Culture First Leadership

Welcome to the Debrief. Today we're diving into a topic that every police officer, every SWAT operator, every K9 handler, and every leader in law enforcement should care about, and that's culture. Because the truth is, every department has policies, every team has equipment, most have training, but only a few organizations consistently produce elite teams. So the question is, what's the difference? My guest today argues that the difference isn't tactics, equipment, or how good they look; it's culture.

Joining me today is Jon Becker, the person who is normally the one who is asking all the questions around here, but today we are flipping the script. Jon is now in the hot seat on his own podcast. We are here to talk about his new book, “Culture First: Nine Leadership Practices That Build Elite Teams,” where he lays out how leaders intentionally build high-performance teams, enforce standards, make better decisions, and develop people who can perform under pressure. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jon Becker.

My name is Jon Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Toby Darby: All right. So, Jon, welcome to The Debrief with Toby Darby.

Jon Becker: Now, I got to say I like it better from that seat, buddy.

Toby Darby: Yeah. How does it feel to sit over there?

Jon Becker: It's better in that seat, is it? For sure.

Toby Darby: It's a little different in that seat as well. So, welcome to The Debrief. So, we're here today to talk about your book. And it's a book that I personally have read and I know that, after 30 years in law enforcement, everything that you wrote in that book really rang true with me and I think that the readers are going to get it. But I have some questions for you today. I think that some of your listeners, your followers are going to want to know as well. So the first thing I want to ask (and maybe you can answer this): Why this content? Why this topic? Why this book? Why did you decide to write this book?

Jon Becker: So, I'll tell you this. I'll tell you the evolution of it came from the strategic leadership program and culture-centric leadership that I teach in the 40 years I've worked with tactical units and elite teams, there are units that I've worked with that have always been at the absolute top of their game. There are units that I've worked with that have never been at the top of their game that have always had problems. So about 20 years ago, I just started paying attention to what teams were doing. At the same time that was occurring, my business was growing. I was in way over my head as a leader and trying to figure out how to lead an organization. I started to just watch and I started taking notes and I started reading a lot. And what I noticed was there were patterns that an elite unit in Belgium or in France or in Germany was very similar to an elite military unit was very similar to an elite law enforcement unit was very similar to an elite sports team or an elite corporation. I started to just ask, why? What is it about these organizations that makes them good? What I realized was the underlying operating system in all of these things was culture. So I started to just develop a curriculum on it and teach on it and write on it.

The book has been something that's been in the works for a long time. It just finally came together. The timing was right for me to actually finish it and get all my thoughts down.

Toby Darby: It's interesting because you start off by talking about elite teams specifically in law enforcement, which is my former world. And as I read the book and listen to you now, it sounds like it's more than just law enforcement. I know Jocko Willink wrote about when he was doing the SEALs, he started in business and then that kind of went over to law enforcement and the corporations and fire department and now it's everybody. Who is this book for? Is it just law enforcement?

Jon Becker: No. The book is really for anybody that is leading an organization, right? Anyone that is in a position of leadership and a leadership position is everything from a culture leader, a patrol sergeant, a corporal, all the way to a chief of police or the CEO of a corporation. The lessons and the doctrine here runs across any kind of organization. And that was really what made me want to write it was I just started to realize that elite SWAT teams are not different than military units, not different than the Los Angeles Dodgers or Apple Computer and that there is this kind of overlap and it all comes back to culture.

The analogy we use in the book is that “culture is an operating system” that, like the operating system on your phone, underlies everything that happens on your phone. If the operating system is broken, it doesn't matter how good the apps are. If the operating system runs efficiently, then the apps run efficiently. So when you look at it, you go, okay, well, an underlying culture that's effective, that's operationally effective, that people are happy in, that people thrive in, that they can grow and develop in, is the same thing.

Now, an operating system, an effective culture in a tier-one unit is not going to look the same as an effective culture at Pixar. Different people, different beliefs, different missions, but there are so many common characteristics that it just seems like this works for everybody, so let's try and share it as widely as we can.

Toby Darby: Yeah. And that's interesting you bring that up because many different departments, elite units, they all have different training policies, standing operating procedures. And how does culture play into those to make some more elite than others? Is that what I'm asking?

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, culture underpins everything you do. Plain and simple. It underpins everything you do. If your culture is effective, the organization can grow and develop and learn and make decisions and, if it's broken, all of those things will be broken. So, what makes the Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series is in many ways the same thing that makes our tier-one units so incredibly effective. It really comes back to that cultural aspect.

Toby Darby: I've sat in a lot of leadership meetings or management meetings where the chief of police would come in or members of city government or whatever to talk about leadership and where the direction of the city's going. They always bring up the word “culture.” I think they bring that up, but after reading this book, I don't think that they know what culture is or how it plays into certain organizations and how important it is. Why is it you say “culture first” when you're talking about this in your book?

Jon Becker: Because if your culture is broken, everything's broken. Culture has to be the first thing in any organization to make it work. Originally we had a variety of titles. We kept coming back to this idea of culture because it's central to everything that happens in the organization. It has to be the first thing you fix. And so that really should be what's in your mind. I agree with you, after Daniel Coyle's book and there have been a variety of books, Simon Sinek's book, “Start with Why”, culture became a buzzword, but nobody really stopped to understand what culture actually means. Like so many things, it gets reduced to a poster that hangs on a wall, “build a good culture,” and they don't take the time to actually understand what it means.

So, what I mean by culture is I mean the unwritten rules and understandings of people in an organization. So, if you think about it, we all have a variety of friend groups. We have groups of friends that you might go to church with. We have groups of friends that you would never take near a church. You have friends that you would be proud to introduce to your parents. And you have friends that you would never introduce to your parents. What defines the rules of those groups is culture. What defines the behavior of the members of the group is culture. A lot of what we're trying to do here is create the right environment to foster the right behaviors in the organization. And that to me is what culture does. It is that underlayment that lays underneath everything that you're doing and informs how you are going to behave, what is socially acceptable, what's not. A lot of people look at it as just a buzzword that “oh yeah, we have a great culture.”

I wrote an article a while back talking about how, bosses scream at their people to try and improve their culture. I've got a “Pirates of the Caribbean” hat that says “The beatings will continue until the morale improves,” right? Like that's not culture.

Toby Darby: Yeah. You say in the book that culture has to be built intentionally. What happens when our leaders or the leaders in any organization don't build it intentionally?

Jon Becker: So our default as human beings is towards self-interest. Our default as human beings is negative. And so what happens in an organization if you're not intentionally building your culture is it will kind of drift towards negativity. It will drift towards selfishness. It will drift towards individual interest. Culture doesn't happen effectively automatically for most organizations. Sure, there are times it happens organically and it works. But the majority of the time, if you want an effective culture, you have to engineer it. You have to be taking steps to intentionally build it and setting cultural rules objectively, right? We are going to define what we believe, how we're going to act with one another, absolutely above board. Then we're going to enforce those rules to make sure that every member of the group knows what they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to act, and what's going to be tolerated by this group.

