The Leadership Disruptor’s Playbook: Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity

Welcome to another powerhouse episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch, where we challenge conventional leadership and unlock breakthrough success. Today we're diving into the Leadership Disruptors Playbook, the game-changing approach that turns chaos into opportunity and builds high-performing teams like never before. Our guest is Ted Santos, CEO of Turnaround Investment Partners, known for his radical strategies that help leaders break through limitations and transform company culture. Ted's approach flips the script on leadership, teaching you how to move from being a problem solver to a problem creator, intentionally fostering challenges that spark innovation and drive explosive growth. In this episode, Ted will walk you through how to master the breakthrough mindset and embrace disruption as a strategic advantage. As well, the art of intentionally creating challenges that ignite innovation. And lastly, leadership strategies to scale the impossible without breaking your company. If you're ready to disrupt the status quo, lead boldly, and achieve what others deem impossible. Then this episode is for you.

Welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms today's managers into tomorrow's powerhouse leaders. Your host, Bernadette Boas, executive coach and author, brings you into a world where the corporate grind meets personal growth and success in each and every episode. With more than 25 years in corporate trenches, Bernadette's own journey from being dismissed as a tyrant boss to becoming a sought-after leadership coach and speaker illustrates the very essence of transformation that she now inspires in others with her tips, strategies and stories. So if you're ready to shed the bitches of fear and insecurity, ditch the imposter syndrome, and step into the role of the powerhouse leader you were born to be, this podcast is for you. Let's do this.

Ted, how are you? Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I'm doing very well. How about yourself?

I am doing fabulous. I— and I'm so excited to actually have this conversation with you. Because as we talked about right before we got onto the program, leaders need a lot of help to understand really how to navigate the chaos that is the business world anymore. But before we get into our subject for today, I'd love our listeners and our viewers to really get to know our guests personally. So could you share a little bit about Ted?

Sure. So I have had some things happen in my life that shaped me in a way that I would have never imagined it would have shaped me. So these were things that occurred, and the way they benefited me, I had never really shared it because I didn't distinguish them as something that would, one, interest people, and two, you know, misfortune can sometimes be your fortune. And one of the ways that helps me explain to people what did happen, our author Malcolm Gladwell, he wrote a book called David and Goliath. And in that book, he talks about exactly how David was disadvantaged and how some of our misfortune or disadvantages turn into our fortunes. So my first misfortune happened when I was at the age of 6. It was actually on New Year's Day, and I saw my mother run with broken legs. At the time, I did not know she had two broken legs, but it was New Year's Eve. She took her— at the time, there were only three children, and I'm the oldest— and we went to her mother's for New Year's Eve. And she has quite a few brothers and sisters. They were there, friends and family. It was a great time. And my father, he did not join us. So we go, we're leaving. I don't know, maybe it's 4, 5, 6 in the morning. It's all I know is it's dark and I'm sleepy. So I'm in the front, myself and my siblings are on the front seat because my mother dropped her brother and his wife off at their house. And she said, ah, 15-minute drive, I'll leave them. I won't wake them up. So we sat there and then bang, I wake up and the car is wrapped around a tree. I've got cut, broken nose, and my brother and sisters were all bleeding. And I look over, my mother's gone. And I'm just tall enough to look over the dashboard, and I watch her run. She didn't limp, crawl, she just ran. I had seen my mother run in my long 6 years of life. I had already seen her run quite a few times. And then my father comes down in no time, and he and his cousin carry us out. We go to the hospital, and I hear my mother had broken two broken legs, broken arm.

Ouch.

