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.
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.
Yeah, I think mission creep is a huge problem. When you're supposed to be everything, you're nothing and you know the military. They face their challenges. When you're both peacekeepers and warriors, it's tough to have a dozen mindsets in your head all at the same time.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.
Travis Yates:
Welcome back to the show. 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. You're going to love it. On today's episode we have Pete Havel. He's a former lobbyist and political consultant who proudly served with some of America's leading pro-business advocacy organizations. He's also been a senior executive for top strategic communication firms and he has a passion for fixingures. That began with taking the wrong turn into a toxic workplace and his subsequent book, the Arsonist in the Office. 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. 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. Pete's the president of Fireproof Leadership. He lives in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Baylor University, and he's an avid Red Sox and Patriots fan. We will not hold that against him, Pete. How are you doing, sir?
Pete Havel:
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.
Travis Yates:
I mean, they're here to listen to you, pete, and I would encourage everybody to follow Pete on LinkedIn. You got to get his book the Arsonist in the Office. I ran across this thing and it was just fascinating. 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.
Pete Havel:
But uh, you know, uh, god has a plan, or uh, you know, stuff happens for a reason. Whatever the answer, is it, um, it's. It's just, it's crazy how life works out. 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.
Travis Yates:
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. 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.
Pete Havel:
Yeah, my career blew up. 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. I was tasked with working with an unbelievably toxic, bizarre, dysfunctional employee that had become untouchable because of how much trouble they had caused. 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. 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. 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.
Pete Havel:
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.
Pete Havel:
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. Can I talk to you every once in a while? 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. And I'll tell you what. 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.
Travis Yates:
Yeah, that's a whole nother story, right? 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. I didn't think anyone would ever read it. Then these people will just contact you from who knows where and talk about this stuff. 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. 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. 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. But when this happened to you, you became aware of this, did you realize how rampant organizational sort of toxicity was?
Pete Havel:
No, I mean my view before I hit that situation that prompted me to write the book. 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. That was it. And when I'd hear about tough situations I really had no concept of, I really had no concept of. So when I experienced what I did, it threw me for a loop because I really wasn't prepared for it in any way. You know they don't teach you about that in school. There's no courses on it. You're not prepared for all right. You know how do I do? I fight back. What are my resources? What's?
Pete Havel:
my mindset going to be Do I have any recourse at all or do I run? What does victory look like? All these kind of questions going through your mind. Most people have no idea. I sure didn't. So, um, yeah, I it. It shocked me at the time, but but now I know that. Um, what do they say? 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. You know the, the things I hear from from folks there's. 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. 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. It should be, but it's just not.
Travis Yates:
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. We'll get into all that. But I saw a recent survey and this blew my mind. It asked you know, if you're out of law enforcement, why did you leave law enforcement? And 70 percent said culture, 70 percent I don't know what the real number is. I know my dissertation showed a 93 percent low morale factor in the profession, which kind of blew me away. In fact my chair didn't even believe it, but I had to show him the data to prove it back. As he said, I didn't think the profession was that bad.
Travis Yates:
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. But you are, you have found a profession and I'm going to speak for law enforcement that desperately needs you. 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? Because there's obviously some very obvious signs they may think, by the way, like I did for many years. This is normal, because if you're in for something for so long, you sort of normalize it right. So what are the telling signs that they're actually in a bad culture?
Pete Havel:
And a lot of them really are behavioral. I mean, I've got 20 of them in the book, but you see retaliation going on. You see disrespect. Do you see retaliation going on. Do you see disrespect? Do you see, for instance, when a leader walks in the room, is there fear? Is?
Speaker 2:
there silence.
Pete Havel:
Can a group of people on the command staff have a hard conversation or even an easy conversation? Is there retaliation if you raise a concern or if you've gotten even a good idea? Is somebody going to be undercutting you because they are jealous of you, or your supervisor may be insecure? All those things and a whole lot more, but those tend to be some of the things that you see. What are the byproducts of that?
Pete Havel:
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.
