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July 22, 2024
Fireproofing Law Enforcement with Pete Havel
Imagine confronting a toxic colleague and losing your job for it. Pete Havel did just that, and it spurred him into a journey that transformed his career and countless workplaces. Join us as we talk with Pete, a former lobbyist and political consultant, who turned his adverse experience into a powerful crusade against toxic work environments. Pete's book, "The Arsonist in the Office," has become a beacon for those battling similar workplace issues, and his insights offer valuable lessons on addressing workplace toxicity and leadership hurdles.
In our conversation, Pete sheds light on the deep-seated cultural issues within law enforcement agencies, particularly focusing on disillusioned officers who have faced retaliation and bullying. We explore strategies to re-engage these officers, often referred to as "walking dead," and the immense challenges of altering toxic environments, even with de-escalation training. By comparing law enforcement cultures with positive organizational examples like Chick-fil-A, Pete highlights how internal treatment of staff has a ripple effect on community interactions and overall behavior.
Finally, we discuss the pivotal role of leadership in fostering a positive organizational culture. From sergeants to top brass, effective leadership involves coaching, mentoring, and building trust among officers. Pete shares his expertise in consulting, training, and coaching, emphasizing the importance of seeking external guidance for effective change. Tune in for a compelling conversation that underscores the necessity of bold leadership and cultural transformation in making meaningful workplace improvements. Connect with Pete through his LinkedIn profile or his website, PeteHavel.com, and embrace the courage to lead boldly.
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Transcript
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Yeah, I think mission creep is a huge problem.
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When you're supposed to be everything, you're nothing and you know the military.
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They face their challenges.
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When you're both peacekeepers and warriors, it's tough to have a dozen mindsets in your head all at the same time.
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Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.
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Welcome back to the show.
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I'm so honored you've decided to spend a few minutes with us here today, and I have been waiting for this conversation for some time.
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You're going to love it.
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On today's episode we have Pete Havel.
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He's a former lobbyist and political consultant who proudly served with some of America's leading pro-business advocacy organizations.
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He's also been a senior executive for top strategic communication firms and he has a passion for fixingures.
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That began with taking the wrong turn into a toxic workplace and his subsequent book, the Arsonist in the Office.
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You've got to get this book, and those moments have built an international platform for Pete to consult, train and speak for high-profile, high-stress, high-impact organizations.
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Not only has he worked with companies ranging from Fortune 500 firms, but he's knee-deep in the law enforcement community, and that's what we're going to talk to him about today.
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Pete's the president of Fireproof Leadership.
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He lives in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Baylor University, and he's an avid Red Sox and Patriots fan.
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We will not hold that against him, Pete.
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How are you doing, sir?
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I'm good, you know if you're going to talk like that, I'll just let you keep on talking, oh come on, man, come on.
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I mean, they're here to listen to you, pete, and I would encourage everybody to follow Pete on LinkedIn.
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You got to get his book the Arsonist in the Office.
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I ran across this thing and it was just fascinating.
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You know there's very few books like this, pete, but before we get to all that, I got to think that I don't know, 20 years ago, if I'd have said hey, pete, you're going to be traveling around the country speaking to law enforcement organizations, you probably thought I was pretty crazy, huh same thing.
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But uh, you know, uh, god has a plan, or uh, you know, stuff happens for a reason.
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Whatever the answer, is it, um, it's.
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It's just, it's crazy how life works out.
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And I had a, um, I had an experience that, well, I was going to say, for whatever reason, um, for, for a lot of reasons, um, my situation aligned a lot with what law enforcement leaders face today.
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Yeah, I think that's interesting because you used that negative experience to just change lives today and there's a lot of our audience listening to this right now that are either in the middle of that experience or they are jaded from that experience and I think you're an encouragement to them of what you've done with that.
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So I'd love to hear about how your life kind of took this turn, based on a negative to turn it into a unbelievable positive.
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Yeah, my career blew up.
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I spoke up and I talk about it a little bit in the book, but I was tasked with working with the inside, a toxic organization.
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I was tasked with working with an unbelievably toxic, bizarre, dysfunctional employee that had become untouchable because of how much trouble they had caused.
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And the organization was this person had them over a barrel, they felt compromised and they let them run roughshod over the organization and this was essentially my partner in the company.
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So I lost my career when I spoke up because the company was much more afraid of them than me and I was out of a job.
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And after some soul searching, I realized I've got a story to tell, ended up writing a book about it and, yeah, here I am.