And I'm— now my life has changed forever because I saw her run like normal. In my mind, I'm thinking human beings have a capacity and we don't know how to get to it. So I am going to understand whatever that is and learn how to pull it out on purpose so that you don't have to be in such in extreme circumstance. So at, at 9, I start literally researching human behavior so I can understand how human beings and the mind and people work. At 11, I start exercising, you know, push-ups, sit-ups. I want to build this nice cut-up body. And when I hit high school, I'm 5'6", I'm dunking basketballs. I— and I don't like basketball. I ran track and played football, but in football I played on the defensive line, which as defensive nose guard. Technically, that should be the biggest guy on the field, and I weighed 143 pounds at 5'6", and I was a starting defensive nose guard, and I did a great job in that position. So my mother's broken legs gave me this advantage because even when I trained for track and football, I had this mindset, and I couldn't tell people this is that I was training to run with broken legs. I was training to have that kind of mindset and performance. So if people were to ask me, why do you train so hard? I could— I would not have been able to express that then. Fast forward, I'm 21. There are now 4 children and I lose both parents in one day. And now I am the head of the family.

Wow.

And So there's still that running with broken legs. And now I'll go to Malcolm Gladwell's book. In his book, he talks about how people who lose parents around the age of 20, uh, tend to be really good leaders because they learn to lead in chaos. They learn lots of things about leadership. So I learned how to coach my sisters who were 12 and 16. My brother was 19. He had full-ride football scholarship, so I take him off to college. And my sisters, I need 12 and 16-year-old girls to do things. They— it's not that they don't know how to do them, they don't even know they don't know how to do these things, right? So I asked them to do things knowing they would fail, and instead of telling them how to do it, I became Socrates, and I would ask them questions. And they go do it, they fail, they come back, I ask more questions, they They fail, they come back, and until they would learn how to figure it out. And then over time, they develop a new capacity for solving problems, and I could ask them to do it, they would figure out on their own how to solve it. And when I was then as a manager, Chief Operating Officer, I found myself doing the same thing. How do you coach people up to do things they don't know how to do? Or to solve problems so that they don't come to me to solve problems, at least for the normal day-to-day, no matter how chaotic. And, and one of the things that I read in Malcolm Gladwell's book, David and Goliath, the people who lost parents at that age, they said when they were running companies that were in chaos, they said, I have seen more chaos than this so I can work it through.

That is beautiful. Beautiful. Sorry you had to go through that. But on the flip side, what a wonderful takeaway. What a wonderful growth experience and opportunity for yourself. That's— yeah, that's absolutely fabulous. And it kind of is a great segue into what we're going to talk about in regards to the Leadership Disruptors Playbook, because the one thing that you talk about is the fact that Leaders have to be really good, not only problem solvers, but you talk about that you also want them to be problem creators and create challenges and disrupt things. So could you help us understand how that plays into the way a leader can really excel in their role?

Sure. Disrupt your org— if you're the CEO, either disrupt your organization or your competition will. And when they disrupt you, you may go out of business, or it will be expensive to play catch-up. So if you're the CEO, if you are not intentionally creating problems for your organization to solve, you should be fired or retrained immediately. And if we look at John F. Kennedy, when he said, "Before the end of the decade, we will send a man to the Moon," that was an example of him creating this new possibility, this new future that no one knew how to do, and it disrupted whatever the normal trajectory was for the United States, that altered it. And I've met people who were old enough to have been in college during that time, and they said they changed their major because they wanted to contribute to sending a man to the moon. So disruption can have that kind of impact where it galvanizes people and it becomes a platform where people want to support and create and, and do something that they haven't done, that they can be part of that historical moment.

Nice. Now, using that premise of really creating problems, let's take it down from the CEO into each even the middle managers to senior leaders who also need to have that mindset, that need to bring in that disruption. Give us some examples of what you've seen and experienced, even in the work that you've done, that they can then relate to saying, oh, okay, now I understand what I should be doing on a day-in, day-out basis.

So if, if you look at it tactically, and it doesn't matter if you are middle management, supervisor, or senior. One of the things that I've seen be very effective is, first, your direct reports. You need to understand, almost like an inventory, their intellectual capital, like what their skills and competencies are. And everyone, like what I'm saying to you, I I had transferable skills. So I transferred skills from, you know, my parents' death to running an organization. Everyone has some transferable skill that they value, and it may not be being leveraged in, in a corporation. So as a leader, it's your job to like, know people. And, and so me starting to research human, you know, behavior at 9 gave me a huge advantage of knowing people. And one of the things that I've seen leaders do that's effective is ask your people to do things they don't know how to do and be okay with them failing. But it's something that's sort of tangential, something that moves them in a a direction that they normally wouldn't. And it's a way of mining untapped skills and competencies in your people.