Pete Havel:
Those folks that were retaliated against, bullied, just demoted you name it and they've never recovered. They go through the motions and they've checked out in a lot of ways. They're waiting until the end of their time to get the heck out and they're not contributing much. 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. We want to know what it's going to take to get you excited again. 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. Those folks who wanted to participate but somebody cut them out at the knees and they didn't. They weren't in after that, that's for sure.
Travis Yates:
Yeah, I would imagine that what you talk about is similar. I talk about Pete is. You're oftentimes in front of your own church choir, right? Like the people that really need to hear this won't have Pete come, come talk to their agency, right? Uh, you're, you're, you're people that have Pete show up. They want to, they want to actually make a difference, they want to change things. But the really bad, toxic cultures there's no way they're having you show up, right?
Pete Havel:
For the most part I've had a few that have been told. You know, bring this guy in and check the box, yep, and those have been. I will tell you some of the most wheels-off things imaginable. I've got some crazy stories that I won't go into. 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.
Pete Havel:
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. You can probably visualize this piece of video right now. He pulls out his pepper spray and a female officer pulls on his gun belt as a way to hopefully de-escalate the situation. She had gone through that de-escalation training. That's probably going to spur the memory of a few folks in your audience. 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. 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.
Pete Havel:
And I said y'all, when that occurred, how long did it take for word of that incident to get around the department? 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. And I said have you all gotten the de-escalation training? And they said yes. I said do you understand the de-escalation training? Yes, and I said, and they had already told me that they had a lot of retaliation going on in the department.
Pete Havel:
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? I heard every expletive out of their mouths of bleep, no, in every way possible. 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. We know what's happened in those situations. It can get on TV and it can wreck lives. It can end lives in some of those types of situations and it all ties back to culture.
Travis Yates:
I would imagine I'm not going to speak for yourself, pete, but most general citizens without any law enforcement knowledge. 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. 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? Yes, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah it's okay to say that, yeah of course, because I tell people all the time.
Travis Yates:
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. I said I could tell you these stories but you just you'll think I'm crazy if I tell you.
Pete Havel:
Yeah, y'all have a level of courage, y'all have some superpowers. 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. 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. In your hands to be able to do certain work. You get callous in some ways of that because of what you see every day. You can't help but have it happen. So you know everything.
Pete Havel:
Y'all's humor is a little bit more dark. The things that would phase you guys it doesn't phase you guys would shock other people. Somebody would be in the fetal position for months with what y'all may see on a normal shift. So yeah, it's different. And then in culture some departments are much different than others. 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. That's where a heck of a lot of problems come from.
Travis Yates:
Well, and people need to also understand that a bagged toxic culture inside a law enforcement agency transcends into the community. I would have officers that would get complaints, rudeness complaints number one complaint in the profession. If I got one of those, I didn't think much of it. 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. My first question is what's this officer seeing inside this organization to where he thinks he can treat somebody like that? Like how is he being treated, or she being treated by us? And that's?
Travis Yates:
That's something that really people need to understand is culture doesn't just stay bad, it doesn't just stay inside an organization. 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. 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. So the next time that you are treated horribly at any place, you need to think to yourself what is the culture like? I'm not saying it may not be a bad employee, but more often than not culture transcends inside, is it not?
Pete Havel:
What happens on the inside is going to spill out into the outside. Nine times out of ten. That's right. Go ahead it when I say this. But corruption is connected to culture sometimes. Well, it's connected in a lot of ways to culture of folks getting lax in a different way. 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. People throughout the organization have likely gotten those same perceptions and run with them. And it's just like that with culture in all sorts of ways.
Travis Yates:
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. They want to do something about it. They may be at different levels in the organization. What kind of advice on a leadership standpoint can you tell them? I think I know some of the things you're going to say. Can you tell them to start, because it's not an overnight fix right? What could you tell the individual, instead of the individual sitting back, going man, the culture is terrible. What type of action can the individual do to have a positive impact on the culture?
Pete Havel:
Yeah, and at all levels. 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. You can only do so much. If you're in leadership, you've got a lot more ability to get things done. 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. 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. 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. And it's a sales job. It really is. It is both a sales job as well as a value proposition.
Pete Havel:
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.
Pete Havel:
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.
