Built by People Leaders – Details, episodes & analysis

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Built by People Leaders

Daria Rudnik

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/6d. Total Eps: 41

Built by People Leaders is a podcast for HR, People, and L&D leaders at scale-ups and fast-growing companies. Host Daria Rudnik — Team Architect, Executive Leadership Coach, and former Chief People Officer — talks with the in-house HR and People leaders building the people side of scale.

Each episode goes inside the real work: designing leadership development that keeps up with growth, earning trust at the executive table, and turning people strategy into measurable business impact. These are practical conversations for anyone leading a People function inside a company that's moving fast.

Daria brings a global perspective from her work with clients across six continents and her years at Deloitte, leading through financial crises, war, and the pandemic. She is the author of CLICKING: A Team Building Strategy for Overloaded Leaders and co-author of The AI Revolution: Thriving Within Civilization's Next Big Disruption.

If you're an HR or People leader scaling a fast-moving company, Built by People Leaders is where the people side of growth gets figured out.

Want to be a guest? Applications go through the podcast page on my website — apply via the guest form or through PodMatch (both links are there). We don't take applications by email or LinkedIn message, so please use one of those two routes.

https://dariarudnik.com/podcast

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🇨🇦 Canada - Careers
09/09/2026
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#40 Cut Turnover 40% in Year One with Clark Ingram, Founder & President of People Profits, ex-CHRO

Episode 40

Monday, September 7, 2026 • Duration 31:14

Clark Ingram served as Chief Human Resources Officer for four companies across four different industries — publicly traded and privately held — over a 30-year career that began in finance, not HR. That finance lens is the foundation of his core operating philosophy: people and profits are co-equals, held together rather than ranked against each other, and every workforce decision carries a number. Clark Ingram is the Founder and President of People Profits LLC, a financially focused human capital management consulting firm built around three chronic problems: employee turnover, chronically open positions, and skills gaps. His standard engagement target is to cut a client's turnover by 40 to 50 percent in the first year.

The operational problem Clark Ingram unpacks in this episode quietly breaks mid-sized companies: the assumption that more recruiting solves a retention problem. At the 100–1,500 headcount stage, people teams often run hard on the recruiting treadmill — hiring fast, watching attrition eat the gains, and never diagnosing why the exits keep happening. Clark Ingram's argument is that the root cause is almost always organizationally specific, that compensation programs built on tenure rather than value accelerate the problem, and that most HR teams have handed leadership a scapegoat — "turnover is a leadership issue" — instead of owning the fixes within their control.

Challenges Addressed

The recruiting treadmill: Clark Ingram describes the pattern he encounters in nearly every engagement — teams hiring as fast as possible, believing the next cohort will fix retention. His position: putting new people into the same environment everyone before them left produces the same result, every time.
Compensation built on time served, not value: Most compensation programs reward tenure with incremental raises unrelated to the value an employee adds. Clark Ingram calls the fix "value pathing." At his first company, senior technicians left because their compensation lagged the value they generated as they completed training modules — a gap competitors exploited by poaching them.
Not knowing who you are as an employer: Clark Ingram argues employer brand is not a list of values but an accurate picture of who genuinely fits. In a consulting engagement with a community hospital, every employee he interviewed used the word "community" unprompted. That identity signal drives both retention and candidate self-selection.

Actionable Takeaways

Set a 40–50% turnover reduction target for year one, then find the single organizationally specific cause driving most of it. Clark Ingram's experience across four industries is that most exits trace back to one dominant issue. Identify it and fix it rather than waiting for a comprehensive program before acting.
Replace time-served compensation with value pathing. Map the value an employee produces as they gain skills, then align pay to that curve rather than tenure. Clark Ingram's first company reached zero turnover among senior technicians by matching pay increases to the training modules that triggered higher client billing — closing the gap competitors used to poach talent.
Ask employees the five reasons they work there, then use their answers to write your hiring criteria. Clark Ingram uses this question to surface the real employer identity — the lived experience, not the stated values. That identity then becomes the filter that keeps poor-fit hires out of the pipeline.

