think about it because they're overloaded with other stuff and just leave it the way it is. What I say is get your team decide, let them decide how they want to communicate. What would be the emergency channel for them? How often do they want to see Whatsapp messages? Are they ready for your messages after hours or not? Some people say, I'm not, I have no problem with that. You send me a message, I'll reply in the morning. Some people say no, please don't do that because I'll feel nervous. I'll have to reply. So let your team decide what they, how they want to communicate with each other.
It sounds really nice, but the most common question that I usually get from this is that if you let the team decide on small decisions, like preferences it might delay the implementation of the project because too many things and too many time will be I wouldn't say wasted, but spent on preliminary decisions on how to actually deliver the project. So how can you combat that or what will be your answer to that?
That's a very nice comment what I usually see is people are wasting a huge amount of time on understanding where the document is, who edited it last, where to find it, what is the or missing the questions that were asked in a different channel, to avoid this Just spend some time and decide on the important stuff first you decide, and then you just have to go smoothly using what people have chosen to use.
Yeah. Usually that's the answer that I give. Yeah. Sorry. It will be really hard to argue with you, by the way, so this is usually the same thing that I tell that by investing a little bit more time at the start you will save tremendous amounts of time during the project. So let's talk about a little bit more about that saving of the time. You, and obviously I'm cannot hold myself back not jumping on that you mentioned multiple times asynchronous work and and like documentation. So how do you justify a synchronous work and documentation for leaders because they usually are, I wouldn't say against it, but they feel and think that implementing any kind of documentation frameworks during the project also costs a lot of time and resources. So they need to invest even more time preliminary to the project. Which is obviously not true, but still.
I know it's hard to find the balance, how much you need to document and what do you need to document? So I would like, I usually look at the former failures and mistakes that the team was making what was lost. And then just do the documents are based on this most common issues. And just don't do super extensive like super documents, documenting everything.
And what are the most common issues that usually get lost?
Like I said, like this missed channels where people send one way or another. Again, I'm not talking about the project I'm talking about the operational work. So yeah, so it's how we want to work together. What are the working hours? You don't need to work nine to five for some, not everybody needs to work nine to five, but probably everybody needs to work at 12 to four. And the rest can be pretty flexible. So this type of things that will make people feel comfortable in doing their job when they want to do it, where they want to do it from, and make sure they still have time to have this communication like synchronical communication meetings with their team members.
Do they usually there is a, again, it's called the new and novel, but it's not really new and novel that startups and scale ups usually invest in a company hub. There are so many different ways how you can do that. There are so many different tools right now that you can use for that. Just to mention notion or almanac or something. And setting that one up is also not novel or new because previously for enterprises, we had that it was called internal or intranet. Do you have any recommendations on how to structure something like that or Have you had any experience when a company was forced to go remote because of the pandemic or something like that? And they needed to adjust the intranet Accordingly or they had to build a new one. Or what were the experiences that you had in this?
You're right. Intranet was always there. Yeah. So there was always access to documents. The only thing was like, you could access it through in the office only. You could not access it like from outside the office and companies who had that had to change the settings so that people can access that from home. But it's for me, it was a rare case because I was working for tech companies all my life and we always had access to internal documents from anywhere with my laptop. The problem with this which is the same for Notion, like whatever hub you Google Docs, whatever hub you're using, is that it's a mess. It can become a mess at some point. And again, it's a huge enterprise project. Let's clean up the folders. What I suggest doing is let it go as it goes. But do some like reflection points at like a certain period of time so that you don't have a pile of unwanted and unused folders and documents, just make sure you delete them, just clean up from time to time.
Yes, but this is mostly for tech companies. Have you had any experience or have you seen any kind of like case studies or any kind of examples where there wasn't a tech company and they had to build something new from the ground up? Would that be hard or harder than amending an existing structure?
