Healthy Police Organizations with Chad Bruckner

Discover a transformative perspective on leadership as former police officer Chad is trailblazing  path through his performance coaching and desire to see leadership in law enforcement improve.  Venturing beyond his book, "The Holy Trinity of Successful and Healthy Police Organizations," Chad illuminates the essence of profound leadership and personal growth, recounting the lessons from his service-driven upbringing, military discipline, and the front lines of law enforcement. His narrative is a masterclass in understanding the human psyche and instigating positive change within the ranks of those who protect and serve.

Chad juxtaposes the meritocratic ethos of military training with the seniority-centric culture pervasive in police departments. We confront the systemic challenges that hinder the cultivation of true leaders and discuss the dire need for an overhaul in law enforcement leadership. For officers feeling disheartened by their current professional environment, Chad extends actionable advice and encouragement. His insights are not just crucial for those in uniform; they resonate with anyone aspiring to lead with integrity and impact.

Join us for a conversation that promises to redefine your understanding of what it means to lead by example.



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Transcript

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Welcome to courageous leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

Travis Yates: 0:12

Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you've decided to spend some time with us here today, and this episode is sponsored by Officer Privacy. Officerprivacy. C Officerprivacycom was started by Pete James, a 25-year veteran of law enforcement and digital forensics expert. His passion is to help LEOs and their families delete their private information from the internet so they can feel safe, and today more than ever we need to be doing that. So contact Pete at officerprivacy. com. Let him know that we sent you there. Today's episode is going to be a barn burner. We have Chad Bruckner. He's a former police officer, but he's now helping others as a performance coach and motivational speaker. In his book, the "Holy Trinity of Successful and Healthy Police Organizations Blends the Issue of Wellness and Leadership Like Few Others have. I highly recommend it. You got to get it. You're going to love this conversation. Chad Brueckner, how are you doing, sir?

Chad Bruckner: 1:12

Dr. Travis Yates. How are you, my friend Travis? Just fine, my man. How are you?

Travis Yates: 1:17

How you been doing? Staying busy? What's going on?

Chad Bruckner: 1:19

Oh man, he stays a new day, brother. Today I was working on my newsletter putting my latest edition of that out, and I also have a private investigation firm, so I was working on some background investigation today. So it was a little bit of everything.

Travis Yates: 1:31

Yeah, isn't that great man. You get to kind of be the boss of your own kingdom and I got to ask you man, how you got here.

Travis Yates: 1:37

So you're in the military, you're going to law enforcement and, man, you're in your early 40s and I found you online, man, and you were doing some superb stuff. I've immediately ordered the book, immediately reached out to you. I said because I read a lot of books. I've got I mean probably four or 500 of leadership type books, but this is my passion, and when I read your book, man, it had that rare commodity that I very rarely see, which is it was unique and it was to the point and very practical.

Travis Yates: 2:06

If you get his book, the Holy Trinity In Successful and Healthy Police Organizations. First, you won't be able to put it down and, second, you're going to, it's going to have an immediate impact on you and that's powerful. I can read 20 John Maxwell books and I've read one book. Right, it's all very similar. That's just the way it is. But that's what I love about you, chad, is you've got some ideas and thoughts that are really before your time. You're a young man, but you're thinking like an old man with wisdom. So I just want to ask you, man, what got you here?

Chad Bruckner: 2:34

Yeah, that's, I appreciate you saying all of that. The book, the book. I definitely poured it all out into there and I purposely, intentionally, didn't want to leave any stone unturned and wanted to leave something into the world that you know everybody could really be proud of. And if you're in the profession it can make those changes as hard changes holistically, which is, I think you know, we see these money problems being thrown around it, recruitment or attention to leadership issues, but that's all the answers to fix the right inside of our hearts and souls and that starts within ourselves and how we become the best leaders and best humans and that will transcend our organization. So, yeah, I really left it all out there.

