The Hidden Cost of Broken Relationships: Ted Santos on Leadership and Productivity

Welcome to another episode of the Transforming Lives panel podcast, where we delve into groundbreaking ideas and transformative strategies with industry leaders. Today, we're thrilled to introduce Ted Santos, a leadership disruptor and CEO whisperer known for his unconventional approach to business growth. Ted challenges the status quo by teaching leaders to create problems as a means to achieve breakthrough growth, turning struggling companies into market leaders. In this episode, we explore his unique methodologies, the impact of personal struggles on workplace productivity, and the intriguing insights from his book on how broken relationships cost U.S. businesses billions annually. Join us as we flip the leadership playbook upside down and discover how to think bigger, act bolder, and dominate your industry.

Speaker 3
Welcome to another episode of the Transforming Lives panel podcast. I'm Sharmin Prince, one of your hosts.

Speaker 2
And I'm Mitzy Dadoun your other host.

Speaker 3
And before I introduce you to our guests, just join me in a brief breathing exercise so that we can be centered and grounded. Join me in taking a deep breath in, And out. In. And out.

Take a deep breath in. And on the exhale, let go of everything that did not serve you today. Take another deep breath in. And hold that breath so that you can be present with yourself.

And exhale all the distractions. And breathe normally. Thank you for joining us for that brief breathing exercise. Now today, I am excited to introduce you to Ted Santos, a leadership disruptor, CEO whisperer, and the mastermind behind the disruptive leadership model.

While most strategists teach leaders to solve problems, Ted trains them to create problems. Yes, you heard that correct. Because breakthrough growth demands breaking the rules. From turning struggling companies into market leaders, to doubting productivity in months, Ted's unconventional strategies help businesses scale the impossible without breaking themselves.

But his insight don't stop in the boardroom. His groundbreaking book, Here's Why You Can't Find Love. exposes how broken relationships drain U.S. businesses of 300 billion a year and gives leaders the tools to fix the hidden leaks sabotaging their success. If you're ready to think bigger, act bolder, and dominate your industry, this conversation will flip your leadership playbook upside down.

Ted Santos, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1
Well, quite an introduction. Thank you for having me here. I'm looking forward to this. Sounds like I have quite a reputation to live up to.

I don't know if you may have overstated me, but thank you for that. That was pretty powerful. Thank you.

Speaker 3
You are so welcome.

Speaker 2
So when you're working with somebody and you're helping them make these types of transformations, how does working with you look? Like, is it a, five week program, does it vary by different person? Can you kind of elaborate a little bit more about what it's like to work with you and go through the experience of making this type of a transformation?

Speaker 1
Sure. The gentleman in the mortgage industry worked with me for six months and he was satisfied, but most people work with me significantly longer than that, especially CEO looking to create breakthrough initiatives throughout it and be able to navigate through that. It's usually multiple years, and sometimes, especially if they're doing acquisitions, I've worked with companies that had an aggressive acquisition strategy. So I end up working with some of the other executives that they've acquired who are now doing other things in a bigger organization.

Speaker 2
So when you're working with somebody, do you have them go through a series of different exercises or activities or things that help create these new neuroplastic things or I guess just kind of elaborate a little bit without giving away your secret sauce about how the process works.

Speaker 1
So it's not transformation just for the sake of I want to transform. I often have people create a breakthrough initiative. So whatever that initiative is, that's where they're able to practice. The simple way to say it, they're developing new skills and competencies, and they have a place to focus it and where they get to practice those.

So usually, it's a. bi-weekly. They'll see me every other week for two hours, but it's sometimes it's very different. Sometimes I'm within the company and I'm working with several people in the course of a day, but it's me engaging them and partly it's exercises.

I use a lot whiteboards, but most of it is working with them to be able to distinguish the way they've always done things And then the other side is being able to create these new commitments, declaring a new future, and it's something that pulls them in a direction that's not their normal trajectory. I'll give you an example of Let's say Henry Ford said – he declared most households would own an automobile. That's a huge future to create, and how do you do that?

And so that declaration, most households will own an automobile, now shapes your actions. just by declaring that when you're committing to it. It's not like a pipe dream. It's not airy-fairy.

It's something to which you really commit. And for him to have most households own an automobile, he had to work out a way to make cars more efficiently than everyone else at the time. It took nine months to make an automobile, and he got it down to nine days and then nine hours. So the assembly line was one way for him to fulfill that commitment.

Now, that's really important. Does that answer your question?

Speaker 2
Yes, yeah, it's going to be a good sort of example to draw on the same thing as you're saying, for example, when Kennedy said that we're going to put a man on the moon,

Speaker 1
he made

Speaker 2
that declaration and then all activity is focused in on how do we make this happen? So when you're weighing in everything, it's always with that end goal in mind.

