Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates
Courageous Leadership with Dr. Travis Yates Podcast examines what it means to be a Courageous Police Leader. Join us weekly as the concepts of Courageous Leadership are detailed along with interviews with influencers that are committed to leading with courage. You can find out more about Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates at: www.TravisYates.org
Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates
Building Resilient Leaders with Brian Ellis
Discover the transformational journey from law enforcement to leadership and wellness with Brian Ellis, the Chief Experience Officer at the National Command College and MAGNUSWorx. Join Dr. Travis Yates as he unpacks Brian's remarkable transition, and learn how his collaboration with Dr. Javidi led to the creation of a groundbreaking application designed to reduce stress and enhance performance among police officers. Gain valuable insights into the importance of proactive stress management practices for the well-being and effectiveness of those who serve and protect.
Ever wondered how to balance assertiveness with competitiveness while maintaining humility? Brian delves into the core of effective leadership, emphasizing the need for coachability and openness to feedback. We also discuss the complexities and triumphs of implementing a tech platform to boost employee wellness and leadership engagement. See how persistence and innovation have driven significant improvements in staff retention and leadership participation. Whether you're a leader in law enforcement or any other field, this episode provides essential guidance on fostering courage, collaboration, and integrity in your professional journey. Connect with courageous leaders today at travisyates.org.
Join Our Tribe of Courageous Leaders:
Get The Book
Get Weekly Articles by Travis Yates
Join Us At Our Website
Get Our 'Courageous Leadership' Training
Join The Courageous Police Leadership Alliance
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 and I'm so excited to bring you today's guest. His name is Brian Ellis. You've probably heard of him before. Let me tell you who he is. He's the Chief Experience Officer at the National Command College and Magnus Works and he's the co-author of the Theory of Magnus Ovea, a General Theory of Human Performance and Wellbeing. Both Brian and I just released a new podcast called the Bravery Blueprint that you're going to hear about here, and we're going to give you the links to it in the show notes. But, brian Ellis, thanks for being on with Courageous Leadership. How are you doing, sir? Thanks, brother, I'm doing well. So, man, a lot of people probably are familiar with you, brian. You're doing a lot of cool stuff in the industry. Obviously, you're focused in on leadership and wellness, all things that go with that. Just sort of give our audience a quick summary of how you got here, kind of your career, because you're retired law enforcement and work us up to today.
Brian Ellis:Yeah, essentially it's. You know, I think my work at Command College of Magnus Works is just an extension of my police service and that's you know. I took an oath to protect and serve and you know, quite frankly, nothing's given me more joy than to serve those who serve. And we got a lot. We got a big road ahead of us. We've got a tall mountain to climb. I mean, and some of the statistics around you know, leadership and performance and police organizations is quite frightening and and we got to do something about it frightening and and we got to do something about it.
Travis Yates:Yeah, so you retired and you jumped in full steam with the National Command and Staff College. Tell us how that relationship happened and some of the things that you're doing.
Brian Ellis:Yeah, so I, you know, I've been working for the for command college for about a decade.
Brian Ellis:So I've I, you know, I think I was in a master's program when I was first introduced to Dr Javidi and his crew and they asked me to do some writing for them and I said you got the wrong guy. I'm not really not a writer not interested in writing. And they encouraged me over some time to essentially write my first article. And then, you know, kind of once you stumble through something, you know, once you've done something difficult, you're like, oh, that wasn't so bad and yeah, I mean, it started this side hustle, so to speak, of just researching me to working for command college for quite some time. And then, as I was nearing retirement, dr Chavitti you know Mitch, basically just said, hey look, I've got this idea, and it was an idea on a napkin. And you know he said leadership training is just not enough, it's just not doing what you know, there's too much that's needed and we really can't just put that many people in classrooms. So that led to us building out Magnus Works and where we're at today.
Travis Yates:Yeah, I had Justin King on the show a few weeks ago. So if you're listening to this now and you haven't heard Justin King's interview, go back to that after this episode. It'll give you a lot of context. On the National Command staff calls, Justin is involved on the training at a high level and I talked briefly with Justin about Magnus Works, Brian and you're the brainchild behind that. By the way, every great idea starts off on a napkin. I got a whole bunch of napkins back here in my drawer that I haven't got anybody like Brian involved in it. So I'm sure Dr Mitch was very pleased that you took that and ran with it.
Travis Yates:So I want to just briefly explain to our audience that maybe haven't listened to Justin's podcast yet. Tell us exactly what the application is. And then I want to get into how this retired cop from California got with this crazy Dr Mitch guy and they made what I believe is one of the most important instruments to law enforcement leadership today. I said that on Justin's show. Regardless of what I do, we're all doing this stuff. I believe what you guys have done with Madness Works is actually the answer to what we're seeing, which is we're seeing a lot of training but no practice, and this will help you practice. So let me just back up. Tell us about what the application does, Brian specifically about the application.