Chad Bruckner: 3:07

And you know, for me, growing up I grew up in a service-oriented family. My parents, my grandfathers, both served in military, my dad served, so that was always that element in the room was was just a service passion. It was always kind of through our house growing up and watching my dad. We didn't have really that much money at all and he would take whatever money he'd have and he'd go buy a bunch of pretzels soft pretzels and we'd drive around Philadelphia delivering pretzels to people without homes and those are the experiences I had growing up not a lot of money, but tons of love, tons of passion, tons of purpose. So when I graduated high school at 17, really the only option I had was to go in the military because I just didn't really have any other option at that time and I was happy to do it. I loved it. It was the greatest thing that happened to me, travis, because I went in at 17, still a kid in so many ways, obviously and I got out at 25, eight years later, still a kid. But that eight-year period of my life I didn't realize it at the time but was the most profound eight-year period of my life because I got to travel the world, did a lot of things, met some amazing people, did a lot of positive things, did some negative things and all those really added to the to my kaleidoscope of, of my perspectives, of just, you know, things.

Chad Bruckner: 4:14

Very few things to me are black and white. Most of the world is gray and and not to say there's not right versus wrong and we can call things out, but most things I think we have to massage and have conversations about and discussion, because there's always factors and merits that that lead us to take behaviors or actions that we do. It's never that unilaterally or single issue, I believe I found so that perspective has just helped me really be curious for people and dig into why people do the things they do. I'm very naturally curious about that. There's not too many people that I have too much to stay for anymore, because I realized that we're all stand from a place, we all have some pain. We're trying to work through the world and solve or something happens. We're trying to still prove ourselves and we were all human, and so it really helps me to kind of see people for who they are and that's helped me generate a lot of momentum and just making relationships and wanting to help people.

Travis Yates: 4:59

So you go into military Chad at 17 years old and I'm just gonna have you explain to our audience that hasn't been in the military. Talk to us about the leadership Influence, the leadership training, the leadership cadre that you were immediately exposed to in the US military.

Chad Bruckner: 5:14

Yeah, it was high level man. It was, it was, it was. It was impressive and I didn't appreciate it at the time because I was so young and it was. I wrote about this in the Book of just the drill sergeants and getting drilled and I mean they're breaking down a boy. I don't even know who I really was yet, but they were breaking me down. They break us down and it build you up to be a man of character, a man of a purpose, a man who can execute and.

Chad Bruckner: 5:35

I was in the Infantry. So when I say man at that time in the 90s was all male, it's changed, it's been co-ed since, but and and that's what they're breaking it down a break in the boy and then you have to almost kill the boy to become the man that you need to be. There's a process to that and it's hard. It's not always puppy dogs and rainbows, so you have to have great leaders to do that. You can also break a man. You can break a young boy if you don't have great leadership, and so it's very, very important. And I got a real. You know I left. My dad is a really strong leader.

Chad Bruckner: 6:04

Grown up my dad and I go into the military was around some other strong leaders.

Chad Bruckner: 6:07

There were bad leaders there too, but generally the leadership I had the military although it was, you know, you could say, a little harmful in the language we use and things like that. I Looked at the action. I looked at the behaviors of the leaders. You know what were they doing? What behaviors were they exhibiting with? Were they leading from the front, like those are things that I was just conditioned as a kid to really pay attention to, so I Could kind of push back some of the yelling and the cursing and you know we're moving at a high, high pace or all pushing the same direction. That's some of the leadership I was around starting at 17 years old and that carried all through the military. So I was really fortunate just to be around. Some high character men Probably don't have a lot of money and a lot of national acclaim and few people know who they are, but they were tremendous men of character and they really set me up on a path to be here today.

Travis Yates: 6:49

So you, you said you set out at 25 and left the military. You have all this sort of, you know, phd level leadership stuff that you aren't aware that it's that level. But then you go into law enforcement, discuss the stark difference and the leadership you discovered in the military versus the leadership you discovered in law enforcement.