Questions This Episode Answers

Why does increasing our recruiting budget never fix our turnover rate? Clark Ingram's answer is direct: recruiting puts new people into the same conditions that caused previous employees to leave, so the outcome repeats. The only fix is identifying the organizationally specific reason people exit — different for every company — and removing it before adding headcount.
How do I build compensation that retains high performers instead of losing them when they're most valuable? Clark Ingram's value pathing framework ties compensation increases to the skill milestones that raise an employee's output and market value, not to tenure intervals. At his first company, a portion of the incremental client billing triggered by each completed training module went to the employee — shutting down competitor poaching at exactly the point it previously succeeded.
Is my turnover a leadership issue or something HR can actually fix? Clark Ingram rejects the framing that turnover is primarily a leadership problem outside HR's scope. In his experience, the majority of turnover he has eliminated had no leadership involvement as a root cause — it came from selection, compensation design, and employer identity gaps within the people team's control. His test: fix what HR can change this quarter first, then measure the result.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Clark Ingram's websites: ClarkIngram.com

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#39 The Post-Crisis Leadership Gap with Savio P. Clemente

Episode 39

Monday, August 31, 2026 • Duration 28:53

Savio P. Clemente is a keynote and TEDx speaker, healthcare leadership strategist, journalist, and board-certified coach who has conducted more than 2,000 interviews with executives, clinicians, and high performers. A two-time cancer survivor and stem cell transplant recipient, Savio treated his 29-day hospital stay in 2024 as a field study in high-stakes decision-making, and built his Adaptive Resilience Framework around what he observed. His central thesis is that the first thing that fails is clarity and after that performance.

The episode targets the Post-Crisis Leadership Gap — the period after a restructure, leadership change, or failed initiative when things look stable but decision quality, alignment, and confidence quietly erode. For People teams at scaleups of 100–1,500 employees, this is the exact moment informal oversight breaks down and no one owns the recalibration. Savio explains why this drift widens into a chasm when leaders skip the recovery phase.

Challenges Addressed

Drift after the crisis ends: Savio P. Clemente names the Post-Crisis Leadership Gap as the phase where cognitive load quietly undermines decisions long after the emergency is declared over. Left unaddressed, the gap widens into a chasm that is far harder to close.
Leaders performing instead of leading: Savio observes that executives, like the celebrities he covered at the Oscars red carpet, keep "acting" a role and mask real needs — which corrodes trust across scaling People and talent orgs.
Poor decision quality under pressure: Savio cites an estimated $935 billion in US healthcare waste, attributing much of it to poor decision-making after high-stakes disruption rather than to equipment or admin costs.

Actionable Takeaways

Run the ALOHA Reboot in 7 minutes: Savio P. Clemente's practice — Acknowledge, Listen, Open, Harness, Act — helps a leader regain clarity fast. Do one letter per minute a day over five days if seven minutes feels impossible.
Survey how the team feels, not just where they align: Before a big initiative, ask people to name a past moment with a similar feeling (not situation) and how they resourced it. This opens a concrete pathway to action.

Questions This Episode Answers

#38 Automating the Human Out of HR — On Purpose, with David González, Head of People Performance & Growth at Snowflake

Episode 38

Friday, August 28, 2026 • Duration 27:07

David González is Head of People Performance & Growth who joined Snowflake to build its performance architecture after the company came out of hypergrowth. David holds a PhD in Performance Improvement and started his career in advertising, working on Coca-Cola, Bud Light, and Procter brands before shifting into People work through his "Brand ME" project and the Center for Creative Leadership. His central argument in this episode: use AI to automate the administrative core of HR and redeploy People professionals as "performance architects" — executive coaches and strategic truth-tellers who handle judgment, politics, and behavioral change.

For People leaders at 100–1,500 person scaleups, González targets the exact friction of this stage: data scattered across the company, multiple inconsistent performance scales, and siloed, subjective decisions. He describes arriving at Snowflake to find "an untended garden" and walks through the Performance Excellence Architecture he built to replace it.

Challenges Addressed

Fragmented performance data: At Snowflake, David González found data scattered across the company with multiple performance scales and inconsistent processes, forcing a move from decentralized, subjective decisions to enterprise-wide, data-driven insights.
Administrative burden on people leaders: David explains how a quarterly performance cadence created too much administrative load, and how removing it accidentally opened a coverage gap in manager-employee touchpoints.
Scaling without killing startup culture: David addresses leadership fear that adding process slows a high-growth company, arguing for methodical, minimal infrastructure introduced in tight partnership with the executive team.

Actionable Takeaways

Start from the vision, not the tool: Build top-down — define your ethos, then design principles, then measurement tools. David structured it at Snowflake around four North Stars: clarity, accountability, advancement, and rewards.
Let employees tell you where to start: David used annual engagement and pulse survey data to identify that employees wanted clearer performance measurement and career guidance, which then became a company OKR.