And there's endless things that could be worked on, right? Because I can, I can imagine somebody sitting there going, well, I don't know what I could give them or what that problem is. So that's where creativity comes in.

Well, the simplest way is delegating. So you as a leader, there are things on your plate, and if you were to delegate one thing to a direct report that they normally don't do, you, you would be surprised what it does to your relationship. One, it sends a message that I trust you. Two, you'll, you'll have to coach them up and help them become better, and this makes them more valuable to the organization, more valuable to you, and you have a, a much better collaborative relationship with, with your direct report. And you'll be surprised that they're happy to take it on. And, and they in turn may have to delegate to one of their direct reports, right? So it, it, it has almost like this trickle-down effect, you know. So you delegate, they delegate, that person delegates. So everyone in the organization, in your division, or team is becoming better, which allows you to take on bigger things. So as you delegate, that allows you to go create problems for yourself, to go learn something. So if you're a middle manager, maybe being able to read financial statements really effectively and then be able to create budgets for your division and being able to take that, that to your direct report, I mean, to your, to your leading up to your boss and say, hey, these are the things that I'm working on. I've never created a budget. I'm doing that now. Can you help me? So instead of you waiting for them to delegate something to you, go to them. Kind of creating a problem for your boss to coach you up, but it allows you to become more valuable to your boss and to the organization.

I have to tell you, I was considered a problem creator throughout my career. From the very, from the very, I think it was my parents, you know, and I always went looking for something that was broken that needed to be fixed. And that's how I got promoted and leveraged and leveled up as a result of that. So I absolutely agree with you. And I love that financial example, because there's a lot of middle managers who will say, I need financial acumen, but I don't have time to go get it. And I think what you're saying is, Create problems that are delegated to other people. That'll open up time for you to, to go and get that, get that experience. Now, you, you use the term coach up multiple times.

Yes.

Do you find that many leaders struggle to understand how to coach up their people?

Yes, where I see it the most, where you have these people who are really, really smart, like these high AAs who know how to do it all, and they are not good at delegating. And so as a result, they don't invest time coaching people up. To them, it may seem like 'Ah, it takes too long, you know, I, I can just do it myself,' but for themselves, which is, as their company grows or their division grows, they have to hire a whole new crew of direct reports because the people under them haven't grown with the organization or, or the division. And so now they are frustrated. It's like, oh, my people have all these limits. But part of your job as a leader is to actually bring more out of people than they know how to bring out of themselves. You know, Tom Watson Jr., the son of the founder of IBM, he, in the 1960s, he said, we're going to go into the business of mainframe computers. Really? Yes, that's going to be our breakthrough. And this is your budget, and this is the time you have. And they went over time, and they went over budget. He said, I will allocate more money, and you have more time. And they went over that time, and they went over that budget. And he said, we're going to do this. But so as you can see, this is a problem. It's a problem for the people. They don't know how to do it. We've never done it. And now we're burning more cash than we allocated and we burn through time. And he said, well, more money, more time. And eventually they did. And that put IBM on the map as a— yeah, as right, really big. We have these mainframes. They were the leaders in that. But there was a huge commitment from the CEO, and he was okay with his people not getting it right the first time. I will allocate more money and more time. So as, as a leader, are you coaching your people up, ensuring they have the resources to actually accomplish the things that will put your organization on the map in a big way? I mean, Steve Jobs is a guy who we all know that there's a professional troublemaker Right there, Steve Jobs.

Yes, he was. So a professional troublemaker. If a team wants to grow, if a business wants to grow, if the company wants to grow, they need to be finding and they need to be challenging every one of their employees to find those opportunities, find those challenges, find those problems for them to solve, create, and then innovate on, right?