Chad Bruckner: 7:09

Yeah, I was blown away. I was. It hit me pretty hard, hit me pretty fast, probably in the first few months. I just noticed how was a lot of do as I say, not as I do, which is just flies the face of any you know person. I've refused. It's hard for me to call myself a leader. I like maybe other people can say that, but it's just. I still struggle because this sounds self-serving, but you know, but the leaders I've been around, you know they're, they're not, they're, they're leading from the front. You know they're. They're making very healthy decisions. They're, they're.

Chad Bruckner: 7:35

They're not treating it like a business. And I started just quickly seeing law enforcement was a very seniority driven process and it's always been that way. So it's hard to really Criticize. We're in the moment because you know most people say was as I've always done it, and then you try to kind of peel back the layers a little bit, explain that just because you're outranked, somebody through seniority, through time, does it mean that you get to take off your vacations first? Doesn't mean you get to eat first. It doesn't work that way. I'm sorry you were shown the wrong way but that's a horrible example that you were shown and you start to try to make those changes, set those examples. You've got tons of conflict because people don't want to. You know you're trying to do it in a way that that I was trained and shown. So it's just a different thing. It's very seniority driven. It's, you know, depending it, really not merit-based. What I saw.

Chad Bruckner: 8:17

So some of the promotional processes, you know, frankly, law enforcement, the best leaders are just not moving up through the ranks. There's a very political component to it. I saw that, I experienced that, I went through it, and Multiple times, and I went through three sergeant promotional exams, three or four. I couldn't pass one of them, travis, not one. I got through to get promoted sergeant and and I really deep myself up Is this me? Is this what's going on? And each time I kept getting refined like this this is crazy like.

Chad Bruckner: 8:43

I got promoted sergeant in the army 20 years old. I couldn't even drink legally yet. They put sergeant stripes on me and I let 300 combat missions. I come into police work and I couldn't even get out the first level and I couldn't figure it out until I realized it's. It's a system, it's a construct that is not set up to succeed. It's a construct that's set up for the top to benefit. And it's getting even worse as we speak now. So these are the things we have to talk about. Try to change. We got to bring meritorious leadership back, your seniority. I know the unions are important some degrees, but they've also called some roblox in another areas.

Travis Yates: 9:14

Yeah, I can. I can only imagine that culture shock that you had. And they talk about the deep state at the federal level a lot. Well, law enforcement has its own deep state and you describe some of that like things that are done just because they're done. That way it's a system and of mediocrity.

Chad Bruckner: 9:32

Yeah, and Any listen we could be, we could be great, travis, I'd say, right now, this profession is. I love this profession. We can be excellent, we can be great, but you know, to take to be great, I we're gonna have to make some wholesale changes. Are we willing to make wholesale changes? Are certain leaders willing to say you know what I'll sacrifice for the better of the team, I'll sacrifice for the profession? That's what it's gonna take. And I don't see enough leaders sacrifice. I don't see enough willing to say that. I see the opposite. I see leaders, you know, fighting for their newest, next contract, fighting to maintain power, fighting, maintain their, their place in standing, and it's just that that's not service. You know we got to get back to service minded. That's sacrifice.

Travis Yates: 10:07

That's one of my worries, chad, is. You know, you go into the US military at 17 and you were exposed to how leadership is supposed to be done. But what about the cop that goes into policing at 21? That's his first job and he thinks that's how leadership is done. They're the next police chief, they're the next captains, they're the next majors.

Travis Yates: 10:24

And they're gonna carry on what I would call incestual leadership. They're gonna carry on these bad habits of leadership. And you ask what can be done. Well, I think you're doing it, chad. I think this is how we do it we reach as many people as we can. I love folk. In fact, it's funny when people have me come out for a seminar because they'll go. We're trying to get with the schedules of our deputy chiefs and our captains and our majors and I go. I don't care about your schedule, they've already screwed you up. Let's put the officers in the room, because they're the next deputy chiefs and they're the next captains.

Travis Yates: 10:48

Let's get to them now. And they don't always like that answer, but doing a leadership class with just rank is a complete waste of time. Your leadership training should have all ranks in it, because, number one the lower ranks need to hold the higher ranks Accountable, and then the lower ranks are also gonna be the higher ranks. So that's not a quick fix, as you can imagine, but one thing, you said that is clears day chat. There better be a change rather quickly or we're in much more deep trouble than we may even know.