Toby Darby: Yeah. When I teach a class, I always introduce a concept or a theory, and then I try to give a good example. And there's a lot of good stories in this book, a lot of good examples to back the principles that you're talking about in this book. And I know a lot of our listeners even though this is for corporations, sports teams, elite teams and military units, law enforcement, fire department, first responders, but let's talk specifically about patrol right now to give an example because I think everybody knows what a patrol officer does. What does a good culture look like in a patrol environment in law enforcement?

Jon Becker: So an effective culture for patrol environments would be officers are enthusiastic to come to work. They're happy. They feel connected to their team. They're doing their jobs effectively. They're supported by their leadership. They're comfortable taking risks and making decisions and not feeling like they're going to be second-guessed. They're not afraid of their organization. In patrol especially, it's a big ask.

Toby Darby: Does that responsibility lie just with the sergeants or lieutenants or can it be anybody within that patrol group?

Jon Becker: So everybody's a cultural leader, right? If you think about it, any group you're a part of, you influence. Obviously the role of senior leadership in any organization is to set the culture. I think all leaders recognize their job is to set the culture. I don't think they realize that setting the culture is not what they say, it's what they do. Right? It's kind of like you can tell your kids not to lie, but if your kids watch you lie all the time, your kids are going to lie. And the problem with a lot of senior leaders is they think well I'm going to say everybody has to be on time and then they show up 20 minutes late with a Starbucks in their hand.

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: From a senior leadership standpoint, setting the culture means clearly defining the roles, clearly defining the purpose of the organization and how we relate to that purpose and then manifesting those behaviors being the highest form of whatever you're asking for. In my organization I have to be the most honest person in the organization. I have to own mistakes more than anybody else does. I have to share successes more than anybody else does because what I do everybody looks at, right? As the senior leader, everybody's looking at what you do. They're also looking at what you say, but what you do drives much more what they believe than what you say. So, at a senior leadership level, that's what it has to look like. At a middle management, a lieutenant and sergeant level, same thing as up above, but you also have to be a cultural leader within the organization. You have to be the guy that's like, "Hey, let's fix this. Let's move forward." You've got to be the person that's coaching the morale of the organization, that's helping the people that work for you to become the best version of themselves that they can. And then at an individual level, it's making sure that you're staying connected to everybody in the organization. A graveyard sergeant with a bad attitude can do more damage to a police department than a chief of police can.

Toby Darby: I agree with that. Yeah. 100%. You bring that up and I read the book “Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle and in that book he has an experiment where he puts a bad apple into a group to see how it affects it, and then he puts somebody good in the group and see how that changes the group's dynamics. For a patrol environment or even a SWAT team for that matter what does a bad apple or a toxic culture look like in that environment?

Jon Becker: So most of the time in my experience that looks like a guy who sits and complains about the organization. Nothing is ever good enough for him. He doesn't care about other people. He acts selfishly and his goal is to undermine the morale of others. I think anybody that works with police departments or fire departments knows that guy. I've known hundreds of those guys. That guy is a product of his environment. Some of us are negatively biased. Make no mistake. Some of us are just bitchers. We want to complain. We want to be unhappy. It's their nature. That kind of behavior has to be socially unacceptable for an organization to be effective. It can't be rewarded. Unfortunately what happens a lot of times is everybody knows that guy and everybody doesn't like that guy and nobody wants to work with him, but the senior leadership of the organization doesn't deal with him.

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: It makes him a cultural leader and if there isn't clear positive leadership in an organization, the negative leaders will pull the organization down.

Toby Darby: So that kind of brings to mind the question about selection and how we select people for elite teams for departments. I know through the hiring process and through a promotional process we're always worried about selecting the right person for the job. I know recently we've had an issue with recruitment and retention and sometimes people, slip through the cracks and get hired by a department, an organization, whatever it may be. And now you have that. What do you think about selection and how does that play into culture?

Jon Becker: So, we spent an entire chapter in the book on selection. Selection is something that has fascinated me for most of my career. How do you know who to pick, and why do you pick people? Hiring is the single greatest lever on your culture that you have, who you let in the door will affect the organization more than almost anything else you do. And yet hiring for most organizations is a 20-minute interview with one person and out the door you go.

Toby Darby: Yep.

Jon Becker: Or it's based on, what do they do? What do they have on their resume? One of the concepts we talk about in the book is what's called “A High-Performing Asshole,” or a high-performing asshole, as I've also heard it expressed. I learned that term from a friend who's on one of the most elite law enforcement units in the world. We were having dinner one night and we were talking about their selection and they have a very complicated, long process for selection. I just decided, tonight is the night I'm going to pick his brain on what you pick and why you're picking them and I kept coming back to like, yeah, but what are you looking for? Yeah, but what are you looking for? And he would tell me, "Oh, we're doing this. We're doing that. Yeah, but what are you looking for?" And he finally goes, "We're just trying not to hire a high-performing asshole." And I went, "That's magic." Organizations hire too much based on credentials. They don't hire enough based on culture and the way somebody fits in the organization. You might be really good in one organization and a terrible fit for another one. So the organization when it hires, when it selects, it needs to pick the right people. If you don't have good ingredients, you won't make a good cake, right? So, the first input you have, and I think the greatest input you have is who comes in. You really have to pay attention to who you're picking, how you're picking, why you're picking them, and you've got to make sure that they fit into the organization culturally, or what happens is every new hire begins to erode the culture.

Toby Darby: I think there is a dichotomy, just hearing you say that because you have the High-Performing Assholes but you also have the type A personalities, which a lot of elite teams actually recruit. I mean, that's what you want, that person who is that type A personality, that alpha dog, so to speak. How do you harness that type A personality, especially in a team or organizational environment? What is it you do? I know we talk or you talk about it in your book Knives Versus Spoons and it gave me a picture and I go, that's brilliant but how do you harness that?

Jon Becker: So, I think the first thing is the difference between a high performer and a high-performing asshole is who they're playing for, right? The high performer is trying to help the organization. They're learning. They're developing. They are trying to make their organization better. The high-performing asshole is in it for themselves. They're both high performers. They have a different mission, right? So, all I deal with in my day job are high performers, right? It is so rare that I deal with somebody that is just a complete slug, especially in elite units.

Toby Darby: Right.

Jon Becker: The thing is like they're not all type A personalities. They're just all really high-performing people. What differentiates the two is who they're playing for. The high-performing asshole is playing for themselves. They win by making others lose. The high performer that you want to hire is somebody that wins by the team winning. They're a team player. They care about other people. They want the mission. They serve the purpose of the organization.

We use the analogy too. We use knives versus spoons, but we also do knives versus broken glass. So, I'll touch on that. So, I talk about Knives versus Spoons. You want to surround yourself with knives, right? Spoons are great. They nest in the drawer together. They literally spoon. They never hurt anybody. They're not dangerous. That's not how you build an elite organization. You build an elite organization with knives. The difference between knives and broken glass is knives cut for a purpose. Broken glass cuts indiscriminately. You want people who are going to challenge you. You want people who are going to challenge the organization, who are going to push very hard, who are going to study very hard, who are passionate, but they have to serve the purpose of the organization. They can't be in it for themselves.

