Built by People Leaders

Most HR and People leaders don’t have a peer to call when things get hard. This podcast is that conversation.Built by People Leaders brings together HR Directors, Heads of People, CPOs, and founders from fast-growing companies to talk honestly about what it actually takes to build organizations where people and performance move together — not against each other.Hosted by Daria Rudnik — Team Architect, executive coach, former CPO, and author of CLICKING — each episode goes behind the scenes on culture transformation, leadership scaling, team design, and what it means to be a strategic People leader when the company is moving fast.No frameworks without context. No advice without experience. Real conversations from people doing the work.

Built by People Leaders is a business podcast hosted by Daria Rudnik, with 42 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Daria Rudnik hosts Built by People Leaders, a business show with 42 episodes published.

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  Episode #43

  #43 Building HR Influence Without Asking for Permission with Johanna Flórez Restrepo, CPO at CryoHoldco Biotech

  Sep 28, 202623 min

  Johanna Flórez Restrepo is LATAM Chief People Officer at CryoHoldco Biotech, one of the world's top five stem cell banks, with over 15 years leading HR and organizational transformation across 8 countries, 2 continents, and organizations of 120,000+ employees. Her single biggest argument for People leaders: stop asking for a seat at the table and build real influence, so business leaders say "I need you here with me." Johanna Flórez Restrepo teaches a three-part Influence-over-Imposition framework — listen to understand, anchor to the final objective, and match empathy to each person's level. In this episode, Johanna Flórez Restrepo unpacks the friction that hits companies scaling through rapid growth, M&A, and digital transformation: policy and compliance stop working as the primary lever with CEOs and directors, cultural change starts feeling like invisible work, and a single crisis — like a full cyber attack — can put payroll for thousands of employees at risk overnight. For People teams at high-growth companies where the leadership team can no longer oversee everything directly, her operating principles turn HR from rule enforcer into trusted business partner. Challenges Addressed Policy-first HR loses credibility: Johanna Flórez Restrepo explains that leading with rules, compliance, and normative alignment signals "rule enforcer" to CEOs and directors, not strategic partner — and loses the influence battle immediately. Invisible work during transformation: During cultural change, progress feels like nothing is happening; Johanna Flórez Restrepo reframes this marathon-like effort as preventive work that precedes visible results. Speed mismatch in digital transformation: Moving from pharma's multi-year product cycles to a digital business measured in seconds (page load, CTR, conversion) forced Johanna Flórez Restrepo to recalibrate what "urgency" means in People operations. Actionable Takeaways Listen to understand, not to respond: Stay calm, focused, and fully present in executive conversations. Senior leaders in lonely positions share their real fears only when they trust their HR partner is genuinely listening, and that trust earns proximity no title can. Prioritize door one before door ten: In a crisis with fires everywhere, discipline means opening the door that moves you closest to the result first. Enforce rest, nutrition, and boundaries for your team so people stay functional under pressure. Build a support network inside and outside the company: Inside contacts understand your context without a full briefing; outside contacts provide external perspective and prevent tunnel vision. Both protect your judgment when everything feels like a Titanic. Questions This Episode Answers How do I get taken seriously as a strategic business partner instead of a rule enforcer? Johanna Flórez Restrepo argues you build influence, not authority: know the business deeply, listen to leaders' real concerns, and stop leading with policy. When you do this, executives ask for you by name rather than granting you a seat. How should HR lead a company through a cyber attack or major operational crisis? Johanna Flórez Restrepo used three principles when a cyber attack put payroll for 5,000 people across 2 million kilometers at risk: self-awareness of your own triggers, a support network inside and outside the company, and discipline to prioritize what moves you closest to the result. Why does my culture and change management work feel invisible? Johanna Flórez Restrepo reframes this as preventive work that comes before visible work. Cultural change is a marathon — you are still moving toward the result even when progress isn't yet visible, because culture is behavior lived day by day, not policy written on paper. Links & Resources Mentioned: Connect with Johanna Flórez Restrepo on LinkedIn

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  Episode #40

  #40 Cut Turnover 40% in Year One with Clark Ingram, Founder & President of People Profits, ex-CHRO

  Sep 7, 202631 min

  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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  Episode #39

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

  Aug 31, 202629 min

  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. Name the crisis to create psychological distance: Explicitly labelling what is happening lets a team categorise the disruption and step back from it. Frame the conversation through psychological safety — trust and vulnerability — not clinical terms like metacognition. Questions This Episode Answers What is the post-crisis leadership gap and why does it matter? Savio P. Clemente defines it as the period after disruption when performance is still expected but decision-making, confidence, and alignment quietly drift. It matters because organisations win or lose in the recovery phase, not during the emergency itself. How do I rebuild team decision-making after a restructure or major change? Savio recommends first identifying where the decision drift began, then using the ALOHA Reboot and framing discussions around psychological safety. Ask people to recall a past feeling they navigated successfully to unblock action. Who is accountable when a company delegates decisions to AI? Savio argues AI carries no consequence for a bad output, while human leaders do — so AI adoption must stay responsible. Links & Resources Mentioned: Connect with Savio P. Clemente on LinkedIn TEDx Talk: "Seven Minutes to Wellness, How to Love Your Inner Stranger"

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  Episode #38

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

  Aug 28, 202627 min

  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. Measure both the "what" and the "how": David introduced a unified five-point look-back scale that embeds two "how" questions into a weighted rating, reducing bias and evaluating every employee consistently across functions. Questions This Episode Answers How do I make data-driven People decisions when my company is too small to have much data? David González advises running a focused engagement survey with questions relevant to your company, then using AI interview tools that now deliver fast, low-cost qualitative data — even a 50-person startup can interview its leadership team and managers to build a usable data set. How do I add HR structure without slowing down our startup culture? David recommends being surgical and methodical, introducing only infrastructure whose value you can prove with data, and partnering closely with the executive team while iterating over time rather than overlaying heavy process at once. What will HR professionals do once AI handles the admin? According to David González, People professionals become performance architects — extreme executive coaches skilled in conflict resolution, systemic influence, and systems thinking who provide the human judgment, context, and body-language reading that AI cannot replicate. Links & Resources Mentioned: Connect with David González on LinkedIn

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  Episode #37

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

  Aug 17, 202628 min

  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. Map your triggers before you regulate: Dr. Nugent recommends writing down your specific emotional triggers and the patterns that follow—for example, asking "Am I 10-angry or 4-angry?"—because self-awareness alone introduces choice and breaks automatic responses. Questions This Episode Answers How do I stop being the HR referee for every team conflict? Dr. Nugent recommends building conflict capacity across your leadership team through realistic, tension-filled training rather than staying the person who resolves every dispute. When managers develop their own skills, People teams stop being pulled in as the default fixer. My engagement scores are high but no one raises hard truths—is that a red flag? Yes. Dr. Nugent warns that surface calm often hides resignation and cynicism. If no one debates ideas in a leadership meeting at a company facing market pressure, conflict avoidance has calcified, and important decisions are stalling beneath the quiet. How do I give tough feedback to my CEO? Dr. Nugent advises learning how the executive prefers to consume information, pre-framing your feedback with genuine concern for the organization, and accepting short-term discomfort. The truth may not land immediately, but it holds weight over time when events prove it out. Links & Resources Mentioned: Connect with Dr. Irvine Nugent on LinkedIn , where he shares educational conflict-management resources ConflictEQ website with a free conflict-response assessment: https://www.conflicteq.com/

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