Brian Ellis:I think you really I think you got to really center in on what the problem is for police, for law enforcement in general, because you know it should scare anybody that really starts to dig into it. And you know police officers have one of the most the worst cardiac profile of any profession studied. You know what we know about health just human beings is inflammation kills us, and you know our immune system is designed to have an. You know to have that response to injury or infection and it's good but it's not good to be in all the time. You know good but it's not good to be in all the time. You know overexposure to toxin, stress, poor nutrition, you know all that stuff. It creates this chronic issues in our body heart disease, depression and everything you know maybe, and even cancer. And so if you look at stress in law enforcement organizations and this is something I studied for a really long time you know police stress.
Brian Ellis:Dr Richard Ayers, going back into the 90s, said that. You know this profession suffers a lot of stress for countless reasons. You know it's shift work, the nature of police work, you know negative media exposure, but the number one, largest factor of stress is organizational environment. Ok. So how we do management practices is the lowest hanging fruit, for you know, to reduce stress. And so when we want people to perform at their best, we want community trust and transparency and community oriented policing and great customer service and all this other stuff that we say that we want. All the time we're not being proactive with chronic stress and how we combat it, which leads to cynicism, emotional detachment, reduced efficiency, absenteeism, early retirement, excessive aggressiveness, substance abuse, ptsd, heart attacks. I mean it's broken. It's broken until we fundamentally change and start figuring out how we attack this.
Brian Ellis:From brain science and what we know about the human brain is what you repeat in the brain sticks, it's what you repeat in the brain. The brain greets right. Repetition refines really how the brain aligns our thoughts and our actions. And so, essentially, magnusworks is just a collection of all this leadership training that we've done at the command college resiliency training, mental toughness, you know all these different domains of wellbeing and performance. Cause, really, at command college, we're we're, we're chasing performance.
Brian Ellis:We think wellness and wellbeing is a by-product of performing at your best, and MagnusWorks then becomes a gym, a gymnasium, where we just it's repetition, man, you are what you repeatedly think about and we put these bite-sized bits of information into a platform where it's easily accessible for people, and then we sit back and listen and we watch and listen because, uh, you know, through assessments, and those assessments are done in an anonymous fashion. Nope, not even our staff has the ability to to peel back the layer and see who it is, because, realistically, assessments have to come from a position of psychological safety in order to be effective, because if you don't feel safe, you're going to play it safe. You're not going to tell me that, my baby's ugly, unless you have a complete ironclad curtain to're able to build out an aggregate data profile for an organization and say, hey, this is where you're hurting, this is where you're doing well, and let's work on the things that need the low-hanging fruit and let's get better every day.
Travis Yates:So I just want to back it up. So, just so our audience is clear this is an app on your phone, correct?
Brian Ellis:Yes, so we're a platform. We don't really like the word app because everybody I mean there's a million apps out there and the problem with an app is, you know, it's just a passive tool. You know we're a platform that really is going to integrate into an organization. We can take everything from biometric data. We can take the information from your smartwatch and integrate it into our system to start seeing, you know, your levels of stress, and we can look at individual and organizational issues when they come to leadership, stress resiliency. You know, because all the stuff is interconnected and it's all currently, right now, broken in our public safety. You know, in our public safety profession.
Travis Yates:Well, I meant it as a positive because you know the phone is with us all the time and so I would you know. So they could probably get on the computer, but the phone is with them and it's access. I'm sure you can do push notifications. So what I love about it is is they could go to the training or cannot go to the training, but, as I talked with Justin about, you're talking about blending both worlds. You could bring them to a course. They meet you, they see you, they get exposed to what you do and you leave them with something with them that keeps reaching out to them each and every day, which makes leadership real and practicable, that keeps reaching out to them each and every day, which makes leadership real and practicable and, more importantly, reminding them of what it means.
Travis Yates:And that's where I think we're missing the boat. There's a lot of great leadership programs out there. I mean, I've been to them all right, I got the brick. I've been to the East Coast the West Coast, you name the school I partied there, right? But does it actually stick with you? Right, but does it actually stick with you? And what I saw in my career? I saw individuals constantly coming back with nice plaques and certificates but no action. And so why I believe in this so much is because, if we're going to get to the practical, real, authentic leadership viewpoint we talk about courageous leadership here you're going to have to keep reaching in and out, because, as you know, brian, this is not some natural skill that we have Talk to us about that. This is a learned skill. When you learn something, you can't just quit learning it, right.