One of the big things that you see in elite units is, I mean, it is a cavalcade of knives but all the knives are cutting in the same direction and they're all working together and they're not cutting each other. They're cutting for a purpose, not for fun.

Toby Darby: On that topic, there is the concept of selfless leaders in our organization and the one thing I would ask you is how do you cultivate humility in an elite organization, an elite patrol group, even a fire truck or a fire engine in a firehouse. How would you cultivate humility when you have a lot of knives working in that environment?

Jon Becker: You demonstrate it. The senior leadership in the organization has to demonstrate humility. Humility is, if you said, "What's the one magic ingredient to building an elite unit?" Humility is probably that thing. Humble people learn from other people. Humble people make good decisions. Humble people listen to other people. Humble people care about other people. Ego is the enemy. Ryan Holiday wrote a book called “Ego is the Enemy.” Ego is the Enemy. Ego prevents you from learning. Ego makes you make dangerous decisions. There's so much that is built by humility. Humility is fostered in an environment where the leaders demonstrate it, where they admit when they make mistakes, where they ask other people for help, and where they don't tolerate ego. The funny thing about the most elite units in the world is ego is not tolerated. And there's a difference between recreational ego, the kind of shit-talking that we're used to in this environment, and actual ego.

Toby Darby: Yep.

Jon Becker: So recreational ego, yeah, by all means, it's what makes this industry fun. Part of the great joy of my job is the recreational assholery, as I like to refer to it. That's a different thing than real ego. A real belief that you are somehow special or you are better than other people.

One of the interesting conversations I had probably two years ago, somebody asked me, "What's the real difference if you're sitting down with one of the top units in the world and you're sitting down with an ineffective unit, what's the biggest difference you find?" I said, the most effective units I deal with when I have dinner with them, I am exhausted when I leave. They have pulled every bit of knowledge out of my brain that they possibly could. I've done the same thing to them. It is like, they're going to learn everything they can from me in the time we're together. The units that are not effective are going to spend the night telling me how cool they are. They're going to tell me how, they're telling me war stories. They're telling me how awesome they are. They're telling me how much they can bench press, but the really elite units, it's exactly the opposite. Humble guys, soft-spoken, care very much about other people, and they learn from everybody they touch.

Toby Darby: Yeah. To that point, I was just recently having a couple drinks with some Navy SEALs, and you wouldn't know that they were Navy SEALs. And they were so humble. I'm like, wait a second, you guys did all this? I mean, how many Silver Stars or all the awards that they have? I never would have thought in a million years that this was them because of their humility. I know, though, kind of shifting a little bit and changing gears on these elite teams, these organizations, in order to start this culture, you have to establish some sort of standard. With those standards, we have to enforce those standards. And sometimes that involves confronting high-performing assholes or high performers on your team or people that have been around for a long time. Quick example, on SWAT for 20 years, we have a physical requirement that we have to run an obstacle course with body armor, a bunch of other things, and then also be able to shoot effectively. And as people get older, it's not as easy for them to do the physical aspect of it. All of a sudden fatigue sets in. Maybe they're on the range during a hot summer day qualifying. And as time went on, I started to see a little bit of those standards not being enforced on those senior team members because of that. And we're like, "Oh, that's just so and so." And they're up there in age. And it sometimes had a negative effect on performance of the team, but also now you're allowing something that should not be into the organization. What is your mindset regarding standards and what is the leader's responsibility in enforcing these standards on these high-performing teams?

Jon Becker: So it's funny my view of standards has changed over the last probably 15 years and I now believe that you should not have a lot of standards or a lot of rules but the rules that you have should be absolutely grounded in the most important things in the organization and should be rigidly enforced. So, let's take SWAT standards. It is one where my thinking has evolved. When the SEAL teams did the research, they found that there's only two things that correlate with somebody's likely success in the Navy's tier-one unit, and those are processing speed, how smart they are, what their raw IQ is, and their VO2 max, which is measured by how fast they can run. And the reason that's true is processing speed. They're working in a very complicated multi-thread environment. There's a lot going on. The size of the processor really matters. The 286 computer versus the modern computer is going to have a very different experience. VO2 max measures how effectively you'll be able to retain that cognitive capacity under stress. So, you can see where that translates.

So, it makes sense to enforce VO2 max. If you want to have a certain level of physical fitness because that's going to underlie how well you're able to access your cognitive processing, how well you're able to deal with multiple stimuli. It makes sense for police department SWAT teams to have shooting standards because you have to have a base level of proficiency, but it may not make sense to have a pull-up standard or a sit-up standard. It may only be running and shooting. Teams that have very complicated protocols start to erode because Toby's been on the team a long time. We really like him, we'll give him a break. Well, the second we give a break to the standard, it's not a standard anymore. If I'm applying it to some of us and not to all of us, not only have I eroded the standard, but I've eroded the fairness of the team, I've eroded the culture and the morale.

So, Kevin Cyr and I had an argument one night about this where we ended up arguing like so many things that Kevin and I argue. We end up on both sides of the argument.

Toby Darby: You argue with Kevin. That's something I've never heard of.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's really strange, but we ended up on both sides of the argument and basically concluded that your standard should be something that everybody on the team agrees that if you can't meet that, you shouldn't be here. It shouldn't be, if we go, “Hey, you got to be able to run a 10-minute mile or you just don't have the VO2 max to be able to stand or you need to be able to shoot a 90%.” And you go, “Okay, well, let's make it where we want it.” “No, don't make it where you want it. Make it where everybody agrees not meeting that standard means you shouldn't be here.”

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And then rigidly enforce it. So it's like I said my view on this has changed. Standards have to apply to everybody. They have to be agreed upon by the group. Everybody has to agree like this really matters and you should be able to perform at this level and then enforce that religiously. There is no deviation from it. I think regarding that, I think about the importance of leadership and when I got on the team, I thought this was a hazing thing.

Toby Darby: Oh, you have to be, you have to run this obstacle course, shoot this qualification just to meet the requirements of the team because you have to wear a tight t-shirt. You got to look like you're in shape to be SWAT. But there is actual science behind this. Is that right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. No, absolutely. In the case of law enforcement, your cardiovascular fitness, cardiorespiratory fitness underpins your ability to make decisions under pressure. Because you think about it, if you're in an officer-involved shooting, your heart rate's going really fast, you're breathing really fast, your adrenaline levels are high. If that takes you into the red zone, you're going to get tunnel vision, you're going to start to ignore stimuli, you're going to lose orientation to what's going on. So cardiovascular fitness actually matters. The mistake that teams make is they either make it a hazing ritual or they implement a standard that they can't justify.

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: There is no point in having a standard that you can't explain the reason for. If the standard is this is what I did so you're going to do it, you're a gatekeeper, right? All you're trying to do is keep people out. That's not the point of standards. Standards are what underlies our trust. I know I can follow you through a door even if I haven't worked with you directly. If you're from another team, right, and we know each other, but we don't really know each other. I know that I can trust you. I know that you can shoot over my shoulder or from behind me and not hit me because I know how well you shoot. I know how fit you are. I know that you've met the standard. We do this all the time unintentionally. When you get on an airplane, you don't check the credentials of the pilot. You put your life in the hands of a complete stranger every time you get on an airplane.

