Pod Insights Vision Pros Live Podcast Building Stronger Teams Through Collaboration with Daria Rudnik About this episode What helps teams stay aligned and productive during periods of growth, change, and uncertainty? In this episode of Vision Pros Live, Daria Rudnik shares her perspective on leadership, team collaboration, company culture, and helping organizations navigate complex transitions. With experience supporting executives, HR leaders, and global organizations through mergers, acquisitions, and organizational change, Daria focuses on creating healthier and more engaged workplaces.
This conversation explores leadership during uncertainty, the importance of culture in business growth, and why collaboration is becoming more important than traditional top-down leadership.
#VisionProsLive #DariaRudnik #Leadership #TeamCulture #BusinessGrowth #OrganizationalLeadership #Collaboration #CompanyCulture #LeadershipDevelopment #ScalingAndGrowth
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hey what's up my friends, welcome into an extra special episode of Vision Pros Live. I'm your show host Jackson Callum, founder and CEO of First Class Business and I've got Daria Rudnik in the house. It could be Daria Rudnik as well. She's over in Israel and so there's that accent thing that me as an American, man, I'm probably gonna butcher that, but she is a phenomenal business consultant and leader and I, I have to grill the business leaders before they come on my show. We, we met today and I'm very fast at grilling business owners and seeing their websites and stuff and making sure her understanding of leadership, diplomacy, working with teams, helping HR, working with mergers and acquisitions as well. There's a lot to her story and my friends,
0:42 Speaker 00 they're not, it's very hard to find the right types of business consultants and leaders to connect to. You've got to search long and hard to find the right ones. Patrick Lencioni, Michael Gerber, etc. And so I'm gonna bring her on stage. We're gonna hear about her vision. We're gonna look at her website a little bit too. I'm gonna see if I can bring her back for full episode as well. Daria, welcome into Vision Pros Live.
1:03 Speaker 01 Hi Jackson, it's great to be here.
1:06 Speaker 00 Do you prefer Daria, Daria or something different?
1:09 Speaker 01 It's Daria.
1:10 Speaker 00 Daria, Daria, I'm so sorry. Okay, cool.
1:13 Speaker 01 No problem.
1:14 Speaker 00 See, and she's even nice to the Americans who do things like that. So I like you already and, and yes, prayers with you guys and what you guys are going through over there in Israel. Absolutely. Thank you for, for being a champion to jump in too, in the middle of what you're going through. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, once said, he was asked, what about, what he thought about the recession? He said, "Well, I thought about it and I decided not to participate." And so way to show up and participate in the here and now of helping businesses grow regardless of what's going on in life. Daria, tell us about your vision.
1:49 Speaker 01 My vision is, I wanna...
1:52 Speaker 01 I want people to feel happy at work. We deserve to be happy at work and especially leaders who are overloaded and stressed staying with multiple demands globally. I mean economically, politically, like everything that's happening around us, whatever it is, whatever you are. So feeling that you're thriving at work is is super important. And I want to help leaders build amazing teams who can work together, collaborate, co-create and produce great products together. And that will bring benefit for their people, for leaders, for shareholders, for customers, for the communities. It's a win-win-win-win-win situation.
2:29 Speaker 00 Huge. I love it. And my friends, Daria got to experience firsthand how blunt I can be. One, I love her brand and what she's done for website. Yet, I did have to speculate a little bit because like some of you out there with businesses, when you're working with a business leader who's talking about successful teams, but doesn't have an internal team, it can be a little bit of a concern. And so, Daria, you passed my test on that, but I'd love for you to talk more about that for the audience's sake. You're coming in to help HR and executives with their team leadership without asking sacredly, what qualifies you to help them with the growth of their teams while you operate as kind of an independent consultant?
3:15 Speaker 01 I'm gonna reveal my age now. I'll say that. I have more than
3:20 Speaker 00 Good.