Speaker 1
Right. Look at it as a paradigm. We have a paradigm that we inherit, the human paradigm, and we do things a certain way. So I've lived abroad, I've lived in the jungle with Indians, no electricity or running water, and I saw the same human paradigm there.

I saw it when I went to Greenland, I've seen it You know, people are born, they learn to walk, talk, they eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, they drink liquids. These are all part of the human paradigm. No matter what language you speak, there's so much that we can relate to with one another. When you want to create a new paradigm that does not exist, It's sort of like, we go back to Ford.

Henry Ford said, if I would have asked people what they wanted in terms of transportation, they would have said faster horses. But he had to create an entirely new paradigm. I'm going to create an automobile that most of you can afford. And that has a very distinct language than riding horses.

So the new paradigm has a very distinct way of being, a way of thinking, and a language that goes with that. As you said, he declared a man to the moon, and that shaped actions for people throughout the entire United States.

Speaker 3
Excellent. When it comes to paradigm shifts, it's understandable for individuals. But how do you turn a struggling company into market leaders? Like what's that first move that you make when a business is stuck?

Speaker 1
First, you need to understand what's the current state that we're in before you come in and start making changes. The first step is to really understand. You interview people, you'll hear conversations like our culture is toxic or it's a plague. Anyone, even if you hire a high performer, they're going to catch what we have and they'll eventually be just like us.

So those are the conversations. There's a certain language that people will have in a struggling company about how difficult things are, bureaucracy, unspoken policies of favoritism. You'll hear all of that in a company that's not doing well. Social anthropologists say a culture for a country, a business, a family, a city, there's a network of conversations.

So that's why I was saying just a few minutes ago that in a new paradigm that there's a new language you create a new language there are new conversations and those conversations shape the actions now part of that also. is having people within the company create their own breakthrough initiatives that are in service to the CEO's breakthrough initiative. So that gets people it's not about getting people engaged it's raising the commitment level of people's contribution to the success of the organization so. A few things happen.

When you create a problem that's big enough, like Kennedy sending a man to the moon, that's the CEO's job. He's just created a problem, and now his people have to solve it. They're creating breakthrough initiatives to be in service to that problem that they are solving, that the CEO created. And what often happens is they have to now engage one another, collaborate.

It increases collaboration, because I created a project, except I need Mary over here to help me, and I need John over there to help me do something else. So it's bringing the departments and different people together, so they're talking more, and you've disrupted the way they already always are thinking. Like, the culture is this, this is the way it is, and you hear people say, it is what it is, and there's nothing you can do about it. And that's just a huge myth.

I mean, nothing is what it is. I mean, that's that is a conversation talking about the isness of the world and how people get stuck with the way it is and feeling helpless. Sort of going back to the guy in the mortgage industry. You know, I'm a guy who makes jokes.

I'm a funny guy. And people walk away. They like me. And it is what it is.

And there's nothing we can I can do about it.

Speaker 3
Thank you, Ted. I want to shift gears and talk a little about your book. Your book ties broken relationships to $300 billion in loss of productivity. Right.

How do personal struggles secretly sabotage a leader's bottom line.

Speaker 1
Sure, so there's an organization called Life Innovation. They are the ones that found that it's $300 billion in workplace productivity being lost to divorce. And I guess you can throw bad relationships, bad breakups in there also. What was also found is that when people are dealing with divorce, their workplace productivity drops by 50% to 75%.

I know this is anecdotal, but I have a friend married 25 years. He and his wife had five children and she wanted a divorce. And after the divorce, he took one year off from work because he knew that he wouldn't be very productive now. He could afford to take a year off.

Most people cannot. So they just go to work, punch in and think about How I'm going to recalibrate my life here and also think about this Breakup that most people do not get married to intentionally have a divorce. So, you know, you're Rethinking what went wrong? What's wrong with me all these conversations you're having That makes it very difficult to focus on work So imagine you have a large corporation and there's a percentage of your employees headed for a divorce, another percentage are in the middle of it, and there's another percentage that just

came out of it. That can be a lot of people who are not as productive as they normally are. And so when your company is not as productive, well, it might make sense to lay some people off. which you don't lay off the people dealing with divorce, you randomly lay off people and some of those people laid off are now going to have financial strain, which may send them on the path of, you have a whole new crop of people headed for divorce now.

So we are running businesses and no one is addressing this. It's just not, we're running businesses as though it's not happening.

Speaker 2
So from your, so what can people do to help their employees as they're dealing with this? What are some of the recommendations that you have in relationship, in relation to this?