Toby Darby: Then you see them when you walk off the plane and wonder why you did that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's half the time.

Toby Darby: Because they're not meeting those VO2 requirements because they're not.

Jon Becker: So, yeah. But like when you think about that or like when you have surgery, you don't go, "Oh, I want to see every example of the times you've done this and I want to see all your medical degrees." We use standards as a shorthand in society to allow us to trust one another. So within a team, within a unit, the standards are going to drive that trust. If the standards aren't rooted in reality and they're not enforced, they undermine the trust. So pick things that really matter to the performance of the unit, don't put the pilot on a scale if he's flying a 747 and go, well, he can't be bigger than this. Make sure you can fly a plane really freaking well and test him regularly and train him regularly because then every time you get in an airplane, I mean, if you think about commercial aviation, there are almost no plane crashes in the millions of flights that happen every year. There are almost no plane crashes, which tells you, the planes don't fall out of the sky. They don't break very often. We are enforcing standards there that are working and they're allowing us to trust complete strangers. You don't know who did the maintenance on the plane. You don't know who's flying the plane. But you get on and you don't worry about it because somebody is enforcing the standard and that the standard is relevant to the performance we need. Every organization needs to look at standards that way.

Toby Darby: Yeah. And you bring up a couple things that I want to discuss now and that is you talk about cognitive overload. There's a term that we use in the classes we teach called “Overwhelmed by Events.” We see this so common in critical incidents, especially when leaders who were promoted because of maybe a college degree but lack of experience. They stayed out of trouble their whole career. Now they're in that position and they're required to make a decision under pressure. And our brains are like computers and some of our brains are older than others. And some of those computers may be 75 megahertz. Dell when they first came out, you can hear the carrots crunching in the background. Whereas, the term is Overwhelmed by Events, when all of a sudden all this information starts going into our brains, we tend to start to, not be able to think. I think sometimes in the past you mentioned using our animal brain or our lizard brain instead of the frontal cortex. But when it comes to culture and decision-making, how does culture play into empowering our people to make decisions by disciplining yourself to make these decisions? What's the correlation there?

Jon Becker: Huge. Huge. It is fascinating how quickly and easily elite organizations make very complicated, very difficult decisions. And yet, you see other organizations agonize over where they're going to get their coffee from. Decision-making ability and the ability to maintain orientation are in my top three or five things for any organization that's going to perform at a high level. We wrote a whole chapter on “building a decision machine.”

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Because if you want elite performance, you have to be able to make decisions and you have to be able to make them quickly and that means you have to be able to gain and maintain orientation to what's going on.

I wrote an article for NTOA on the OODA loop and Jon Boyd's work and how everybody's perception of OODA is wrong. And we talk about it in the book that like the way we're taught OODA as this linear circle is, you're going to observe, then you're going to orient and you're going to decide and you're going to act. And that's not what Boyd intended at all. Right? Boyd intended orientation to be the center. So part of running any kind of organization that's going to perform at an elite level is the ability to gain orientation. What is happening in our brain aligns carefully with what is happening in the real world. So that orientation has to underlie everything you're doing. And then with that orientation, you have to be able to quickly decide and act. But you also have to be able to figure out what's going on around you. If you think of orientation in the middle, decide and act on the right and observe on the left, (which is the way Boyd originally drew it) Orientation is that big. The other two are really small, right? It's all about orientation.

Your orientation, in part, is driven by your organization. It's driven by your ability for everybody on scene to pass information that is relevant to what's going on back to the commander and provide them with situational awareness of what's actually happening and then from there being able to make decisions. Well, culture underlies that. First of all, as a commander, I have to trust and value the opinions of the people who are sharing that information. As an organization, we have to prize making the correct decision. We have to care more about making the right decision than we do being the guy that made the decision, which means owning mistakes. It means sharing information. It means a lot of things that are going to gain us situational awareness and allow us to execute on it. It also means the leadership of the organization has to recognize that periodically we're going to make mistakes and allow that to happen.

I think one of the big mistakes we've made with law enforcement is we tend to judge law enforcement retrospectively. We look back and go, “Oh, well, that shouldn't have happened.” But we don't stop and go, wait a minute, why did they make the decision that they did? And was that a reasonable decision? If it was a reasonable decision, we have to support them. Yeah. We can't look back and go, "Well, even though he didn't know this, he could have known it or he should have known it."

It's organizations that murder their own decisions publicly and murder their decision makers don't make decisions anymore. You teach apathy. By murdering people who make decisions, you teach people to not make decisions and to allow situations to evolve. I mean, we see it playing out all the time in tactical incidents now where the commanders just wait… they just let the situation evolve and they wait to make a decision. I frequently quote Rush's song, free will. “Even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” That's got to be the culture of the organization if we have to make decisions.

Toby Darby: You realize that 80% of your listeners don't know who Rush is.

Jon Becker: I like to think that at least 30% of my listeners do.

Toby Darby: All right. Well, at least you got a couple there. All right. But I read Jocko Willink. I read Daniel Coyle, Simon Sinek, Gary Klein because you mentioned some Gary Klein there in regards to debriefs and everything and how we're doing at retro. If you watch the movie “Sully” with Sully Sullenberg, Tom Hanks plays in it. That's one of the things I play in my class is decision-making under pressure and we talk about leadership and decision-making within the organization and pushing it down to the lowest level. There's a saying we say in our classes is “You can delegate authority but you can't delegate responsibility.” A lot of our leaders are decentralizing commands and there is this stupid thing I do and maybe if you remember Sesame Street there I would be like “What's the letter of the day?” Sometimes I say the letter of the day today is D. It's going to be Detach, Decide, Decentralize command and delegate. Those types of things pushing it down to the lowest level within elite teams. What does that look like culturally to encourage that type of behavior in your organization?

Jon Becker: So really effective organizations, whether they're tactical organizations, production companies, baseball teams, rugby teams, or Apple Computer, make decisions at a very low level. They push decision-makingaking authority to the person with the most knowledge and the most situational awareness. If you really stop and think about it, as the CEO of Aardvark, I know less about everything that happens at Aardvark than the people that do those jobs. As you move up in an organization, you become a generalist. You learn less. So, who has the best truth as to how a piece of armor is sewn? The person sewing the armor, not the CEO who's three steps away.

So really effective organizations recognize that. They recognize that the decision authority has to lie with the person in the best position to gain situational awareness or the best knowledge of the subject matter or ideally both. And they push that decision-making authority down rather than pulling it up. Effective leaders don't make a lot of decisions. I make very few decisions anymore. The decisions are made by people in the organization, and by the time it comes to me like it's a decision that nobody wants to make. I always joke that “there's two things that walk in the front door of the business: cookies and turds and an effective organization. They eat all the cookies and most of the turds and only the big ones end up on my desk."

My job is is to make really hard decisions where there isn't necessarily a win to be had but it's choosing which loss we're going to the decisions in the organization should be made by the person who's in the position to make them, who sees what's happening, who has the situational awareness. The guy standing at the door knows better what's going on inside the building than the commander does a mile away at a command post.