3:20 Speaker 01 15 years of executive experience. I used to be Chief People Officer. I started my career in Deloitte and then I was Chief People Officer for tech and telecom companies. Yeah.
3:29 Speaker 00 Well, Deloitte's a mic drop of its own, but keep going, please.
3:34 Speaker 01 And I've been helping like the companies I was working with and my clients with mergers and acquisitions, people's side of mergers and acquisitions, which is messy, difficult.
3:46 Speaker 01 Painful. So how do you make it smooth for people? How do you make sure that people who joining the company feel welcomed and and kind of aligned with your process? How you make sure that people who are already in your company, they actually know what to do with the new karmas? I mean, hundreds of new karmas joining your new company. So helping leaders with that, setting up offices in other countries like Nicaragua, I was helping set up office in Nicaragua and Peru. So, welcome to like my high two cheers to Latin America and Central America.
4:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
4:21 Speaker 01 Been there. And to be honest, like helping companies go through major disruptions like COVID-19, we all been there, but also military conflicts like we have now in Israel. And I had clients in Armenia and Azerbaijan during their conflict. And it's crazy to say how many, and I had clients in Ukraine, in Russia. I mean, it's crazy how many conflicts we have, but we do need still to help leaders motivate their teams, engage their teams, and build this great cultures.
4:57 Speaker 00 Dang, that's amazing. So you not only bring happiness, you know how to shift people's mindsets to bring happiness during some of the most turbulent business experiences of all, which mergers and acquisitions is exactly, even if you got two great teams coming together, you got two great egos coming together too of like, well, who's going to come out on top? Like, what a, what a cra- that's fascinating. I gotta, I gotta get you back for 40 to 60 minutes. But do you mind just kind of highlighting a little bit about what's that like?
5:28 Speaker 01 I mean, it's, it's hard. And it's hard because, again, you need to accommodate all of those people, but you also need to make sure that they are like in line with everything you're doing in your company. And some of my experiences were Identifying why you're acquiring this company for work, what is the main asset? And I've seen situations and I've been in situations when the main asset was actually culture. So the company was acquired because they had a great culture of working with their customers and they had so many clients and they had a great pipeline, all because they had this client-facing culture, they had this client-facing experience. So they actually acquired this company to bring this culture in, which is not a usual
6:12 Speaker 01 thing, because usually the parent company is kind of setting the content, changes the culture of the company that's acquired. So this kind of challenges companies face and they need to start from the top, like why we're acquiring this company, what we want to stay and what we need to let go, because letting go is the hardest part.
6:37 Speaker 00 Hmm, super, so well said. And I love that your testimonials are linked to their LinkedIn accounts. We're one of, I thought we were the first company to, no, I've only seen it a couple of times. And so we recently launched ours again like that. And it just, again, it goes to the depth of what you understand about business and positioning yourself. And so visionaries, what you just saw from a branding standpoint is world-class. Take Daria's website, drop it into a paid access Claude AI and say Claude, recreate me a website for myself based on what Daria has done. She is the model to follow on that for sure. And so again, we're going to, we're going to bring Daria back. We're going to come up with a very, very important topic for business owners that we
7:21 Speaker 00 can go back and forth on, but you guys know how to connect with her already. You're welcome to invite her to your stage, of course, as well. And those of you who want to be on Vision Pros, there's a button in the top right corner that says be our guest. Click on that button at visionproslive.com and come and join us. Final words of wisdom, fortune cookie style. Daria, if this is a last chance to share some wisdom with visionaries, what would it be?
7:41 Speaker 01 Oh, I would like to say that don't be a heroic leader trying to save the world and trying to save your company and, and your team. The era of heroic leadership is gone. Now it's time for empowered teams. Bring this co-creation and collaboration and that'll make you happy, you more free and will make your team more engaged and more motivated.
8:02 Speaker 00 Thank you for hanging in there with me before we started. I'm so glad we did this. You heard it from Nadia Rudnik, my friends. Let's empower our team members and let's collaborate. See you next time. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.
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