Questions This Episode Answers

#37 Why Conflict Isn't a Problem to Fix: Dr. Irvine Nugent on Building Conflict Capacity as Your People Team Scales

Episode 37

Monday, August 17, 2026 • Duration 27:38

Dr. Irvine Nugent is co-founder of ConflictEQ and a former nonprofit CEO with a Ph.D. in Management who helps leaders navigate pressure and difficult conversations without losing clarity or connection. In this episode, Dr. Nugent argues that conflict is not a signal something has gone wrong—it is the natural friction of differing opinions and perspectives, and it is the fuel scaling companies need for creativity and problem-solving. He describes his own turning point as a "recovering conflict coward": a key employee quit because the team was not having the conversations it needed to have.

For People leaders at companies in the 100–1,500 employee range, Dr. Nugent addresses a familiar breakdown. As headcount grows, informal communication stops working, HR teams get pulled in as the constant referee, and leadership meetings turn either performatively calm or aggressively winner-take-all. Both patterns stall the decisions high-growth companies cannot afford to delay.

Challenges Addressed

HR as the permanent referee: Dr. Nugent describes how People teams at scaleups burn out because managers escalate every interpersonal tension instead of handling it themselves, expecting HR to resolve conflict "out of a puff of air."
Calm meetings hiding cynicism: Dr. Nugent explains that high engagement scores and agreeable leadership meetings often mask resignation—people stopped raising ideas because past attempts went nowhere, which stalls critical initiatives like AI adoption and org redesign.
Two instinctive threat responses: Dr. Nugent frames conflict avoidance (freeze) and conflict aggression (fight) as untrained instincts that both create destructive patterns as the old "we're a family" culture stops scaling.

Actionable Takeaways

Shift People Ops from referee to capacity-builder: Dr. Nugent advises People leaders to invest in conflict-capacity training so managers can hold hard conversations themselves, rather than escalating every tension to HR.
Open with pressure, not correction: When addressing a colleague's unhealthy behavior, start with "What are you overwhelmed with right now?" instead of "Your behavior is a problem." Surfacing the underlying stress opens a real conversation.

Questions This Episode Answers

#36 When to Lead vs. When to Manage (and Why Most Founders Get It Wrong) with Michael K. Cobb, ECI Development

Episode 36

Tuesday, August 11, 2026 • Duration 30:11

Michael K. Cobb, Founder and CEO of ECI Development, has run three fully remote businesses across Central America for 30 years: a mortgage bank in Belize, an international real estate development company, and a teak timber operation in Panama that started with 100 acres planted in 1999 and now runs its own sawmill. His single biggest argument for scaling People teams: leadership and management are different jobs, and most growing organizations must deliberately build management infrastructure even when founders resist it.

For scaleups in the 100–1,500 employee tier, informal information sharing—the water cooler, the coffee pot—breaks down as headcount grows and leadership can no longer oversee everything directly. Michael Cobb built remote protocols to replace those channels long before COVID, starting with fax machines in the mid-1990s. He explains how People leaders rebuild connection and trust when co-location is no longer the glue.

Challenges Addressed

Losing informal communication in remote scaleups: Michael Cobb explains that remote and high-growth companies lose the informal "water cooler" network that co-located offices rely on, and must replace it with deliberate structure.
Founders resisting management structure: Michael Cobb assumed autonomy always drives satisfaction, but morale rose when he hired a Chief Operating Officer in the early-to-mid 2000s to add management structure.
HR seen only as a problem-surfacer: Michael Cobb describes how People teams struggle to earn executive trust when they only bring problems to leadership rather than offering to help.

Actionable Takeaways

Make remote connection an institution, not an accident: Require cameras on for every Zoom meeting and fund regular in-person gatherings so senior teams get the informal exchange that formal agendas miss.
Calibrate management structure to each person: Some employees want autonomy and others want direction; hire managers who can read where each person sits on that spectrum and give them the right amount of structure.
Open HR conversations with "How can I be more helpful to you?": Michael Cobb says this question earns immediate attention from leadership because most people arrive with problems, not offers of support.

Questions This Episode Answers

#35 The 91st Day: How Nate Hill Stops Post-Onboarding Attrition and Rebuilds Trust in Scaling Organizations

Episode 35

Monday, August 3, 2026 • Duration 29:18

Nathaniel Sietz is an HR professional who built an entire People function from scratch as the only HR Manager at a logistics company that had no HR infrastructure. In this episode of Built by People Leaders, Nate introduces The 91st Day framework—a practical way to keep onboarding and culture-building going beyond the standard 90-day probation period. Ironically, that’s exactly when most companies stop investing in new hires, even though it’s also when many people decide to leave. He published the framework under the name Nate Hill.