Toby Darby: So, what happens when that person who's a mile away downrange, not at the command post, what happens when they fail?

Jon Becker: The organization has to support them. And that's the hard part.

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: The hard part is, for the organization to be able to effectively make decisions, for the middle leaders, the middle managers to be able to effectively make decisions, the organization has to support them when they make a mistake. And one of the things that I talk about when I teach this is you've got to be more focused on making the right decision than you do on who's making it. You have to recognize that just periodically you're going to make mistakes. People are going to make mistakes. And when they do make mistakes, what you need to be fixing is the mechanism that led to the decision, not the person.

I always tell people, try this. The next time you're in an argument with your wife, just stick your finger in her face and go, I think you should. And see how long that lasts for you.

Toby Darby: My wife was a drill instructor for the--

Jon Becker: Your wife would snap your finger off.

Toby Darby: Probably would. And a force instructor, so yeah, I would do that.

Jon Becker: She'd snap your finger off.

Toby Darby: That'd be a failure.

Jon Becker: Probably beat you with it, which I would respect. But what does it do? It puts the person on the defensive. It puts the person in a position where they feel like they're being blamed. So, one, they're not going to make another decision because you just punish them for making the one that they did. And two, they're going to hide. They're not going to tell you the truth, right? It's got to be us versus the problem, not me versus you because you made a decision. I always say fix the mistake. Don't fix the blame.

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And so it's like effective organizations are so focused on we're going to try to make the right decision as an organization, but when we make a mistake, we're not going to sit around and go, "Well, why did Toby make that stupid decision?" We're going to say, "What were the facts that led to that decision, and how can we get better facts next time?" People do not intentionally make bad decisions.

Toby Darby: Right.

Jon Becker: They make bad decisions because they either have bad orientation or they're out of their realm. In either case, I either need to train you or I need to improve your situational awareness. I don't need to beat you for it. This is a catastrophic mistake that we've made with law enforcement. You look at the recent events that we've covered in The Debrief. A perfect example is Uvalde. What do we do when Uvalde happens? Do we stop and go, "Wait a second. How were there 370 cops standing in a hallway for 77 minutes? What underlies that? Why did that happen? Why did we not effectively lead those people?" No. We blame it on the chief of police from the consolidated independent school district police who has less police officers working for him than a corporal would at LAPD and we say he should have made a better decision. We blame the guy. We charge people criminally. What we don't address is why we made the decisions we made. And so for the organization to effectively make decisions, we need to look back and go, hey, what did we see that made you think that was happening and what information was available that you could have used differently? And then that's what we need to be training. But that's not what we're doing. We're just fixing the blame. And as a result, Columbine, Parkland and Uvalde are whatever the next one's going to be because we're not improving.

Toby Darby: And unfortunately, I see that to play out as a toxic thing in our culture as law enforcement because it trains us to be risk-averse.

Jon Becker: Yep. Acts of omission and acts of commission. You are more likely to get in trouble for making a decision than not making a decision. One of the experiments I run in my class is the trolley experiment. And that's where the trolley is going down the railroad track. There are five people ahead lying on the track. You can throw a lever which is going to divert that trolley off to kill one person, but that one person is at your hand and I anonymously poll the audience. Now, a lot of people pull the handle because they're like, "Hey, that's what we do in law enforcement," which causes the train to go off the track and run the one person over, but there are some people that don't pull that switch because they don't want the blood of that one individual on their hands. And for the people that did pull the switch or did not pull the switch or I'm getting them backwards there. The people that decided to run the one person over, I'll ask them, "Okay, well now you were standing on a bridge and there's a kid with a backpack on the bridge." I say fat kid, but then sometimes that makes people upset because there's some fat people in the class. But I say, "You pushed that kid off the bridge which is going to stop that trolley from running those five people over. Will you push that kid?"

It's interesting because a lot of them won't do it because we're talking about human factors in there. We have a risk-averse environment because of situations like Uvalde and this is why the classes we teach are about debriefs and after-action reviews is to not fix blame but to fix the problems and I think that's great but when there is a failure instead of throwing one person under the bus like Adrien Gonzalez from Uvalde Chief Orodondo Scott Peterson from the Broward County Sheriff's Department Sheriff Dr. Gregory Tony just did a press release and an incident that happened in Broward County last year where he fired eight of his deputies, two sergeants and some deputies and then he demoted a captain. Talking about culture now and again we're putting blame and it's let's not forget about the person who committed this horrific event is the reason why we're here in the first place. But when you have those failures, what do you think is important in our culture and how we can make these people feel safe, support them and the biggest thing is psychologically safe. What do you think?

Jon Becker: So you raised several issues there. One is if your actions do not rise to the standards of the organization, which is what you were talking about with Sheriff Tony. If your actions do not rise to the level of the organization's expectations and standards, you should be fired. Right? The requirement of leadership is to not only support people, but to remove people when they are not meeting the standards. General McChrystal has this concept that he talks about in his book about gardeners. Leadership is gardening, right? Create an environment where the plants can grow, where people can flourish, where people can thrive. Part of gardening is defending the garden. Part of gardening is pulling out the weeds. Part of gardening is trimming the tree to make sure that it grows in a healthy way. So, it is kind of a double-edged sword.

We were making two mistakes right now in law enforcement. And they're opposing each other. We're actually making the wrong decision in both directions. We are blaming people rather than figuring out why they're making the decisions that they are. And we are not firing people who are not meeting the standards.

Toby Darby: Right.

Jon Becker: And so you're undermining the culture from two different directions. And you see it in recruitment rates. You see it in retention rates. You see it in operational effectiveness. We are allowing people who are not meeting the standards to stay in organizations much longer than they should be allowed to. And when people are making honest mistakes, we're punishing them. Yeah. So for me, the question is why did you make the decision that you made? When you looked at this situation, what were you looking at? Gary Klein talks about it as a cognitive debrief. We don't say, "What did you do?" We say, "Why did you decide what you decided? What were the factors that were in your mind? What were you seeing? What were you hearing that led you to make that decision?" Then we look at that and we say, "Okay, was that reasonable? And if it wasn't reasonable, why? Did they not have good orientation? Were they not properly trained? Or is he a bad actor?" And if it's a bad actor, the actor needs to leave the organization. If somebody does something and I think in the example that using Sheriff Tony was a sergeant that during an active shooter didn't go to the problem, they went to another location and kind of hid. And that kind of behavior is not what we're paying law enforcement for, right? Your job is to take chances. Your job is to make really hard decisions, but if we want you to make those decisions, it means that periodically you're going to make the wrong decision and we have to support you.

Toby Darby: There's a saying from Jocko Willink and extreme in extreme ownership in Leif Babin and that is there are no bad organizations. I'm sorry.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Toby Darby: No bad teams, just bad leaders. There are just bad leaders and leadership plays a huge part in psychological safety. I think in that Dr. Tony incident, I don't think that the sheriff's sergeant at that time went and hid. I think that they saw it a different way based on experience, maybe training and saying, "Well, it's not an active shooter. There's domestic violence, whatever they may have been thinking and framing it as, “Hey, let's slow roll this and, be cognizant of officer safety and time is on our side.” The stuff that we teach when talking about time and terrain and tactical science and decision-makingaking, but leadership is so important in all this stuff.