Pete Havel:
When I go into departments and I'm talking to the sergeants on up, I say who are the folks in leadership? 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. But sergeants need to understand guys, y'all are leaders. 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. Chiefs need to understand that too. And that is the people out in the field that are going to make and break everything that the command staff does. They're the boots on the ground that are going to do the important work of the police department.
Travis Yates:
Yeah, just so I'm clear. 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? We?
Travis Yates:
have so many that are just scared to death of making any decisions. And it's always the COA up the chain. I used to get this all the time. 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? What's the policy, say? I mean, I booted more people out of my office. I said I'm not going to answer this for you. You have rank, you know what the boundaries are. And then after a while they started to not come in the office. Right, but there's just such a fear because of the culture and a real quick culture story. I was a brand new commander at a big division.
Travis Yates:
I walked into the midnight shift. 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. 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? And everyone's quiet. And I said, listen, I get it. 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. Surely there's something I can ask, I can answer for you.
Travis Yates:
And this one hand goes up and the guy goes yeah, major, you see that TV on the wall. Yes, sir, wall. Yes, sir, that tv doesn't work. You think you could get us a new tv? I said, and it's like a you know 199 tv, pete. And I said well, how long has the tv been not been working? That guy says over 20 years, or something like that. I go well, how come it's not working? And he goes no one's ever asked us about it. I thought to myself man, what am I involved in? And so it took a long time to get them to open up. But that really just started with some hard work and communication. Right, pete, that's what somebody can do, is, I would say, you can judge your culture by if you ask the regular officer hey, what do you think when you have to walk into your sergeant's office or your captain's office, your chief's office? If their immediate thought is fear, then you've got some work to do, do you not?
Pete Havel:
That's right, Absolutely. And if you don't know that person I hear a lot of talk about, well, I've got an open door policy. Well, that's great.
Travis Yates:
No one's coming in your door probably.
Pete Havel:
Yeah, if your people don't know who's in that office, don't trust them or haven't had a conversation with them. Your young officer is not going to do that. That's not how things work in a workplace. The leader makes that first step and then the employee comes from there. Step out leaders and you're going to get the feedback back to you, but don't expect your people to come into a situation where they have no earthly idea of what you're going to do with it. They don't know if this is an opportunity for a leader that is going to help them or if it's one of those Venus fly trap things where you were the fly.
Travis Yates:
Yeah, that's what I always tell people. I said don't have an open door policy, go to their door, right, because no one's going to come to your door. You've got to break down their door and after a while then they will come to your door, but you've got to go there first. See, trust goes both ways. They're not going to trust you until you trust it in your book and it's one of my favorite companies ever Southwest Airlines and I talk about Southwest a lot. They're so unique in that industry and you have some knowledge with that Kind of talk to us about the culture in Southwest Airlines and how they were able to achieve that.
Pete Havel:
Yeah, I think one of the things that empowers folks at Southwest and they've had their problems too, and you know you always have to work on your culture and they've they've worn that over the last few years. We've all seen the headlines. But one of the things I love about them is that they believe and they aggressively believe it is that um customer is not always right. They and they and they back it up. And if the customer is rude, if the customer is um, the customer is just demeaning in any way, they are going to back up that person. They are going to ask that person to kindly get off their flight and they will find them another way home and they will find them another way home.
Pete Havel:
The empowerment that that sends, the message that that sends, is incredible. The rewarding that they do, the celebration that they have from day one of folks walking in a massive pep rally that is held for the new hires every month. You walk in there, music blaring, cheerleaders, you name it. It is fun to be in the place and new ideas are accepted, leadership engaged. It's a fun place to work and you know, admittedly, policing is going to be a little bit different, but you can still figure out ways to have fun, and probably one of the best ways to do that is ask your people what's fun to them, and how can we fit that in within the parameters of a department. How do you guys want to celebrate?
