Disruptive Leadership

Some effective leaders could be described as disruptive. But of course, we’re thinking of disruption as a constructive force – challenging the status quo, innovating, committing to lifelong learning and experimentation, being agile, and having the ability to adapt and change. It’s about breaking rules with purpose. Listen as Bill and Ralph discuss disruptive leadership, its value in strengthening teams and organizations, and how you can become a proactive disruptor.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent Podcast, where we discuss leadership, team and organizational topics and best practices. We like to provide ideas, concepts, and pragmatic experiments to help you develop your potential in your work and leadership. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: Ralph, I love today’s topic of disruptive leadership.

Ralph Simone: I love it too because I think it’s been my whole life. Just, we disrupt things because we want to have a better outcome. We wanna have a better process. And, and I think it’s, we need to set the record straight. A leader’s role is to be disruptive. And disruptive is constructive, not destructive, because we wanna, it’s, it’s like breaking things before it’s too late.

Right. It’s reinventing ourselves. It’s, it’s innovating and I think part of the work we do as coaches is we are trying to be a disruptive force by asking people questions to get them to think differently about their current habits of thought and patterns of behavior.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s challenging the status quo.

It is rule breaking with purpose. It’s, I love how you said disruptive. As a constructive force, not disruption in some type of negative way, but it’s really looking at what could be new, what could be possible, what haven’t we stepped into that we’d like to experiment with?

Ralph Simone: What’s constraining in ourselves, you know, we’ve talked about that fish notice water last.

We get immersed into a culture. We get immersed into a particular way of being and it may not be inclusive, it may not be something that takes full advantage of all the resources, and we need somebody to, we talk about this responsibly complaining that’s being disruptive. Asking for something that doesn’t currently exist in the environment so that we can get a better outcome for the organization and for more of the employees.

Bill Berthel: The space of disruptive leadership is similar to disruptive innovation where we see a set of existing variables, whether it’s in a market, there’s certain products, whether that is, there’s certain operating. Ground rules in our organization. There’s certain ways we’re doing things. We’re interested in getting in and tweaking ’em, maybe even breaking ’em to see what could possibly emerge for new purpose.

Ralph Simone: I mean, look at what Musk did with Tesla. Yeah. Regardless of what you think of him as a leader or not. He certainly was disruptive. I mean, he was, the technology was disruptive. He wasn’t able to market and distribute through the normal channels, so he disrupted that channel, right? And what you’re seeing is, you know, sometimes disruption does require somebody to swim upstream, to take some unpopular stances, but look at what i