Chad Bruckner: 11:16

It's, it's good. It's getting worse and this is the and I'm not a negative person, but I'm also a truthful person like you, so I can speak the truth and I get anxious about it it's getting worse. The problem is getting worse, so we have to make we got to keep talking about it and if we you and me are the only ones I got to keep talking about leadership changes and and that's we're gonna have to do. But I love this profession, I love our country, I love our communities and they deserve to have the best and the part of the mission and the reason I wrote this book.

Chad Bruckner: 11:40

Travis, you said it is the 21 year old cop. I know what leadership is. You can't lie to me about what it is. I have a lot to learn and I'm still learning every day, but I know the essence of it. You know you can't fake me, but there's a lot of young men out there and women who absolutely don't know. They weren't trained and brought up in that regard, so they think that they're in these high-performing cultures because they're being told this is how it is. This is high performing.

Chad Bruckner: 11:59

I come from an agency where they still think they're high-performing. They're not, they're not. They don't even see it. They're all drinking and cheating, you know, and infideli, like police departments. When you're doing those kind of things, you're not performing it's. It comes back to an individual because just come back to an organization. You're not reaching your best. So leadership is a very selfless act. You have to rub shoulders with your people every single day. You got to be vulnerable, you got to ask them. You've got to be willing to dig in to find out what's the problem with them, to help them grow and perform. And we just pretend that these cops are not dealing with the stuff on the street. We pretend that they come back to the building and they don't have anxiety and trust. We just continue, continue, continue to pretend those things don't happen. Now it is changing but, like you said, we got to keep making these changes because the clock is going.

Travis Yates: 12:41

Yeah, if you're a chief or a sheriff and you ran across the show and you think this is all a bunch of nonsense, well, the reason Chad is saying this, the reason I'm saying this, is we talked to actual cops daily, like we're talking to people on the streets that are working for these shoes and sheriffs, and we know exactly how it is, and the problem they have is they can't speak out like us, chad, because they've been disciplined. That's how. That's how this system works. Well, you know we're being led by complete idiots. You know they're making wrong decisions, but if I speak up to them, they're going to punish me. If I speak out to the public, I'm going to be fired, and so when you speak, chad, that's who you're speaking for, and Right you got to keep on doing.

Travis Yates: 13:16

You say, well, maybe it's just me or you will choose better than zero, but I have a feeling it's gonna be a lot more than two. And when it's a lot more than two, that's when these chiefs and sheriffs need to start looking over their shoulder, because I got to tell you what. I'm coming from Chad. I'm coming for them. They are running one of the finest professions known to man. They've run the professions for future generations of cops, kids, and I'm coming for them and I'm gonna call them out, and then we're gonna try to fix this. And, by the way, maybe you say that's crazy. You can't fix an entire Profession. Well then, we're gonna try, aren't we? We're gonna try. I mean.

Chad Bruckner: 13:47

What's the alternative?

Travis Yates: 13:48

Try that doesn't work for me. Yeah, it's not a good alternative so so maybe you're doing this thing now where you're helping out so many people and your website is. I love your website. It's motivate change with a little dash in the middle. Motivate-Change. com, and so when you talk about change, obviously your book lines it out, but just explain to our audience what kind of change you'd like to see in the next several years in this profession.

Chad Bruckner: 14:12

Yeah, the the fundamental issue of leadership is we have so many police departments in America I come from Pennsylvania tons of police departments. You have all these little agencies, smaller agencies, big agencies. You have all these these chiefs and these commissioners and these little kingdoms and they all have a thousand different ideas how they do it. The worst is when they all come together and they start doing what everybody else is doing. They were pete because nobody wants to be the disruptor, rock the boat. That's when you know the system is broke. So what we need to do is we need to really get back to instituting the best serving leaders at our top of our agency. The chief executive has to be the most influential, most morally minded, most intuitive. Doesn't have to be the brightest, doesn't have to be the best shot on the range, doesn't have to make the most arrests. Has to be an influential leader, somebody that the men and women rally a vine. It doesn't matter that they don't have, you know, the most high physical fitness. We just continue to promote people on resume bullets and there and this is creates the cycle to Travis, where cops keep going out and trying to achieve more, achieve more, achieve more. So we're sacrificing service. We're eliminating that from our repertoire so we can achieve more, get more certifications, more training, so we look more good for promotion. It's a system that's broken. It's broken.