Speaker 1
So you're looking for an answer?

Speaker 2
Give us some ideas.

Speaker 1
Oh, that's not an answer. OK, what am I talking about? It's a good question. So when you think of corporate social responsibility, what do you think of?

Speaker 2
Treating people well, doing no harm. making the world a better place than it was. Okay. Those types of things.

Speaker 1
Okay. Charmin, when you think of corporate social responsibility?

Speaker 3
I, the first thing came to mind is EAP. Um, because I, I remember as an executive, when my direct reports have personal problems, I send them to EAP.

Speaker 1
What's

Speaker 3
EAP? It's an assistance program where they go and speak to a counselor and they have, I think, three or four free sessions. So, It's a quick fix, but it's something that I use. And when you ask that question, that's the first thought that

Speaker 1
came to mind.

Speaker 3
All

Speaker 1
right. Where do you send the problem child, right? Send them to EAP, right? Yeah.

Detention. So, uh, have you, do you think about the environment when you think about corporate social responsibility, fossil footprints and how, how they impact the environment?

Speaker 2
Yes, I do, but not as much as some of the other things that I mentioned.

Speaker 1
Oh, interesting. OK, good. So I assert that the next level of corporate social responsibility is. Providing people.

With a skill and competency base that they can take home that will mitigate divorce, so one of the biggest They asked executives, I forget who asked the question, what would be the number one skill you would want to develop as an executive? And the number one was conflict resolution. And I would say most marriages fall apart because the people are not as good with conflict resolution as they need to be. Lots of marriages fall apart, not necessarily because there's a problem, It appears to be a problem, and we respond to the way it appears to be.

We go back to the minefield. The mine in our mind goes off, and it takes us on a tangent. And now we are combative with our mate. And it was really just a misunderstanding.

And you get a few misunderstandings, and they snowball, and now you have a relationship that falls apart. So when people are better at conflict resolution when they're good at it. What you learn, the essence of conflict resolution almost never has anything to do with the other person or the situation. It's the conflict that you're in that's unresolved and you're now projecting it out on to the other person or situation.

So being able to unlearn those minds that are in your mind and they no longer trigger because you've resolved them, you're no longer in conflict and you have a better chance of being able to address what's occurring as opposed to being dominated by that mind in your own mind. Does that make sense when I put it that way?

Speaker 3
It makes a lot of sense and I have a million questions for you, you know, so that you can unpack that, but I am going to, to hold those questions because I'm going to invite you back. Because my mind is saying to me, or I'm thinking. The importance of having courageous conversations. When while you're speaking, and oftentimes we have all the skills in the boardroom.

But it seems difficult to translate the skills that we use in the boardroom that are effective, efficient, and productive into our personal lives. Because sometimes we think that those two are separate.

Speaker 1
Good point. So it's not like we're bananas that we peel off one thing, go to work, and then put the peeling back on and go home. We're the same person.

Speaker 3
Yeah.

Speaker 1
Right. So what triggers us at home triggers us in the boardroom. The distinction between the two is in the boardroom and in the corporate world, business world, We are given, we're taught what business etiquette is. We're taught what it means to be a professional.

And you're still triggered. And what you find is people don't overtly express the trigger. They find another way to level the playing field and get back at you. So the boss who's always yelling at people People will say, oh, I forgot, and they know they didn't, but it's just a way I got you back for that.

I didn't like when you yelled at me. I saw in one corporation, and this is a Fortune 50 company, people would spend two weeks researching ways to prove that this initiative can't work, as opposed to spending two weeks looking for how it could work. And it was a guy back for something I didn't like that you did in the past.

Speaker 2
Also, when we come back, I'd be very interested to the discussion on how artificial intelligence and AI and everything that's coming about is affecting this, if it is, world. Ted, how can people get in touch with you to find out more, to work with you? Tell us a little bit about that, please.

Speaker 1
Sure. You can find me on LinkedIn at Ted Santos, or you can find me on my website at turnaroundip.com. The company is Turnaround Investment Partners. So Turnaround IP, IP is like investmentpartners.com.

Speaker 3
Excellent. Thank you, Ted. But before you go, I love to end with some rapid fire questions. Sure.

And I have a few for you.

Speaker 1
Let's do it. So I'm sorry.

Speaker 3
Solve problems or create them. Pick one.

Speaker 1
Oh, I've always loved creating problems even for myself. Yes.

Speaker 3
The most overrated leadership advice.

Speaker 1
Oh. Servant leadership.

Speaker 3
Oh, no, you just.

Speaker 1
Why do you think I took a breath? Oh, God. Here I go.

Speaker 3
I'm a James Autry girl. You just heard me. OK. One word to describe the future of leadership.