Let me tell you, one of the side benefits to intentionally disrupting your— disrupting your people is when there are economic changes, when COVID shows up, when things happen. The Black Swan. Are you familiar with that book, The Black Swan? When black swans do occur, it's really advantageous to have a team, a corporation that's nimble enough to be able to make those shifts when you have to. I mean, COVID was a black swan, right? No one saw that coming. I mean, there are people who will say, I saw it, but as a general rule, the most people on the planet didn't see COVID coming. And, and there are other incidents like that that occur, and you just didn't see it coming. So How nimble is your team? How can they change or transform in the face of disruption? Disruption happens. So if your people are trained to be disrupted, when other disruptions happen, they're not thrown off. It's almost like Navy SEALs are trained to deal with chaos and disruption, right? So how do you train your people? Without putting them through Navy SEAL training to be more effective, right, in the, in the face of chaos and disruption. And, you know, one of the things that I, I suggested was asking your people to do things they do not know how to do. That's one way to do that. When, when you are asking your people to create a mainframe and we've never done it, that's, that's a problem. You're creating a problem for them to solve.. And when it's solved, you have a breakthrough for the organization.

So Ted, what do you tell leaders who say, I just don't have time. I have far too much on my plate already. I have my calendar is completely full. What do you tell them to kind of smack them into waking up and not making this excuse that they don't have time to create disruption?

When people hire me, they often think they are hiring me to come in and solve problems. They don't know that I'm actually coming in to create problems. So, so the— but before we start talking about executing a breakthrough initiative, the first thing that I do is help them uncover blind spots and mental barriers. So there's a method And I, I could, you could say what I have is a, as a technology, it is a mindset technology that transforms the way people, the way they think, the way they see themselves, their, their employees and their, their customers. And if you don't do that, they will go into the conversation of a breakthrough with exactly what you said. My people are not ready, the economy is not right, I have too much on my plate. Blah, you know, there's a long list of reasons why they cannot. But when you disrupt the preconceived notions they have about self, the world, customers, you know, what, what innovation is possible, that frees them up. So you, you help people unlearn the things that you said so that they can pursue things that may have been right in front of them and they just couldn't see it.

Do you find them to be open to that or are they resistant to it?

Uh, I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't have some resistance to it. The smarter you are, the, you know, you, you, there's so much you already know. I'll give you an example. I had a client, Wharton MBA, smart guy, played, you know, played basketball at, at University of North Carolina. I think it was the same college Michael Jordan attended. So he was an athlete and a Wharton MBA, really smart guy, worked in one of the big brokerage houses in M&A and made a ton of money. And then one day decided to go out on his own, was able to secure funding, and he started doing a roll-up. He wanted to buy companies in a certain industry, and he had purchased 3 companies already. And he said to me, he hired me in the month of February, and fast forward, we hit December. What he said to me was, I hired you to be a consultant who was going to confirm the things that I already knew, and you were just going to help me, you know, justify and give me some intelligence that allowed me to execute things that I knew, and I could justify it to my team. And then he said, but I was almost ready to fire you because I meet with you, you know, twice a month, and you're the guy I lean on that I'm going to help me solve my problems. And I come to you with a problem, and instead of you solving my problem, you start asking me all of these questions and I'm getting angry, and I, and I pay you a monthly retainer, and I'm coming to meet you with a check in my hand to pay a guy who won't solve my problems. He makes me solve them myself. And he said, I was furious and asking myself, why am I going to see this guy? Like, why am I paying a guy who won't solve a problem for me, right? And then he said, it hit him that I was asking him questions he wasn't asking himself, and no one in his organization was asking these questions. And he said, my God, it's helping me see things that I normally do not see. And he said, so my plan was to fire you in December, and here we are in December, and there's no way I'm going to fire you. In fact, I have a problem today, and I know you're going to ask me a bunch of questions. So let's get started. Okay, here's my problem. Hit me with your questions. So that's an example. You know, even currently I have a client that says, I don't even know if you're asking a Socratic approach, you're asking questions. And he said, I've actually seen others get upset because you, you force us to think in a way we normally don't. And it sometimes can be embarrassing. That you're learning things about yourself in real time and you don't have the answers, right? So, so asking questions is, is, is one way, and you'll get resistance, but it overall, in my methodology, it really helps people look at themselves and uncover things about themselves that they didn't even know they didn't know.