Again, I was looking for a bank. We had internet in the bank as well. It's usually something for like for small companies, studying companies. I'm now on the board of the nonprofit and we obviously have nothing. So we use google and Notion, and again, we just start slow. We don't, it's not a big project. It's something that we start using, see how it works, change it. See, this one is not working. Let's change another thing. Let's implement the Kanban. No, Kanban is not working. Let's just do regular tasks. Okay. That for our small team, that works perfectly fine. No pressure. When we need to change it, we'll change it again.
Sure. Would it be the size of the team? That complicates the complexity of this, or would it be the number of projects because. Just let me clarify. I usually work with smaller teams, so like less than a hundred people. But they have so many projects usually going parallel to each other. I wouldn't say that there is a, obviously there is one big, which is the product roadmap, shall we say. Or something similar to that, but they also have, especially for example, marketing, I've worked with a lot of marketing teams we have small little projects constantly ongoing. Let's say, I don't know, we are active on social media. So there is a social media project, which is ongoing every time, every day all the same tasks repeating each other. So would it be the number of people who are contributing or would it be the number of projects? What do you think?
It's both depending on how this team are working together. Again, the more people who have, the harder it is to agree on how we use that. But again, you have like, when you have many people, you'll probably have a sort of a product owner or project owner who can either initiate a discussion or make a decision on how we use that. Again, when we have many projects, they own, they don't usually come up all at once. On one to one and when you see, okay, it's time to change something. We add the new one, probably with the new structure, the new flow, if it's possible. So again I guess the reflection part is what often missing. We get used to doing things and don't spend time on reflecting whether it's working or not. And end up when it's just a mess. Then it becomes a problem, but if we have some small reflections, we will not have that situation.
We talked a lot about operational issues so far, I think but you mentioned our keyword, which is reflection and let's go a little bit more to a softer approach like self reflection on leadership, which is often missing in general. Not just from leaders from, I can, we can agree from most of the people in general. How can you help team leaders and managers to be more self reflective to the problems and the bottlenecks of the issues that they might have or they will have with their teams?
It's a one million question, Peter.
I know. It's wild.
I know, it's just, I guess it's the maturity of people cause we're all flooded with information, there's lots of information about the importance of reflection, and again, agile methodology, like you have retrospective every week or every other week, so it's built in. But somehow, even if we used to do it in this sprint sections, we don't, in sprints, we don't use it for our goals or for our leadership. It's hard for many people to transfer that skill from one area to another. So it's just telling people, showing why it's important, helping them try it out and see the benefits of it.
Do you think that so how can a leadership development program can help with that to install a little bit more not projects related reflection? Because that's a different thing. And I think, so when we talk about reflection, there are two ways of reflections, I think one is when you do have the project. The project itself has issues bottlenecks, things when go South and things that when something is working, that's also great. So we should acknowledge that self reflection shouldn't start only when things go South. It's also great to self reflect on things that we win. So one is in a project level and one is on a managerial level, which is like overarching all of the projects all of the things that, that people manage within the company. And there are many ways to help these leaders and managers to be a little bit more self reflective. And I think there are many great practices that people can follow. Have you seen any kind of examples that worked really well for at least a certain type of people. No, that's not for everyone.
Organizations actually have a tool for self reflection, which is most of the time used in a terrible way, but it's either performance management system or OKRs or whatever people are using to set up goals and then reflect. The problem is that they often used for even OKRs when they're not supposed to be used by like that, but they used to rate, give a person a rating. And assign like them for either promotion or bonus or redundancy. But if like when those tools used correctly, it's a built in process where a leader and their team members will first, the leader reflects on how it's been, what was the journey? What's their personal development journey, ask feedback from their members, how they can contribute to leaders development, and then think about their people and share. The feedback with them and people also share feedback with the leader. So it's mutual support and connection where people help each other grow. So if organization use that regularly with the right attitude that it's not an assessment. It's a developmental process. It's a helped for mutual growth. Then it can help with the general reflection and further reflections on personal goals, on leadership goals, et cetera. But it can be the first step.