Jon Becker: The biggest thing, like for example, in a debrief as a sergeant, the first thing I did was call out something I did wrong first and foremost to make it a safe environment for people to speak up. And I think that's important in culture from what I'm getting from your book. What are your thoughts on that?

Toby Darby: 100%.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, the leadership of an organization has to model the behavior they want to see. If you want people to admit their mistakes, if you want people to own their failures, you have to be the most extreme example of that. One of the things I love about Jocko and Leif's book, Extreme Ownership, is, it's very focused on the leader. And this idea that, when we win, we won. When we lost, I had a bad plan. It was the leader that made the decision that led to the loss. I think that notion has to underlie everything a leader is doing. You have to support the people that work for you. And realistically, you have to be the most extreme manifestation of the behaviors you want to see. If you want your people to admit that they made mistakes, you've got to go in and own every mistake that you made.

Toby Darby: What happens if you are a line-level person listening to this who reads your book, goes back to their organization? Because in the many leadership schools that I went to, I get all amped up. I go back to the organization then realize that the problem is the command staff and the problem is the leaders are the ones that are driving bad culture. What is your recommendation to those people who want to bring that back to their organization but have the people, the decision-makers are the ones that are making sure that doesn't happen.

Jon Becker: So good culture is infectious, bad culture is infectious. Everywhere in your organization, there are leaders. You lead in a variety of ways in your organization. You make choices every day. Even as a line-level officer, you make choices about the culture of your team, you and your partner, your patrol shift. You are making choices for what that culture is going to look like. An effective culture is very infectious. And so, yeah, as a line-level officer working in a large organization, you're not going to change the chief of police's behavior. You can hope it's going to change, but you're not going to, you're not going to directly change his behavior. What you are going to do is change your environment. You're going to change how your patrol shift operates. You're going to change how you and your partner get along. Control the things within your span of control. We talk about leadership happening up, down, and sideways. You lead the people that lead you in the same way that they lead you. You also lead the people at your level. So you can choose to be an agent for good or you can choose to be an agent for bad. The choices that you make not only drive the effectiveness of the organization, but they also drive your personal happiness.

To some degree, the culture that you create around you is the culture of where you're going to live. One of the things that I taught my kids early on is if you look at the world as an evil place full of bad people that are trying to screw you over, you live in a world full of evil people who are trying to screw you over.

Toby Darby: Yeah.

Jon Becker: If you look at the world as a good place where periodically something bad happens, your world is a good place. You manifest the world around you by the way you view it. And if you view it negatively and you view your culture negatively and you become a negative agent of that culture, you ultimately create the shitty environment that you don't want to live in. So whether you're, mid-level manager, top of an organization, or bottom of an organization, look at your span of control and affect it positively.

Toby Darby: I think Steven Covey talks about this in his book, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective” People. And a lot of people are more concerned about what they can't control. Yep. But they need to control or be concerned with what they can control. And you're right, it is infectious. But let's shift gears a little bit here and say for those of the people that are listening to this that are in those command staff or the chiefs or sheriff's position, how can they cultivate a shared culture within the organization so that everybody benefits from it?

Jon Becker: So the farther up you are in an organization, the more intentional you need to be about creating culture. You need to be thinking about what the culture looks like. So, if you're the sheriff or you're the chief of police, my friend and mentor Phil Hansen talked about when he became the chief at Santa Maria, one of the first things he did was go by the graveyard patrol shifts and talk to officers. He sought ground truth. He went to the people that were operating at the bottom levels of the organization and just listened to them. “What's working? What's not working? What do you wish you had?” As a senior leader in an organization, you've got to be taking an honest look at what your culture looks like. What does it look like at the ground level? Because the bad behaviors you see are not deviant actors. They are people that are operating within the cultural parameters. Think about the people that people you arrested throughout your career. It was very unusual that you arrested somebody who did something really bad in an environment where that kind of behavior was not tolerated. You're right.

Toby Darby: Right.

Jon Becker: Usually [ __ ] hang out with other [ __ ] and have terrible culture, and they have a predatory culture. They have a, whatever. If you're a sheriff or chief of police and you're like, "Man, we keep having problems with guys." You're the problem. Your culture is the problem. Like once in a while, sure, periodically, somebody deviates from the norm, deviates from the culture, your job is to pare that branch off the tree. But if you keep having problems, you have an underlying cultural issue that you're not addressing. So then it's time to go back and look and say, "Okay, how do we reset our culture? What do we as an organization believe in? What is the purpose of the organization? And are we serving that purpose?”

I think that people lose track and we've definitely lost track. We've taken away the sense of purpose that most of our law enforcement has in a way that deeply troubles me. Law enforcement performs one of the most selfless acts there is. You think about some of the cases we've covered on The Debrief where people have jumped into holes in Alabama to rescue a kid or gone through a door at Bataclan and in Paris, taken unbelievable chances with their own lives to save other people. That is the highest purpose of a human being. We've taken that away from law enforcement. We spend so much time second-guessing that we're undermining the culture of law enforcement. We're going away from, hey, you're doing something really noble to like, “hey, you're kind of a terrible person and what you're doing is awful and it doesn't matter.” We're kind of getting into the find out portion of this program where we're seeing very low retention rates. We're seeing officers leaving. We're seeing the wrong people coming into the job. We're going away from organizations that are life-saving organizations that are focused on that and we're starting to attract the wrong types of people and we're driving away the good ones.

I think that if you are a senior leader in law enforcement especially, you need to look at the purpose of your organization and make sure that everybody is constantly reminded that what they do really matters.

Toby Darby: When it comes to leadership failures, what do you think is the number one leadership habit that destroys culture totally in an organization? What is the main thing that leaders are doing wrong that destroys culture?

Jon Becker: Arrogance. I think arrogance underlies a lot, and sometimes arrogance is real arrogance and sometimes arrogance is just a lack of confidence manifested as arrogance. I think that we place too much value on people that lack humility. I always say like no matter which side of the political aisle you're on in the United States, we're running a political selection for narcissistic, self-centered people. We are 100% successful right now.

Toby Darby: 100%.

Jon Becker: Everybody is in it for themselves. As a leader, your job is to serve the people that work for you. We have to constantly remind ourselves of that. We have to constantly remind ourselves to be human and to care about other people. And what I see manifesting in a lot of places is this high level of arrogance that prevents learning. It prevents learning from mistakes. It prevents caring about other people. It creates an environment where people become very selfish. You don't build a team by being selfish. You build a team by common purpose.