Self-awareness is a beautiful thing, isn't it?

I think this is even beyond self-awareness because there are things you don't know you don't know about yourself that, that create the blind spots that have you be upset about questions or have you tell your people, I don't have time for this, I just have to do it like you, I'm in a rush, or I have to— you have to be the smartest in the room. There are so many ways, and if you can't distinguish sort of the genesis of how you became that way, it just being aware of yourself is, is kind of not good enough because you're only going to ask questions based on what you already know.

That's beautiful point. Awesome.

So transformation, I become sort of like a tour guide of yourself and your life. In transformation to help you uncover things that you just couldn't see on your own, because we, we are generally not given the tools for this in our education system.

Would you say all of this that we've been talking about is part of your Leadership Disruptions playbook?

Absolutely.

I do have to kind of skew a little bit Sure, away from that for a second because I got very curious about something with you. Is you, you have a book and it's called Here's Why You Can't Find Love. Now what I found interesting about it is when I looked into it, you bring business and personal relationship together when you describe it. So could you share with us a little bit about what your book, Here's Why You Can't Find Love, is about?

Sure. So I wrote the book because, for one, divorce rate is over 50%, and that can't be good for any society. Uh, two, and here's where we connect it to business, corporate America— maybe you know the answer, but if you do, great— but corporate America is losing $300 $300 billion, not million, $300 billion every year because of workplace productivity. Do you know why?

Absenteeism, loneliness from their people.

Those are actually good, but I'll whittle it down to one word. Divorce.

Wow.

So what they have found is people going through divorce, their workplace productivity drops by 50 to 75%. Now with 50% of your— 53 or 55% of your population going through divorce, that's a lot of people who are distracted and not performing well in the workplace. That's a problem. And, and $300 billion loss We're pretending like it doesn't exist. It's like this invisible hand sucking, really, revenue out of a company. And so when your people are not productive, you just tend to get rid of people. You start laying people off, and you don't lay off the people going through divorce. You just let randomly lay off people. And it's something that's just not discussed. We are pretending like it's not happening. So it's, it's like we're rushing to have these great corporations that are innovative and they're growing and, and we're slitting our wrists at the same time.

Oof. Oof. And so Here's Why You Can't Find Love leans on what type of concepts or ideas?

The things that I'm talking about, uncovering blind spots, transforming mindset. I infused that into a book about a on a topic that most people can understand and relate to. Most people have had some intimate relationship in their life. So it's, it's a common ground, but I infuse my business advisory coaching into something that is common. So it shows that it's transferable. So it applies in the workplace and it applies into your personal life. If you could learn many of these skills that make you more effective at work, like conflict resolution. So when, when your leader creates a problem for you to solve, one of the things it does is it puts people in conflict with themselves. Hey, look, we've never done this. I don't know how. And now the ultimate conflict is, if we go in this direction, I may be not very competent in this. So maybe I'm no longer relevant in the workplace, I could lose my job. However, if I sabotage this project, I get to stay and keep doing what I'm already good at. So that people don't manage that conflict with themselves, and creating problems can have people conflict with other team members. So if you become more efficient, more effective in conflict resolution, and you take that home with your spouse, you will be more effective at resolving conflict with your spouse, with your children. And I'm willing to bet most marriages have dissolved because of some conflict that really wasn't a big deal. People just didn't know how to resolve it.

Amen, amen, amen, amen. Seriously, you can look around and watch and, and experience personally, and you can absolutely see that scenario, those scenarios happening. I love that.