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It was not an easy path between that point and now, but it has turned into something amazing because, yeah, there are people in law enforcement and elsewhere that find themselves in horrible cultures that wreck their careers at some point or another, either short-term or long-term, and I lent a voice with my experience and I literally hear from people all over the world that will tell me either you know they didn't know how to get out of a situation, or I helped them through a situation or, you know, in some of these cases I've had a couple of situations where somebody that that's wearing the badge has come up to me after I speak at a conference and said I've got a serious problem going on in my heart right now.
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He said, and I had one of these situations where a guy said I read your book, I don't know who to turn to and I've got some stuff going on right now.
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Can I talk to you every once in a while?
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And I won't go into the details of it, but he was in a really, really dark place and I'm not saying I'm a life changer or you know I'm saving lives or anything like that, but for whatever reason, my story connected with him and he's doing okay today and for whatever reason that you know, I was in the right place at the right time for him to read my book.
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And I'll tell you what.
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There's nothing better than changing the lives of somebody in a totally different part of the world and knowing you made an impact feels good.
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Yeah, that's a whole nother story, right?
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I wrote a book on courageous leadership back in 2019, and it was just a medicine for me, just to get it out of my head.
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I didn't think anyone would ever read it.
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Then these people will just contact you from who knows where and talk about this stuff.
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And so God is definitely working in crazy ways, you know, because I never even envisioned that I never envisioned to this day I'd still be talking about it To me.
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It was just a moment in my life that I needed to get this on paper, and I have to imagine that before you went through that experience, pete, you probably had no idea that this culture thing was an issue across every gamut of private organizations and nonprofits and government organizations.
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I mean because you know we're all just kind of doing our thing, we're working, we're raising our kids and our family.
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But when this happened to you, you became aware of this, did you realize how rampant organizational sort of toxicity was?
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No, I mean my view before I hit that situation that prompted me to write the book.
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I mean, the worst that ever happened to me was, you know, getting chewed out a couple of times by bosses that, frankly, were great.
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That was it.
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And when I'd hear about tough situations I really had no concept of, I really had no concept of.
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So when I experienced what I did, it threw me for a loop because I really wasn't prepared for it in any way.
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You know they don't teach you about that in school.
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There's no courses on it.
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You're not prepared for all right.
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You know how do I do?
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I fight back.
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What are my resources?
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What's?
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my mindset going to be Do I have any recourse at all or do I run?
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What does victory look like?
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All these kind of questions going through your mind.
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Most people have no idea.
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I sure didn't.
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So, um, yeah, I it.
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It shocked me at the time, but but now I know that.
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Um, what do they say?
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Probably a third of the people out there are in a toxic workplace right now at some level of um, of toxicity, and certainly in policing.
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You know the, the things I hear from from folks there's.
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Oh yeah, you can put a number on it better than I can, but I would guess probably at least a quarter of them are toxic and maybe more.
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And one of those challenges is leaders have a lot of things on their plates and, for a whole lot of reasons, that we can get into culture normally is never at the top of the list of things they've got to change.
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It should be, but it's just not.
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Well, not only is it not the top of the list, many of them don't understand what it is, they don't think they're the blame, they don't think it can be fixed and it's a lot of hard work to fix it.
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We'll get into all that.
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But I saw a recent survey and this blew my mind.
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It asked you know, if you're out of law enforcement, why did you leave law enforcement?
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And 70 percent said culture, 70 percent I don't know what the real number is.
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I know my dissertation showed a 93 percent low morale factor in the profession, which kind of blew me away.
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In fact my chair didn't even believe it, but I had to show him the data to prove it back.
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As he said, I didn't think the profession was that bad.
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Now, I'm sure you know, in American law enforcement, pete, as you know, we have 18000 police departments are all sort of different, some great, some not so great, some horrible, some good.
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But you are, you have found a profession and I'm going to speak for law enforcement that desperately needs you.
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And I want to just sort of start with if somebody's listening to this, how do they know that they're in a bad culture?
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Because there's obviously some very obvious signs they may think, by the way, like I did for many years.
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This is normal, because if you're in for something for so long, you sort of normalize it right.
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So what are the telling signs that they're actually in a bad culture?
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And a lot of them really are behavioral.
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I mean, I've got 20 of them in the book, but you see retaliation going on.
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You see disrespect.
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Do you see retaliation going on.
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Do you see disrespect?
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Do you see, for instance, when a leader walks in the room, is there fear?
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Is?