When I teach this, I always talk about, you're driving down the street and you see a young girl pulled over on the side of the road and she's trying to push her car by herself. You and two other guys pull over and hop out of the car and are now helping her. Are you a team? Yes, of course you're a team. What if one of you is pushing in the opposite direction? Still a team? Not a team anymore. Teams are built by common purpose. Purpose has to be emotionally resonant. It can't be making money. It can't be overtime. It has to be saving lives. If you look at the mottos of elite units, RCMP's Lower Mainland team has four others. FBI, HRT's save lives, they're externally focused. They're emotionally resonant and everybody aligns around the purpose of the organization. My job is protecting tactical operators. That is what our organization does. When somebody is saved in our armor, we gather around and tell the story and talk about it, and everybody gets a shirt with that person's name on it. We take time to ritualize the things that really matter in the organization. We've lost that. We've lost that emotionally resonant purpose. And a lot of it's because we have self-centered narcissistic leaders that are arrogant and are in it for themselves. And that's just not who we should be promoting.

Toby Darby: No, I totally agree with that. I think though as we're talking about leadership and the importance of leadership and culture and things, the rank of police sergeant, a fire department captain, or, in the private world, a foreman comes to mind and how important their role is to culture in the organization. If you were talking to a police sergeant, a fire captain, or a first-line supervisor in any corporation, what is the best piece of advice to give them to get their culture going? What do you think that they should be doing?

Jon Becker: Care about the people you lead. Care about them individually. Know each of them individually. If you're leading five people, you have no excuse for not knowing them and knowing their families and what they care about and what matters to them. Spend your time trying to develop the people that you're leading. I use the example of, in an organization, you have a variety of personalities and a variety of capabilities. You might have people that are a 10 out of 10 and you might have other people that are a six out of six. The 10 out of 10 might be running at a nine all the time. The six might be running at a two. Organizationally, we're better off getting that guy up to a six than we are trying to take from a nine to a 10. What do we do in organizations? We write people off as, "Well, that guy's stupid. He's lazy, he's whatever, and we go, "Oh man, the high flyer, that guy, let's give him more to do." What ends up happening is the high flyer leaves because we overburden them. The one that we could have developed from a two to a six is still a two.

So, you've got to look at every single person and ask yourself, how can I get 100% from this guy? And that 100% will vary. It'll vary in what they can do. It'll vary and how well they do it, but how do I get more from everybody? How do I make this guy? How do I make Toby the best Toby he can possibly be? I think if you do nothing more than that, you're forced to care about people. You're forced to pay attention to them. You're trying to develop them. You're going to build connections, and you are now building a team. You're building, “Hey, we're trying to go in the same direction. I'm trying to help you.” If that's all we're doing, we're going to go a long way.

Toby Darby: So, As you say this, I know in the book you talk about cathedral thinking, but then let's talk briefly about legacy as we get ready to close and, what does it look like for a leader when the word succession planning comes to mind, what does it look like for a leader's legacy regarding culture, leaving a strong culture behind when they leave the organization?

Jon Becker: The ideal leader leaves the organization. Everybody's sad to see them go and the organization doesn't get any weaker because they left.

Toby Darby: I love that.

Jon Becker: The best leader designs themself out of a job. He builds the leaders behind them that are going to support him. I use an example in the book of Johnny Montegran at SEB who scout is a coveted job at LASD. You want to be a team scout. Johnny's the blue scout and he's getting close to retirement. He's about a year out and he steps down as scout and moves to the eight position, moves to the lowest ranking guy on the team and his backup Alex Lamela becomes the scout for a year. For that year, Alex has an apprenticeship in the job with the last scout as a reference. So he has the prior scout around for a year to say, "Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. What are your thoughts to use for wisdom?” But by the time Johnny leaves, the team's sad to see him go, but Alex has been running the team for a year. It's this idea that the organization, especially in law enforcement, especially in tactical units, the organization's mission goes on. When you leave the organization, people are sad to see you go. When you retired, people were sad to see you go. But the next day, they fielded exactly the same number of patrol cars as they did the day before.

Toby Darby: Not to take away from Johnny Montenegro at all. First of all, he's probably one of the best shooting instructors I've ever learned from. He's amazing. But because we're talking about culture, my wife was also a Los Angeles County deputy. She was a team leader on a major crimes team and she did the same thing. Before she knew she was going to retire, she stepped down and passed it off to another individual. So that might be a cultural thing in the sheriff's department because of guys like Phil Hansen, because of people that are instilling these cultural values within the organization. And I think that's the one thing that is important for these organizations to utilize and encourage so that it is passed on from generation to generation because a lot of times good leadership dies when somebody leaves the organization and somebody gets promoted for things that they should not be getting promoted for.

So, I think it should be a professional culture for our profession, not just for a specific organization. No, 100%. I mean, I think if you can learn one lesson as a leader, the most important phrase I can give you is: it's not about you. Yeah. It's never about you. It's about Pete Blaber, who I interviewed for the book and was nice enough to give me an endorsement of the book. The former Delta commander wrote a book called The Mission, the Men, and Me. And in that order, right? The mission is the most important thing. The organization is the most important thing. The people you lead are the second most important thing. You are the least important thing. Simon Sinek talks about the Marine Corps' practice of leaders eating last. The leaders in the organization, the higher you rank, the later you wait to eat. Everybody eats before you do. And it's a Marine Corps cultural tradition, but it's a cultural tradition that sends a very clear message. You are more important than I am. You are more important than I am. You go eat. If there isn't enough food, I will be the one that carries that burden, not you.

Toby Darby: I love that. Are you ready for some rapid-fire questions?

Jon Becker: Rock. All right.

Toby Darby: So what do you think is the best trait of elite teams?

Jon Becker: Humility. They're humble.

Toby Darby: Tell me more.

Jon Becker: They're humble. I mean they learn from everybody that they intersect with. They learn from every operation. They are knowledge sponges.

Toby Darby: Okay. In regards to elite teams, what is the biggest culture killer?

Jon Becker: Arrogance. Wow. Arrogance. This is the placing of self. I mean, if you've read “Code Over Country” which is a less than flattering portrayal of DEVGRU sometimes they get the culture. All these organizations, like culture itself, are not static things, right? It's a constantly evolving thing DEVGRU yesterday is not DEVGRU tomorrow, right? It's going to constantly be evolving and so there are periods of time in any of these organizations where they get it really well and periods where they don't. But if you read Code Over Country you see a lot of examples of guys placing themselves ahead of the organization, taking advantage where they could, doing what they wanted when they shouldn't. It is this notion that I am more important than the team, and it's the inverse of Pete Blaber's views. It's me, the men, and the mission. And that's not how it works.

Toby Darby: Wow.

Jon Becker: There is a saying by John Maxwell that says, "If you want to impress them, share with them your successes. If you want to impact them, share with them your failures.”

Toby Darby: What is one leadership failure you have had in your career that you can impact us with?

Jon Becker: I'm glad you allowed me to only one because this could go on for hours.

Toby Darby: There's humility coming out.