Thank you. The book literally takes people on a journey of transformation. That's what the reader goes through. And opposed to me just writing words down and say, these are Ted-isms or a TED Talk from the real Ted. It's a book over a real incident where there are 5 women at a party and they're interviewing me and they're like, kind of like, Ted, you know, so what is it you want from a relationship? What would you want from a woman? And, but you're a guy, and how could you say that? And so there's this back and forth dynamic with 5 women, and, and it's an extremely engaging conversation. And each woman has their own, you know, personality and way of asking. And so it allows the woman to— I mean, the reader to go on a journey You know, like they're in a workshop when they're writing the book. So the, the book provides people with skills that make them, I would say, more competent first in choosing someone who's compatible for you in a relationship, because that tends to be what keeps people together, the compatibility. And, and so knowing things about yourself that perhaps you didn't know and, and having distinctions for what could derail your relationship or derail you or put you in conflict. Also being a more efficient communicator, which also is important in the workplace. If you learn many of these skills at work and you take them home, life will be better, and so will the workplace.

What would you say would be one thing you would want our leaders who are listening and watching to do like, right now, that can start getting them on the path of really becoming a disruptive leader?

Many of these leaders already have this idea, this sort of legacy they'd like to leave behind, this, this thing they'd like to accomplish, except it's not the right time. My people are not ready. You kind of have that. Most people. And, and so the question is, what would be a breakthrough for you and your team or your enterprise? And second is delegate two things so that you can now dedicate time to that breakthrough initiative. Strategically delegate, delegate one thing to one person, another thing to another, and coach them up and understand why you are delegating this to them and how it supports the growth in their career. And then it frees you up so that you can go and focus on any skills and competencies you need to develop in, in your own mindset, and you're able to actually take on this new possibility. I mean, I mean, if you just think about it, a major job of any leader is to be in the business of creating new possibilities, not to maintain status quo. If you are there and you are just maintaining your company, you're headed for obsolescence. You just don't know it yet, or you're in denial.

Great way to bring it all together and cap it off. Thank you so much, Ted. But before you go, I just want to remind everyone, please go to turnaround ip.com and check out all the work that he's, he's doing and how he could support you as well. Follow him on LinkedIn, look for Ted Santos, and you'll easily locate him as well on Amazon. His book, Here's Why You Can't Find Love. Ted, thank you so much. This has been fabulous.

Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

You're welcome. What a powerhouse conversation with Ted Santos of Turnaround Investment Partners. The whole idea of being a problem creator is so exciting. Think about it. You just don't want to be solving the problems that, you know, already exist. That's pretty much, even Ted would say, probably status quo. What you wanna be doing to really ignite innovation, as he says, is to go and create problems that need to be solved and then actually delegate and assign your people to go and solve those problems to give them an opportunity to learn and to grow. He talked about the fact that you really need to ask your people to do something that they don't know how to do. Why is that? Then they'll learn new skills. They'll learn how to solve problems. They'll learn how to engage other resources and really team and seek out what is needed in order to solve those problems. So it's a great way to do two things. One, delegate to others so you open up some space on your calendar or on your to-do list where you can then be creating bigger and better opportunities and challenges and problems and innovations. And then at the same time, you're also coaching up, as Ted calls it, your people. So then they feel more valued, more engaged, more important to the business because they are too learning and developing and growing. I absolutely loved it, and I hope you did as well. And if you did, please be sure to share it with your colleagues, with your team members. At the same time, be sure to follow the show. You can go to ballofirecoaching.com/podcast and follow us on any one of your podcast streaming services or even on our Shed the Corporate Bitch TV YouTube channel. And also, if you happen to have a challenge that you're dealing with yourself beyond what we talked about today, just in regards to becoming a powerhouse leader, then let's talk. You can go to coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall and allow me to understand what it is that you're dealing with, give you some tips and strategies, and point you in the right direction. I'll look forward to having you right back here for another episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch.

Bye.

Thank you for tuning into today's episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch. Every journey taken together is another step towards unleashing the powerhouse leader within you. Don't miss any of our weekly episodes. Subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. And for those who thrive on visual content, catch us on our Shedding the Bitch YouTube channel. Wanna dive deeper with Bernadette on becoming a powerhouse leader? Visit balloffirecoaching.com to learn more about how she helps professionals, HR executives, and team leaders elevate overall team performance. You've been listening to Shedding the Corporate Bitch with Bernadette Boas. Until next time, keep shedding, keep growing, and keep leading.