Nate talks about the challenges People teams face as companies grow: onboarding that ends after the first week, managers who push back on structure because “things change too fast,” and acquisitions that create rumors and uncertainty, leading to preventable turnover. For companies that have outgrown informal communication and where leaders can’t keep track of everything themselves anymore, Nate explains how to replace ad hoc ways of working with simple, consistent people practices that scale.

Challenges Addressed

Onboarding that stops at day 90: Nate Hill explains how companies spend roughly $20,000 to hire one person, then withdraw cultural attention after probation—forcing repeat spend when new hires leave inside the three-month window.
Trust erosion during acquisitions and rapid growth: Nate Hill describes employees updating resumes and crying in his office over layoff rumors, and how leadership distraction with new departments left the core team feeling left behind.
Managers without an onboarding framework: Nate Hill addresses the gap where managers own onboarding but lack a structured plan, defaulting to one-week classroom orientations instead of month-long integration.

Actionable Takeaways

Co-design a month-long onboarding plan with each manager: Sit down with the hiring manager to build a role-specific 30-day timeline instead of using a generic company template. Secure manager buy-in so the plan is followed, not filed away.
Run 30-, 60-, and 90-day self-evaluations for employees and managers: Use these surveys to catch onboarding failures before the three-month attrition window. A downward trend signals it is time to rebuild that manager's onboarding plan.
Translate HR issues into leadership's own language: Reframe turnover, meeting time, and disengagement as financial cost for money-focused executives. Bring survey data and cost breakdowns as proof rather than subjective opinion.

Questions This Episode Answers

#34 Why Training Fails and How to Build L&D That Changes Behavior with Maria Kolesnikoff, Former Head of Talent Management

Episode 34

Monday, July 27, 2026 • Duration 24:01

Maria Kolesnikoff spent 20 years across every HR function—recruitment, compensation, organizational design, and change management—before becoming head of talent management at the corporate investment business unit of a large bank, and now works as an ICF PCC coach. In this episode of Built by People Leaders with Daria Rudnik, Maria Kolesnikoff argues that effective learning and development must be built as infrastructure across performance management, compensation, succession planning, and recruitment—not delivered as one-touch training events that end when people leave the room.

The friction Maria Kolesnikoff unpacks matters most for People teams in the 100–1,500 employee range, where informal oversight breaks down and standalone programs stop working. Content-only training covers learning but skips practice and feedback, so behavior never changes. Maria Kolesnikoff shows how systemic incentives—not entertainment—push people out of their comfort zone and make new behaviors stick.

Challenges Addressed

Training that delivers content but no behavior change: Maria Kolesnikoff explains that content-focused programs only cover learning, leaving out the practice and feedback that the full development cycle requires.
Low buy-in and disengagement in talent programs: After running a talent program for one year at her banking organization, Maria Kolesnikoff found weak engagement because stakeholders were never involved in the design.
The HR–business language gap: Maria Kolesnikoff notes that most HR and L&D professionals speak in behaviors and psychology, while leaders respond to numbers and business outcomes.

Actionable Takeaways

Embed development into promotion and compensation criteria: Maria Kolesnikoff redesigned her banking program so candidates needed set study hours, assessment scores, strong talent reviews, an identified successor, and evidence of sharing expertise—all tied to bonus and promotion eligibility.
Use design thinking to co-create programs: Interview representatives from every stakeholder group—business units, HR functions, leaders, and participants. People advocate for programs built from their own ideas.

#33 Building HR Credibility with Boards & Executives with Rachel Sutherland at Respondology

Episode 33

Tuesday, July 21, 2026 • Duration 29:12

Rachel Sutherland is SVP of People & Operations at Respondology, a 50-person venture-backed SaaS company, and she builds HR functions from the ground up at high-growth startups. In this episode of Built by People Leaders, Rachel Sutherland argues that the hardest part of scaling is forcing the founding executive team to stop making every decision and instead build a trusted middle layer that can act without them—her core lens on the startup-to-scaleup transition.

Rachel Sutherland reached people leadership through an unconventional route: an English literature degree, 10 years in publishing, entrepreneurship running brick-and-mortar businesses, then seven years building people functions in startup incubators. The friction she unpacks is specific to companies where founders can no longer sit in every room. Rachel Sutherland calls this "brain dumping" onto a new leadership layer—aligning them, then trusting them to make decisions that may not match how the executive would have done it.

Challenges Addressed

Delegating decision authority: Rachel Sutherland describes the angst executives feel when they push decisions to a new leadership layer and must accept choices that are business-aligned but not exactly their own.
Executive hiring risk: Rachel Sutherland treats executive hires as the highest-stakes decisions in a scaleup, where a wrong hire becomes a six-month mistake that damages a small leadership team.
Stage-specific ceilings: Rachel Sutherland explains how early employees who excel at "zero to one" often cannot carry the company through "one to two," forcing hard layering or exit conversations.