Chad Bruckner: 15:17

If you want to get promoted, serve others. Don't do things for yourself. Serve others. That should get you promoted. We have flipped it where. To get promoted, you have to do all these things and we tell you service is a little small part of it and we'll lie and pretend that we don't really feel that way. But that's the truth. The truth is we have professionalized the profession so much, so much that we have removed, to large degrees in certain areas of the country, service when fundamentally, policing is service. Yeah, it's safety and it's a lot of things, but we have to serve. You have to have a mindset to serve and the profession has lost the mindset to serve. It's. It's become a business.

Travis Yates: 15:53

Yeah, unfortunately, you're right and, as I said earlier, mini-awkery rules a day and you learn real quick that if you just go with the narrative and go with the flow, that you'll have very few problems. But you're a disruptor, chad. That's what I love about it. If you just now joining us, we're talking to Chad Breckner. He's a former police officer and he's now helping others as a performance coach and motivational speaker. He wrote one of the best books on the topic I've ever read, called the holy trainer D of successful and healthy police organizations. Now, chad, when you talk about the health of A police organization, kind of tell our audience what you're talking about. A.

Chad Bruckner: 16:27

Core, fundamental aspect of leadership is you have to be emotionally in control and you know we talked about this before and I've heard before in your contact. If I'm emotionally not prepared to make hard decisions as a leader, well guess what? When those hard decisions come and they're coming every minute I'm not going to make the best decisions. And if you, consistently, are unhealthy enough to prepare yourself to be in a healthy state of mind, decision fatigue will just continue to snowball and snowball. You'll take hostages in the workplace, guys won't go home and drink more and they'll complain to their spouse more because it's more stressful at work and because the leader is unhealthy.

Chad Bruckner: 16:58

The culture is a is a mirror of the executive. The chief executive is a mirror of what those Officers are going to be. If you have a chief that's committing infidelity, then the moral minded of that agency over time give it time will fall to that. If you have a chief that's unhealthy and it's not promoting to be healthy, over time the officers will be the same way. On the flip side, if you have an old chief who's modeling behavior, leading from the front, morally minded, talks about faith and the importance of faith in his life and how it works her life. I was willing to be there for their officers. All through the all those things went done consistently. We'll then take the retention recruitment issue and flush it down the toilet because you don't have a problem anymore. People will come and work for you. They will come. The problem and the reason they're not coming is the leadership. That's what it is. It's the cultures we're building and we have to change it.

Travis Yates: 17:42

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. We don't have a recruiting problem, we don't have a retention problem, we absolutely have a leadership problem, and if you fix leadership, everything else is gonna fix itself.

Chad Bruckner: 17:51

Yeah, the military is the same way. They're going through the same problem right now. We continue to. We continue to address, address solutions and create solutions, the problems that we created, that they don't even address the issues. So it's leadership. This whole country stems on leadership and we need leaders, all the industries, all professions, all ages, all genders, all races. If you're a leader, you're a go-getter, you have passion, you want to help your community, you want to help people around you. You got to step up, you got to have that personal courage and now is the time to get, find a way to lead and serve.

Travis Yates: 18:17

So we have an officer listening to us, Chad, and he's frustrated. He's working for some of the folks we're talking about here and they're wanting to quit. They're wanting to move on because they're so frustrated. What advice would you give them?

Chad Bruckner: 18:31

Well, I quit. I quit and I left, and For me, I had to. That was a choice I made. I felt like I had to do that, but I also realized if we don't keep good officers, we're gonna have this problem. So I guess what I would say is if there's a way to find the ability to grow and and advocate for yourself in the current environment, to do anything you can, to do it, because you and the community need that, you know we need you.