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there silence.
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Can a group of people on the command staff have a hard conversation or even an easy conversation?
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Is there retaliation if you raise a concern or if you've gotten even a good idea?
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Is somebody going to be undercutting you because they are jealous of you, or your supervisor may be insecure?
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All those things and a whole lot more, but those tend to be some of the things that you see.
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What are the byproducts of that?
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One of the terms that I use is and you see this a lot in police departments I call them the walking dead, those folks that you see them 10 years after they took the hit and they actually are still in some of the good cultures that have turned around.
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Those folks that were retaliated against, bullied, just demoted you name it and they've never recovered.
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They go through the motions and they've checked out in a lot of ways.
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They're waiting until the end of their time to get the heck out and they're not contributing much.
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And that's actually one of the groups that whenever I talk to a department, especially to the leadership of a department, I zero in and point those out to the chiefs and command staff and say, if you all are going to turn the ship around, those are the folks you need to talk to first and give them a personal invitation that essentially starts with look, our department has failed you in the past.
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We want to know what it's going to take to get you excited again.
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We're sorry for what happened and let's build something great, but we need your help in getting back involved, and the chiefs that have followed that path have found some amazing success.
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Those folks who wanted to participate but somebody cut them out at the knees and they didn't.
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They weren't in after that, that's for sure.
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Yeah, I would imagine that what you talk about is similar.
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I talk about Pete is.
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You're oftentimes in front of your own church choir, right?
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Like the people that really need to hear this won't have Pete come, come talk to their agency, right?
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Uh, you're, you're, you're people that have Pete show up.
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They want to, they want to actually make a difference, they want to change things.
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But the really bad, toxic cultures there's no way they're having you show up, right?
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For the most part I've had a few that have been told.
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You know, bring this guy in and check the box, yep, and those have been.
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I will tell you some of the most wheels-off things imaginable.
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I've got some crazy stories that I won't go into.
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It would probably be some, you know, pretty entertaining podcast, but just some of the most depressing stuff that you can imagine that gets into.
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You know situations where I've been told flat out and I will tell this story of a department that I won't identify but I'm in there with a bunch of line officers and we watch a video of an incident you may remember from a few years back where it showed a supervisor going at it back and forth, yelling at a guy that had been detained, that was in the back of a cruiser, and he starts to pull out his pepper spray.
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You can probably visualize this piece of video right now.
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He pulls out his pepper spray and a female officer pulls on his gun belt as a way to hopefully de-escalate the situation.
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She had gone through that de-escalation training.
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That's probably going to spur the memory of a few folks in your audience.
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So I show this group of line officers that video and we talk about what's going on when she pulls on that gun belt.
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And he turned around at that point in the video and grabbed her by the throat and shoved her into the back of the side of a cruiser.
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And I said y'all, when that occurred, how long did it take for word of that incident to get around the department?
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We talked about the divisions that start taking place, divisions between command staff and line officers union and not, and I should say, supervisors union and patrolmen's union, all these different things.
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And I said have you all gotten the de-escalation training?
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And they said yes.
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I said do you understand the de-escalation training?
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Yes, and I said, and they had already told me that they had a lot of retaliation going on in the department.
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And I said folks, knowing what goes on here in this department, if you found yourself in a situation like that that courageous officer did, would you step in and try and deescalate that situation?
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I heard every expletive out of their mouths of bleep, no, in every way possible.
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And there's the rubber meeting the road of how bad can a culture get that they know the right thing to do, but they are so afraid of what's going on in their culture, in their workplace every day, that they may put their own liberty on the line.
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We know what's happened in those situations.
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It can get on TV and it can wreck lives.
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It can end lives in some of those types of situations and it all ties back to culture.
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I would imagine I'm not going to speak for yourself, pete, but most general citizens without any law enforcement knowledge.
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They look out there and they think that law enforcement, these highly specially trained professionals, and it's all about what Hollywood portrays and television portrays.
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Were you a little bit shocked when you kind of got inside this profession as an outsider and really saw behind the curtain what was going on?
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Yes, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah it's okay to say that, yeah of course, because I tell people all the time.
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I'm like, hey, I could tell you some stories, but you're not going to believe them, you know, and normally this it revolves around culture and leadership behavior.
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I said I could tell you these stories but you just you'll think I'm crazy if I tell you.
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Yeah, y'all have a level of courage, y'all have some superpowers.
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It comes from the training, comes from mindset and comes from just being blessed by the Lord with some courage people don't normally have.