Actionable Takeaways

Design incentives before headcount: Rachel Sutherland supports revenue by building compensation and KPI structures that motivate people to hit targets, and by keeping teams lean so capital funds growth instead of avoidable layoffs.
Ask every colleague what they do: At Respondology, new hires spend 15 minutes with each person to learn the business. Rachel Sutherland uses this same curiosity to spot gaps and overlaps before making org design decisions.
Be an advocate and a truth-teller: Rachel Sutherland builds board and executive trust by fighting for their compensation annually while also delivering hard feedback when leaders get in their own way—never acting as a "yes person."

Questions This Episode Answers

#32 How to Build Workplace Communities with Katherine Hawkins-Jones, Chief People Officer at Somerset Bridge Group

Episode 32

Monday, July 13, 2026 • Duration 30:40

Katherine Hawkins-Jones is Chief People Officer at a UK-based motor insurance company and founder of the People Experience Consultancy PeopleScape. She entered HR from retail and hospitality management, completed her CIPD qualifications, and built over two decades of experience across insurance, financial services, automotive, retail, hospitality, and education — specializing in change and transformation. In this episode, Katherine explains the Bridge Builders model: a system of self-selected, trained employee advocates who launch and sustain internal communities using a shared playbook.

The core friction Katherine unpacks is what happens as a company scales past the point where informal "water cooler" connection holds it together. In a 100–1,500 person organization, junior and newer employees lose visibility to leadership and access to projects, and community initiatives die without structure. Katherine argues that the People team is uniquely positioned to fix this, using its cross-department "aerial view" to connect people who would never otherwise meet.

Challenges Addressed

Informal networks break down as headcount grows: Katherine Hawkins-Jones describes how "water cooler" collisions that once sparked connection and innovation stop scaling once a company spreads across multiple offices and remote workers. Leadership can no longer oversee every relationship directly, so connection needs deliberate structure.
Junior and newer employees get locked out: Katherine shares her own early-career experience of being excluded from working groups and projects, a pattern that repeats for new starters and recently transferred staff who lack access and leadership visibility.
Community initiatives die from lack of structure: Katherine explains that most workplace communities fail because they are launched for the wrong reasons, try to please everyone, and receive no sustained investment, agenda, or scheduled time.

Actionable Takeaways

Appoint self-selected Bridge Builders: Identify natural connectors who volunteer, then train them on your platform tools (Microsoft Teams, Slack), communication, and event planning. Never conscript people, because forced participation kills the organic energy that sustains a community.

Questions This Episode Answers

#31 How Workday Saved 600,000 Hours with AI with Greta Stahl, VP of Organizational Learning

Episode 31

Monday, July 6, 2026 • Duration 29:19

Greta Stahl, Vice President of Organizational Learning and Development at Workday, ran the largest L&D program in the company's 20-year history: Everyday AI, which reached over 85% monthly AI adoption (a 40%+ jump from baseline) and conservatively saved more than 600,000 hours. Greta structured that program on a three-part framework—Mindset, Skill Set, and Habits—and her central argument is that AI delivers value only when organizations redesign roles and embed tools into core workflows, not bolt them onto old processes.

For People and L&D teams in scaling companies, the friction Greta unpacks is concrete: AI gives employees time back, but without clear role design, that time gets reinvested in more low-value busywork instead of strategy, collaboration, and relationship building. Greta details how Workday re-architected its own L&D roles to move people from content execution toward business consulting—proving the shift can be a win for both the business and the people doing the work.

Challenges Addressed

AI creating busywork instead of capacity: Greta Stahl explains that employees who get time back from AI often fill it with more repeatable, low-value work unless their roles are deliberately redesigned to focus on high-value tasks.
Bolt-on tools that fail to deliver ROI: Greta cites research showing only 27% of organizations embed AI into core workflows; the rest run standalone tools that never produce the business value they expect.
Atrophying human skills: As employees spend more of the day working with AI agents, Greta warns that interpersonal skills like relationship building and candid communication can depreciate without intentional investment from HR and L&D.

Actionable Takeaways

Run role redesign with your business partners: Sit down with a business leader this week to map a single workflow—which parts AI handles, which parts the person handles, and where reclaimed time gets reinvested in high-value work.
Build the Mindset, Skill Set, Habits structure: Activate mindset through events (Greta's team ran "Prompt-a-thons"), grow skills with a single learning destination, and build habits through personal goals and usage dashboards employees track themselves.

Questions This Episode Answers

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