Travis Yates:
Yeah, one of the things you said that does apply to law enforcement. We've seen this issue is is you're right, the customer isn't always right, right. And so the idea that we treat officers a certain way because somebody said something or accuse you of something, the officer isn't automatically guilty. And we have so many officers out there that are treated like this. It doesn't take very many times to be treated like that to go. I got to find another place to go or another culture, and law enforcement has sort of they've been riding the coattails of pensions and which means if an officer is at an agency for so long, they're probably not going to leave the agency. They're probably going to sit there and put up with it. Where in a private industry, you have to work on culture or they won't have a workforce. Well, law enforcement is slowly but surely finding out if you've been keeping up with the recruiting and retention crisis that now they're willing to leave, now to the culture can get so bad to where they'll leave it all and go to another place because that is highly important to them. So law enforcement is sort of not had to focus so much on culture because hey, listen, pete, if agency A, b or C blows up their budget in 2023, guess what happens? They get fully funded for 2024, maybe even more money. Right, that's right.
Travis Yates:
There's an old joke that the end of the fiscal year, in the last month and I was part of it better spend all your money or you won't get it next year. And so we just start spending money on the. You know, if you want a toy, you get it in June of every year, because July 1, they're going to re-up your budget, and so we're not bound by those same rules as a private organization. We'd all be bankrupt if we were, and sometimes that's why our culture isn't focused on, and I have a theory I want to ask you about this. I think one of the reasons our cultures have been largely destroyed in many of our organizations is because, in recent years, we got away from our core mission. You've got men and women that go into the profession with a core mission in mind, and our mission is kind of simple. It's in our name law enforcement, and when organizations get away from that mission, that's when the culture starts breaking down. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Pete Havel:
Yeah, I think mission creep is a huge problem. Um, when you're supposed to be everything, you're nothing right and uh, you know the the military is, uh, they face their challenges. When you're when you're both peacekeepers and, uh, and warriors, it's. It's tough to have a dozen mindsets in your head all at the same time.
Travis Yates:
And that comes down to thinking the customer is always right. We just go with the flow, with whatever the political wind is, instead of just sticking with our mission.
Travis Yates:
And we're going to blame you on the fly, for not knowing which mindset you should have at any given time within seconds. Yeah, it's so easy to see when we're like us, looking from afar, right, but there's so many people inside of it that doesn't necessarily understand what's going on. So I really appreciate the conversation and, by the way, if you're just now joining us, we're talking to Pete Havel. He's written the book the Arsonist in the Office Fireproofing your Life Against Toxic Coworkers, bosses, employees and Cultures. You've got to get this book. Get him out to train. It's life-changing stuff, folks. And one more question, pete, and we're going to let you get on with your day. I'm so appreciative that you joined us today. What's the evidence of a great organizational culture? Because we've got some people out there, we've already given the bad, but how will they know? And I think they probably do know it, because it's a constant process, it's constant work. But what's the evidence of great organizational culture and how can leaders measure it?
Pete Havel:
I think the top one is when you can raise a concern and you're not going to have your head knocked off, that culture of feedback. Culture of feedback when you can frankly, when you can disagree with your boss and your boss says thank you. I think that is the ultimate of cultures, because that creates trust, it creates communication. Those two things, in my view, are the two essentials of any culture. If you don't have both of those, you're in trouble. But that example right there, the great things that can come from people being able to contribute in a way in which they don't have fear when they do it, that's the most beautiful thing in the world. Do it. That's the most beautiful thing in the world that you're going to get so much productivity.
Travis Yates:
So much trust, so many good employees that want to help, no matter where they are in the organization. Well, I know there's people out here listening. You're just like me. This is such good stuff and, pete, I need to really encourage people listening. If you care about culture, go get this book the Arsons in the Office. If you really care about culture, give Pete a call. Pete, you do consulting, you do training, you've added coaching, you've got it all out there. There is no reason, especially if you're a decision maker in an organization. You can change this, but you can't necessarily change it on your own, because we may not be necessarily the best ones to know what to do. So, pete Havel, how can they contact you and how can they reach you?
Pete Havel:
Yeah, you mentioned LinkedIn. I'm on there. My last name is spelled H-A-V, as in Victor E-L, and they can also reach out to me through my website, which is PeteHavel. com. That's P-E-T-E-H-A-V, as in victory E-L dot com.
Travis Yates:
Awesome stuff. Pete, I can't thank you enough for being here.
Pete Havel:
Thanks, Travis, I appreciate it.
Travis Yates:
And those of you listening. Thank you for listening and just remember lead on and stay courageous.
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