Jon Becker: No, the number of mistakes I've made. It's staggering in 40 years. The one that I talk about in the book is I hired a high-performing asshole. So, I hired a guy who was a salesperson for another company. It was a target of opportunity for me. He was a pain in the ass for us to compete with. He was effective at his job. He's a very good salesman. So, I could cripple my competitor and improve my organization at the same time. I didn't like him, but I hired for performance. It was probably six months before I found him standing over one of our female employees with his finger in her face, yelling at her while she was sitting in a chair about something that she had done that was an appropriate thing for her to do. He just didn't like it. I physically dragged him out of the office by his ear. It was one of the few times in 40 years that I've used physical violence. In a very gentle fashion, I explained to him that behavior was not acceptable, and shortly after, I fired him. What I didn't understand at the point that I hired him is I had done exactly the opposite of what I argue in this book. I had hired a high-performing asshole for his performance and I had given very little consideration to what his impact on our culture would be. He was toxic and he burned a hole in our culture that took me probably a year to repair. I will never make that mistake again.

Now, our hiring process is multiple interviews with multiple different personalities. We jokingly call it “Kissing Frogs” enthusiastically. In fact, the subtitle of the chapter is, you're going to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince. Now we will kiss a lot of frogs and we'll have four or five different people from different demographic groups, different genders, different job responsibilities talk to you, meet you. None of them have the ability to hire you. All of them have the ability to prevent you from being hired because in the end, your effect on the culture is more important than your effect on the performance of the organization.

Toby Darby: I don't want to ruin the book, but I know that there is a part about making people feel part of the organization, part of the culture. You mentioned, I think Disney, In-N-Out is another company. There's many companies. Yeah. Zappos, Amazon, they all have names for their employees. You do that here and I see it firsthand and that's pretty cool. But you also told me before this recording that writing the book is living the book.

Jon Becker: Oh God.

Toby Darby: Tell me some more about that.

Jon Becker: So, everything I write in this book, I really believe. This is not Jon's leadership theory book. Jon has lived this. Jon has seen this. Jon's friends have been through this. All the stories are rooted in stories that people have told me or things that I've experienced. So everything that I'm trying, everything I'm talking about in the book, I try to manifest in my own life. I surround myself with knives. I give several examples in the book, but I surround myself with knives, you being one of them. People who will tell me the truth. People who will make me better. When the book was done, the first time the book was done, I sent it out to a bunch of you guys and I got back a lot of feedback and made a lot of changes and then I sent it back. The ones that attacked it, I sent it back to them. The ones that were like, hey, it's great, I didn't send it back to them. The ones that were like, hey, this is not so great, I sent it back to them.

The standout of this experience was Kevin Cyr at the RCMP. We talked earlier about Kevin (one of the best tactical minds), I know, a fantastic tactical leader. Kevin would not let it go. Absolutely would not let it go. He said, "Look, this is the best thing I've read on leadership, but it can be better." The people around me constantly dragged me over the stone, right? The knife gets sharper by being dragged across the stone. I actually say in the last chapter of the book that the process of writing this book is like the sharpening of a knife for a knife being repeatedly dragged across a stone hoping that the injuries that I'm sustaining are making me sharper.

My friends, I actually describe them in the acknowledgments of the book as the book's red team. I had the experience of being subjected to my own standards. In fact, several of you even used the book against me, citing specific passages of why I heard things like, "No, it's good. The whole book is about half-assing it. You should just stop here." I tell the story of one of the women who works for me, Melena, that I won't spoil here, but I had several people go, "Well, I don't want to be like Melena and try to make you better. You should just finish it here." The process of this book has been brutal. If you're thinking to yourself, you're sitting at home thinking, "I should write a book." You should not write a book. You should just slam your head in the door a couple of times. It'll be a lot easier. The pain will be over sooner. But it was an amazing experience because I realized just how strong my tribe is and how willing they are to tell me I am wrong. In the end, as a leader, if you don't surround yourself with people that will tell you the truth, you're not going to get better.

This book was a real opportunity for me to test who is going to tell me the truth, who's going to hurt my feelings, who's going to make me better, and I couldn't be happier. I couldn't be happier with the people that were willing to endorse the book and say things. I had some of the endorsements and was choked up and teared up as I read them because they're people whose opinions I really value who said things that really mattered to me. So it was quite an emotional journey.

Toby Darby: No, I bet. I bet. When can people get hold of this book?

Jon Becker: So, it'll go on pre-sale April 1st.

Toby Darby: Okay.

Jon Becker: It'll ship May 15th.

Toby Darby: Okay.

Jon Becker: We're going to do a hardcover, a softcover. We're going to do an audiobook, and then we're going to do like a Kindle e-pub, but it'll be April 1st that the hardcover and softcover and I think the e-pub will go on sale. The e-pub through Amazon. The hardcover and softcover will eventually be on Amazon starting in May, but we're going to do a pre-sale through an organization called “Ingram Spark” that will allow people to buy for 45 days.

Toby Darby: Okay. And you mentioned that it'll be a discount for law enforcement because cops and firefighters are cheap. But what about your debrief listeners?

Jon Becker: So yeah, what we're going to do is the tactical organizations that we work with, debrief listeners, we're going to give a discount code. We're basically going to sell the book for as low as we can based on cost and everything else that's involved in a book, which is far more complicated than I gave it credit for. I think it's 30 or 35% off the book. Debrief listeners, if they go to The Debrief website, TheDebrief.live, there's a like register for the newsletter. If you register for the newsletter, we will send you the discount code when the book goes on pre-sale to be able to buy it in advance. The discount, unfortunately will only be for the pre-sale because of the way that the book business works and the way Amazon works. It's much more complicated than I thought it was.

Toby Darby: No, nothing's ever easy.

Jon Becker: Especially in book publishing. Way more complicated than I gave it credit for. But yeah, we're going to offer a discount to NTOA members and K9 members and listeners of The Debrief. I really want the book in the hands of this community as cheaply as I can possibly do it because this is the community it came from.

Toby Darby: Yeah. Right.

Jon Becker: I didn't invent this stuff. I'm just sharing lessons this community taught me.

Toby Darby: I think that's kind of I'm going to close with this, but on behalf of our profession, thank you for The Debrief and thank you for writing this book because again, it is assumed that everybody knows this and until you actually read it and see the stories associated with it and actually have real real-world examples, it really doesn't set in. It makes us better as leaders, as organizations, as the culture in our profession. And I want to thank you firsthand for that. And it reminds me of Sid when you I think at one point talked to Sid Heal. And I always say Heal because my mind reads it, but it is pronounced Hail. And I always say Heal because my mind reads it, but it's Hail. And you said somebody needs to, codify this. And he goes, "Well, it's going to be you, Jon." And you took that torch and here we are today. And I can tell you that it has been a huge benefit, not only in the content that we teach. I play a lot of your videos and the classes that we teach to reiterate certain points, but also across the country, across the world, when you're hearing from Australia with Ben Besant and you're hearing the Canadians, I think they lost last night in the baseball game. I'm sorry about that. I'm telling you, you're absolutely right with Kevin Cyr. He is an amazing leader. I thought when I first heard from them it was just going to be a guy with a big red coat and a hat on a horse, but man, they are something else. It's a great team up there, but around the world this is affecting and I want to thank you for that.

So, Jon, thank you for coming on my show today. I really appreciate it.

Jon Becker: Thanks for having me.

Toby Darby: All right, we'll see you on the next one.

Jon Becker: Thanks, Toby.