Speaker 1
Hmm. Wow, one word. Disruptive.

Speaker 3
Best way to sabotage growth without realizing it.

Speaker 1
Make up a story about what's actually happening and yeah. Make up a story in your head about what's happening.

Speaker 3
Chaos, threat or opportunity?

Speaker 1
My lover. Opportunity.

Speaker 3
A leader you would love to disrupt.

Speaker 1
Leader I would love to disrupt. Tim Cook.

Speaker 3
The book that change how you lead.

Speaker 1
There was no book.

Speaker 3
I did that. Hmm.

Speaker 1
I'd have to tell you my. A couple of life events that made that happen.

Speaker 3
So that's a second. Yes. Return. One thing you'd ban.

from every boardroom?

Speaker 1
Yeah, that's a difficult one. Ban from a boardroom. Meetings after the... No, no, because you have...

You can't do that. I don't have an answer for that. Because you have committees that you have meetings after the meeting, so...

Speaker 3
And my last one. A productivity hack that actually works.

Speaker 1
Productivity hack. Commit to doing, break your day up in time. So no one can manage time, but you can manage what you do in time. So if you break up your day and from, let's say from 7 to 8, and I do XYZ from 7 to 8, and at 8 o'clock, that's it.

I move to the next one. And you can even within that as you break off in one hour or 30 minute or 15 minutes, you can even schedule in when you're going to manage breakthroughs or disruptions. So that way you don't get disrupted in those time slots.

Speaker 3
I want you to repeat the phrase that you started with. It slipped me time.

Speaker 1
Oh, you can't. So no one can manage time. You can only manage what you do in time. And we all get the same 24 hours.

So if you manage yourself within, if you break it up in 30 minutes or two hours and say, these are the things that I'm going to work on. Let's say you have to make calls, you have to return calls, and you Carve out 90 minutes, and at the end of 90 minutes, if you didn't get them all in, you just didn't get them all in. You either scheduled them later that day, but if you can do this. The day before, and, you know, the day before what I'm doing tomorrow, and it's, it's all.

In it's all in chunks of of time.

Speaker 2
Time blocking for your various activities projects that you need to be doing.

Speaker 1
Right. And, and that's, and it's not. So then you say at, at six o'clock or seven, I'm going to end the work day and then I'm going to eat or I'm going to the gym. I'm going to, you know, I'm a guy, I'm going to go for a walk with my wife.

You know, I'm going to, I'm going to, and I won't let anything interfere with that, with that time slot.

Speaker 3
Wow. No one can manage time.

Speaker 1
Correct. I mean, if they can, they haven't told me about it. So I haven't met that person.

Speaker 3
So all these things, time management training. I love it. I love the things to do less and blocking out time. You have been great.

Speaker 1
I'll say one thing also in that there are things that I'm not doing now and then there are things that I'm never going to do and I know I'm never I won't even lie to myself so for some people you know I'm not going to the Pilates class I'm just not I'm not even going to talk to my friends about it because I'm just not doing it So there's some honesty in that, and there's lots of responsibility. My work is heavily steeped in accountability and responsibility and integrity, and integrity in a sense of honoring your word as yourself. So if you say you're going to do it in that time slot, do it.

If you say you're not going to do it, it's in that category of not doing ever.

Speaker 3
Thank you, Ted. Is there anything you would like to leave with our listeners?

Speaker 1
Something that would be helpful to people is that person you think you don't like or a group of people you associate with, I don't like those kinds of people, befriend one and get to know them without, suspend your judgment. And most likely what you'll experience is neuroplasticity. You will find that this person is more like you than you imagine. and they're a human being, and you have judged them in ways that you didn't, you judge them in ways that society taught you to judge them, but you didn't judge them as the person they are, because you never took the time out to know who they are.

So spending time with people you think you hate, or kinds of people you think you don't like, it's really productive for people to do that.

Speaker 2
What a great tip and something that everybody in the world could really use, right? Especially right now.

Speaker 1
Yes, absolutely. Especially right now. Yes.

Speaker 2
Thank you so much, Ted. This has been really enlightening and we are really looking forward to having you back to dig deeper into some of these areas that we didn't get to. I know that you're going to help people make a lot of transformations and can you say again your website so that people can find you?

Speaker 1
Sure, it's turnaroundip.com. And IP is like intellectual property.

Speaker 2
Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ted.

Speaker 1
Oh, no, it's been my pleasure. And you ladies asked some really good questions. I don't think I've ever had anyone dig as deep. I've never had to say I won't give away my secret sauce.

So no one's dug that deep with me. So thank you for inviting me. And I would look forward to coming back.

Speaker 3
Excellent.