So it shouldn't be, you're saying that the better way to use the classic and probably I would say well known, but like something that is used by many like OKRs and stuff like that. They shouldn't be used for individual performance metrics where you attach a reward based system behind them, right? Promotion and so on. But it should be used more like on a team level because when you use that on a team level like a community growth, it means that Per se, it will become more wider and broader within the organization, not just focusing on individuals, but also the teams.
I would say it's both. It's one to one leader, team member, and it's team reflection as well. And obviously it's good if we have organizational reflection as well on the board level, on the like C level, which doesn't happen a lot, but yeah.
Why do you think, why do you think is that the case?
Because there is, with anything that happens anything that is about development, growth, reflection, it takes you to take a step back makes you take a step back away from operations, away from achieving goals. We're like, we're dependent on achieving those goals. We're dependent. We need this dopamine. Hey, I got this. We have this sales. Hey, we implemented this project. Hey, we need this. We constantly need some rewards and reflection. doesn't give you that boost of dopamine because, hey, I did this reflection point. It's a slow, it's an, it's another type of process and we're not used to that. That's why people find it hard to start doing that. I find it hard myself. I need to dedicate specific time to do the reflection. That's the time in my calendar. I know I'm gonna do that. I need to prepare myself for that.
What is your motivation then? Why are you doing, why are you still dedicating time to reflect back on what you're doing?
Because it, it gives me the feeling that I'm on track, Uhhuh, like I have a goal, like I have had, I have this reflection points from time to time. I know that I'm on track. I don't feel, I'm not feel lost in my goals. A lot of times when I see companies and teams feel lost, I feel I'm all over the place, but I'm not moving anywhere. Okay, you missed your reflection point.
Sure. I wouldn't want to put any kind of words in your mouth, but still, this is exactly what I usually say that doing any kind of reflection either on individual or like your own goals or as a leader on a team level it gives you the certainty that you are moving to the right direction. And by having certainty, it also means that you can replicate the rewards either on individual or team level which means. Again, this is the second step, it means that it's a sustainable growth for the team and for the leader as well. So it works really well for longer term of, goal setting at least. And in general. You are an HR professional that you mentioned. What do you think are the biggest challenges for HR in the remote first setting?
In any setting, the biggest challenge of HR is to speak the business language. People who work in HR. Usually in most cases, even the different people, I can, I don't want to be like putting some stigmas on, but we care about people. That's why we came to HR because we care, we like people, we care about people. We want people to feel good at work. We want people to perform, but that's not what like C level wants to hear. They realize that because they're smart people, but that's not what in front of their faces. What's in front of their faces is numbers, goals, KPIs. Like board pushing them to, to go further the way of translate, translating this people needs into business needs is the biggest HR challenge that I see.
And do you think that we talked also a lot about tools and metrics. And I think, and I wholeheartedly believe that one of the biggest additions to for remote work compared to any kind of work, or any other kind of works, is the optimal use of people analytics. So it means that you can finally track with actual numbers. And figures how people are working together, how they are feeling what they are how their goal setting is working and so on and so on. And it's almost, I wouldn't say it's automated and autonomous. But it's which means that it gives a little bit of a. measurability behind HR or any kind of people operations. I don't actually prefer the word HR because it treats people as resources, but more like people operations. Do you think that having that data would be a little bit more beneficial for at least the C level who are making the decisions?
Depending on what kind of data you have and what kind of insights you're getting from this data, because having data is great tool for big companies. When we talk about the company of 20, 50 people. These are small numbers. So whenever you see some data, you need to dig deeper.
Yes.
But you can definitely use those, this data to start a conversation with a CEO or changing something.
Yeah and you have, you also need at least an amount of pile of data that is, I wouldn't say representative like a survey or something, but at least something that's actually measurable and not just a idle count or something based on metrics. You also talk a lot about the differences between remote and hybrid and how teams can work hybrid, and how teams can work remote. Now from the obvious differences of having or not having an office what do you think is the main difference between the two points in terms of work and collaboration?