Chad Bruckner: 18:55

Obviously, if you're going through emotional, emotional, emotional and mental challenges like I was and and the reason I left really, truly is I was making a path forward. I was charting a path through all that. I was in therapy, I was getting EMDR, I was doing all these great things, but the truth was I was in a culture that was not set up for healing, so I just couldn't make any momentum progress where I was at. I tried for 18 months in patrol when I got demoted and went back to the street and I just couldn't make it work. You know for me so, but but if I could have made it work, I probably would have stayed because I love that job.

Chad Bruckner: 19:24

So if there's a way to get healthy to get clear. Maybe move off your mark, look at things from a different perspective, try to realize that not everything so personally and and there's a lot of just broken souls in this profession that they don't try to hurt you, they just broken themselves and they're doing broken things. So really focus on what you can control, what you can't control, and if there's enough to stay with it and keep this job and you're a good officer, then we need you and but if not, you know I understand those two you got to make a decision for your family.

Travis Yates: 19:48

Well, I wouldn't describe of you quitting Chad. I would say the department quit on you. So I, so people, don't leave his profession. This profession is leaving the people, and that goes to the heart of what you're trying to do now, which is to encourage people to be great leaders, to do the right thing, to push for that healthy Organization for the better. And it does seem daunting, but you're very encouraging because if you can do it, a lot of people can do it and you've certainly found your purpose.

Travis Yates: 20:13

People out there need to find their purpose. Even if they're in a bad environment, you still have a purpose. Maybe it's helping or assisting other officers, or maybe it is standing up to the nonsense and chaos, even to your peril, where there's a voice of reason in the room. But you got. You certainly have to find your purpose now, chad, if people want to know more about you, you do. You do performance coaching, which is I can't recommend it enough. You know we're in a profession where we think we got this me myself and I but man, if you get us too far, it could be really disastrous. So all the top CEOs out there have performance coaches. All the, all the millionaires you can think of have their own coaches.

Travis Yates: 20:46

They don't know, they know it also. Our profession certainly needs to get that out of their head. So so I want to reach out to you and contact you. What's the best way to do that?

Chad Bruckner: 20:53

Yeah, trying to drive everybody through the website. So motivate hyphen changecom my contact, that goes there. You can also send me an email from there or sign up for the newsletter and my video content. Someone there and just had it redone, so it's really happy with it.

Chad Bruckner: 21:04

And one thing I want to say, travis, just to follow up that comment, because I want to sneak this in real quick because I think it's really critical what we're talking about the agency I worked at. I still talk to many of those officers In secret. They hate working there and secret they're not happy. But they don't say that in public, they don't say that internally in the building. So I just want to highlight that's just one example of one agency that I think is happening all across America.

Chad Bruckner: 21:30

So just because there's not complaints doesn't mean the systems kumbaya. It actually means that there's a culture of fear, which is the worst, so that you have to destroy a culture of fear. You have to remove the executive and you have to destroy that culture of fear. It will get worse until it won't get better on its own. It will get worse and it's a house of cards. So I write this in the book there's a house of cards. Any organization, a family, a private company. Anybody can build something on a house of cards and it looks good from the outside. It's aesthetic and it's clean. We put so much work into making it look that way. When you step into that front door, you see the chaos, and the longer you're there, the longer you see it. So we just got to spend more time keeping our eyes open or ears open and ask questions, be honest and look around and see and then be willing to have the courageous mindset to call things out.

Travis Yates: 22:15

Chad Bruckner. Now you know why he's so needed and so valuable in this profession. I can't thank you chat enough for being here and thanking you so much for the sacrifices You're making the day to make sure other people are more informed. So thank you so much.

Chad Bruckner: 22:26

Thank you, brother. I appreciate all you do. Man, you're driving this bus and I'm happy to be on it.

Travis Yates: 22:31

And thank you for listening, and just remember lead on and stay courageous.

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