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But with that comes, you all get a little bit more calloused in some ways, and that's probably the perfect description calloused, you build those up in your hands to be able to do certain work.
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In your hands to be able to do certain work.
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You get callous in some ways of that because of what you see every day.
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You can't help but have it happen.
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So you know everything.
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Y'all's humor is a little bit more dark.
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The things that would phase you guys it doesn't phase you guys would shock other people.
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Somebody would be in the fetal position for months with what y'all may see on a normal shift.
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So yeah, it's different.
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And then in culture some departments are much different than others.
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But people are people and at the end of the day you know if departments are supposed to be the one place where you're supposed to be treated with some respect and dignity and you know where you're supposed to be backed up by other people and it's not.
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That's where a heck of a lot of problems come from.
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Well, and people need to also understand that a bagged toxic culture inside a law enforcement agency transcends into the community.
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I would have officers that would get complaints, rudeness complaints number one complaint in the profession.
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If I got one of those, I didn't think much of it.
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But if the same officer got multiple of those rudeness complaints, my first question to the supervisor wasn't what's going on with this officer.
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My first question is what's this officer seeing inside this organization to where he thinks he can treat somebody like that?
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Like how is he being treated, or she being treated by us?
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And that's?
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That's something that really people need to understand is culture doesn't just stay bad, it doesn't just stay inside an organization.
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I have to assume you know better than me, pete, that there's a pretty good organizational culture in Chick-fil-A, because they're the nicest people ever, right, absolutely.
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But there's not such a great culture I'm going to get myself in trouble in, maybe, walgreens because you're always treated horribly right.
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So the next time that you are treated horribly at any place, you need to think to yourself what is the culture like?
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I'm not saying it may not be a bad employee, but more often than not culture transcends inside, is it not?
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What happens on the inside is going to spill out into the outside.
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Nine times out of ten.
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That's right.
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Go ahead it when I say this.
00:20:19.522 --> 00:20:24.946
But corruption is connected to culture sometimes.
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Well, it's connected in a lot of ways to culture of folks getting lax in a different way.
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When I hear about departments facing that, my immediate thought is because one of the inclinations is okay, this is an isolated case within the department, it's in one division and it's going to be very rare that it is isolated to one division, because people have picked up signals of weakness, They've picked up signals of entitlement and it's not going to be just one small group of people.
00:21:00.092 --> 00:21:10.506
People throughout the organization have likely gotten those same perceptions and run with them.
00:21:10.506 --> 00:21:14.941
And it's just like that with culture in all sorts of ways.
00:21:16.971 --> 00:21:27.741
Now, pete, you discussed that, when it comes to building a better culture, that it occurs through a more stronger and more determined leadership, and I know there's people out there listening to this that they understand they're dealing with this.
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They want to do something about it.
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They may be at different levels in the organization.
00:21:31.538 --> 00:21:35.500
What kind of advice on a leadership standpoint can you tell them?
00:21:35.500 --> 00:21:37.115
I think I know some of the things you're going to say.
00:21:37.115 --> 00:21:40.856
Can you tell them to start, because it's not an overnight fix right?
00:21:40.856 --> 00:21:45.501
What could you tell the individual, instead of the individual sitting back, going man, the culture is terrible.
00:21:45.501 --> 00:21:50.221
What type of action can the individual do to have a positive impact on the culture?
00:21:51.009 --> 00:21:52.614
Yeah, and at all levels.
00:21:52.614 --> 00:22:06.619
I mean, it certainly starts with you, and if you're that officer, you can do the best you can with folks around you, but you are limited on kind of a global scale.
00:22:06.619 --> 00:22:07.795
You can only do so much.
00:22:07.795 --> 00:22:13.142
If you're in leadership, you've got a lot more ability to get things done.
00:22:13.142 --> 00:22:29.578
If you're that chief, you are setting the standards to step in and say, well, we can do something better here and align your command staff and get folks together to do something different.
00:22:29.578 --> 00:22:39.875
Get your values, your mission, your vision, to have discussions about what you want to be, to address the problems that you see and build something better.
00:22:39.875 --> 00:23:30.843
Really, where you go from there and this is the key to anything is in the middle and once you get beyond command staff, because the command staff, they can talk all day about things, but the key to have the trust that, okay, this isn't just one more plan these guys are tossed now to make themselves look good to the mayor, to the city council, this isn't just some PR thing, that they mean it, that there's something in it for them in a way that's going to make their lives better.