The challenge of hybrid work is location bias, because obviously when people with those people who are in the office have access to decision makers, or they more visible, it's easier for them to be more visible. So it's very important to be aware that there are other people and not judge based people based on their presence. And to make sure you have, you have all the tools that let them speak up and show their work, showcase their work. So that's, yeah, that's the kind of the biggest challenge. If the hybrid environment is just people come and go and they switch some people in the office and people at home, that's okay. But still there'll be people who come to the office because they want to see CEO more often than others want to build stronger relationship with them. So it's very important to be aware of that.
Do you think it can be battled? So how can you fight? So there are some many practices that remote and hybrid companies are implementing to fight this location bias, which is a thing I heard from many others like including, for example, the all I wouldn't say offshore, but like non in office people into the decision making a little bit more documentation and asynchronous work is also can be an answer. But I'm also sure that it, all of these answers are not really enough to battle this. Do you think that companies should. Pick A or B and not the C, the hybrid version. So they either be in office with at least some work done in an office by everyone I wouldn't say all, everyone should go into the office on the same days, but at least there is an office where you should go in time to time or you should adopt remote first and that's it and you have an option to go into the office if you cannot work at home or whatever.
I do believe that. We need to, we would go into the world of, again, I said, flexible work where people choose, where people can choose, and if they want to work in the office, let them do it, and you have an office, let them do that. It's just stupid not to let them come to the office if they want to, because I know some people have small kids or, I don't know, whatever reasons they cannot work from home. And if there is an office, let them come. So the two things that might help with the location bias. First is tools, so the whole work is remote work, like the actual work, all the collaboration, all the meetings are structured as if everyone is remote. And the second one is like self awareness, being aware that there might be this bias, constantly reminding, making sure you hear other people that are not in the office.
Maybe this self-awareness, by the way, should be part of the remote worker as well. So if they want to, yeah, so they, if they want to move something really fastly forward, yes, at that case, you might want to catch up with that team leader in the office to make sure that the project or the work or whatever you're doing is moving forward flawlessly or at least a little bit more faster than it should be. Yeah, I agree. And I agree on the first point as well, that if you operate remote first by default, then it doesn't really mean anything if you have an office or not, it can be a really great bonus or a really great extra. But it doesn't mean that any kind of work that you do, you will miss out from the work itself. Maybe the decision making, maybe the gossip, maybe whatever the small interesting soft things. But you can combat that by just coming to the office once a week or something. And what do you think, what would be the future? I know everyone hates future telling. But still let's see how it goes. I think so before we jump into the actual question I started doing this, like remote work, podcasting this like January and it's now September. It's Jesus Christ so many things have changed even within this nine months. So I would hate myself to answer this question, but I will ask it anyway from you. So please don't hate me. What do you think, how will we work, in the future, in the near future?
I love the question. I don't know how we will work, but I know how I want people to work. And I know what I do to make this happen. And I believe it's the work where there is no one single heroic leader who leads the team and has all the answers, but it's about empowered teams who can work anywhere, anytime, they're not forced to neither location, no time where the work is valued based on the result that they're bringing, not the hours they're sitting at the desk. And when the team is like the team working as a single unit and organization is basically a team of teams where there are no department, like departmental silos or functional silos. but they're a team collaborating with each other and the organization is also a kind of a team teams with their partners, clients, service providers, regulators, having this team relationship with each other so that we have an ecosystem of people working towards creating more value.
I love this feature.
Yeah. That's the feature I want to live in.
Me too. Me too. I love it. Cool. So what keeps you up at night? What are you working on and how people can find you?
I've just finished my first book. I've tried to make, like to write a book for a very long time. I decided I'm not going to publish it. And it's going to be E, like very simple, very practical ebook, which is called click, which how you can make your remote team work. And I'd be happy if you read it.
I would love to share it with our network.
Perfect. Cool. And where can people find you?
Oh, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Daria Rudnik. I engineer remote and hybrid teams for sustainable growth. I'm a team architect. Find me on LinkedIn. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to have a chat.
Thank you for coming here and thank you for your time. I think it was really valuable and I hope everyone learned a lot about how to managing remote teams today and in the future. And again, thanks for your time.
Yeah, thanks Peter. It was fun.