00:23:30.843 --> 00:23:32.673
And it's a sales job.
00:23:32.673 --> 00:23:33.714
It really is.
00:23:33.714 --> 00:23:37.063
It is both a sales job as well as a value proposition.
00:23:37.849 --> 00:23:51.057
But a lot of these sergeants and lieutenants that I talk to in departments around the country, you know they've been lulled into looking at the role of sergeant.
00:23:51.097 --> 00:24:17.924
I don't say this in a negative way, but when I hear them referred to as supervisors, that is not the term that I would put on everything that a sergeant can do, I look at it as, yes, supervision, but also there's coaching, there is mentoring, there is very much leadership.
00:24:18.230 --> 00:24:26.064
When I go into departments and I'm talking to the sergeants on up, I say who are the folks in leadership?
00:24:26.064 --> 00:24:35.782
In this room You'll see command staff raise their hands and I get it from an organizational structure that folks are designated as leadership.
00:24:35.782 --> 00:24:40.582
But sergeants need to understand guys, y'all are leaders.
00:24:40.582 --> 00:25:02.028
You are leaders of men and women that need to think of you as a leader and that's a big mindset shift that every department needs to understand, shift that every department needs to understand that those folks are guiding really the most important part of a department.
00:25:02.028 --> 00:25:03.435
Chiefs need to understand that too.
00:25:03.435 --> 00:25:10.159
And that is the people out in the field that are going to make and break everything that the command staff does.
00:25:10.159 --> 00:25:15.521
They're the boots on the ground that are going to do the important work of the police department.
00:25:16.530 --> 00:25:17.472
Yeah, just so I'm clear.
00:25:17.472 --> 00:25:29.584
The sergeant is the most important role in the police department because they have all of those duties you talked about, and probably a good sign of great culture is when sergeants have the freedom to be that leader, right?
00:25:29.584 --> 00:25:29.710
We?
00:25:29.750 --> 00:25:32.815
have so many that are just scared to death of making any decisions.
00:25:32.815 --> 00:25:34.657
And it's always the COA up the chain.
00:25:34.657 --> 00:25:35.598
I used to get this all the time.
00:25:35.598 --> 00:25:42.278
I was in a higher command level and I'd get a call from a lieutenant or a captain or a sergeant and my first question would be like well, why are you calling me?
00:25:42.278 --> 00:25:43.474
What's the policy, say?
00:25:43.474 --> 00:25:46.480
I mean, I booted more people out of my office.
00:25:46.480 --> 00:25:48.136
I said I'm not going to answer this for you.
00:25:48.136 --> 00:25:51.916
You have rank, you know what the boundaries are.
00:25:51.916 --> 00:25:55.663
And then after a while they started to not come in the office.
00:25:55.663 --> 00:25:59.320
Right, but there's just such a fear because of the culture and a real quick culture story.
00:25:59.320 --> 00:26:01.218
I was a brand new commander at a big division.
00:26:01.810 --> 00:26:03.136
I walked into the midnight shift.
00:26:03.136 --> 00:26:08.691
You know they don't see the boss very often and I'm just trying to talk, and they have what you just earlier mentioned, very quiet.
00:26:08.691 --> 00:26:13.837
This kind of goes to if somebody is trying to do the right thing, but they're in the middle of bad culture, what can you do?
00:26:13.837 --> 00:26:15.200
And everyone's quiet.
00:26:15.200 --> 00:26:16.501
And I said, listen, I get it.
00:26:16.501 --> 00:26:22.910
You don't see me often, you don't know me that well, you're not going to say much, I said, but I'm not leaving until somebody has something to say or a question or something.
00:26:22.910 --> 00:26:25.252
Surely there's something I can ask, I can answer for you.
00:26:25.633 --> 00:26:30.979
And this one hand goes up and the guy goes yeah, major, you see that TV on the wall.
00:26:30.979 --> 00:26:32.480
Yes, sir, wall.
00:26:32.480 --> 00:26:33.922
Yes, sir, that tv doesn't work.
00:26:33.922 --> 00:26:35.683
You think you could get us a new tv?
00:26:35.683 --> 00:26:40.856
I said, and it's like a you know 199 tv, pete.
00:26:40.856 --> 00:26:43.826
And I said well, how long has the tv been not been working?
00:26:43.826 --> 00:26:46.776
That guy says over 20 years, or something like that.
00:26:46.776 --> 00:26:48.722
I go well, how come it's not working?
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