Brian Ellis:Yeah, it's like anything else. I mean, what's the old saying about the gym? It's use it or lose it, right, and it's no difference in leadership. And, trust me, I mean, we've probably all been in those times where, whether we're bored or we're not being adequately engaged or adequately challenged, that we that, you know. Sometimes, you know, we might be a little bit asleep on the court.
Brian Ellis:I just had this conversation with my daughter the other day. Um, she's a freshman on a volleyball team and you know it's fun watching young athletes, and especially at that, at that time where they're turning into that. Hey, you know, competitions really mean something to me and I really want to be a part of a winning culture and everything else, and so I'm watching this team, like any other team, goes through that storming, forming, norming, you know, adjoining stages of teamwork, and I started making some notes and asking my daughter some questions, very pointed questions on hey, who do you think on your team is the most competitive assertiveness, assertive person? Who on your team do you think is the best athlete? Think on your team is the most competitive, assertiveness, assertive person. Who on your team you think is the best athlete? Who on your team is the most skilled and coachable. And what was interesting when I did that with that exercise with her, she had different people in every bucket and and I think what's fascinating about that is, you know a lot of times, that Fascinating about that is you know a lot of times that that overly competitive or assertive person ends up, you know people, people believe that into well, they're the best athlete or they're the most skilled, and that's not really the case.
Brian Ellis:Assertiveness is a skill. Being competitive is, you know, is is a mindset, and if you can be, if you're over competitive, you know you're not the best athlete because you're not sharing the ball with your team. You're not very coachable because you become, start becoming an egomaniac. So you know we got to put these things in the right order and that's you got to be coachable first, first and foremost. I mean you got to be a good athlete to make the team, but you have to be coachable first. And then you know you've got to in order to have skill. You got to, you got to do skill. It's like that old army be no, do you have to, you have, you have to do it. Um, and so it requires work, it requires intention, and that's why the, the platform. The app is so easy and you get in a couple of minutes every day and it's just you know. Put in your mind where it needs to and again, repetition, refine, repetition, refines how the brain aligns Right. It's repetition, repetition, repetition.
Travis Yates:Yeah, for me it'd be one of the easiest decisions as a top leader to implement this in an agency, but I would assume because it helps out the individual employees so much. But there also has to be almost a fear factor, because, from a top leader standpoint, you're going to hear things about your agency that maybe you didn't know about. Right, because, as we always talk about, the higher you go up in the rank system, the more isolated you can be and the more people around you tend to tell you how great you are, which is the most dangerous aspect of any leadership. Right, you don't need those type of people around you, and so have you seen a hesitancy and had to convince some of the chiefs or sheriffs to basically understand what that is and said, because a lot of them may not want to hear what's going to be said.
Brian Ellis:But if you're not willing to hear what's going to be said, you really can't achieve that greatness that you guys are trying to go for. Yeah, and that really just comes down. It's an individual, yeah, we have seen it, and I hope to think that it's not a barrier. I think that you know. Again, I always say courage is contagious, right? I mean, I think once you start seeing people jumping into that arena and saying, hey, look, I'm going to do this because I am more humble and again, I want to, it's coach, it's coaching, right, it's I want to be coachable.
Brian Ellis:I want to coach because you know leadership needs more coaches. They don't need more mentors, they don't need more people saying, hey, this is how I did it, this is how I was successful. It's we need to bring out the most and the best in everyone that that we lead, and so I think leaders that that understand that and understand that they're not perfect Nobody, nobody in this on this planet is perfect, and you know just. But when you do the right thing and when you're trying hard, you know, nine times out of 10, people will give you a lot more runway when things go bad, because they believe in what you're trying to do overall.
Travis Yates:Yeah, it gives me a lot of hope, brian, and so I would imagine that was a heck of a lift. So here you are, you just retired and basically you get this assignment from Dr Mitch. Hey, let's put this together. Did you know anything about this type of technology when you started? And kind of tell us about that process, because that's very intriguing to me, for sure.
Brian Ellis:Well, yeah, I'm a caveman when it comes to tech. I mean, I got to be shown something and then I can do it. But I've broken plenty of mouses because just, you know, mongo, right, you know crashing your keyboard keys methodology, and we had, you know, we had a lot of bits and pieces of of of our trainings and the things that we wanted to do, and we just really didn't have a way of putting it all together. So, you know, those first couple of months were were really great. I mean, even you know, even the very first month that we decided to do this. You know, we, we, we did the Dropbox methodology. You know we went to market without a product and we came in runner up in a particular, you know, bid and you know they wanted our product. We just didn't have anything to show them and it just what it did to us, is it? It lit a fire under our tails to to really go out and get things done. And you know, now you fast forward to.
Brian Ellis:You know, this month is our two-year anniversary of like a official out in the public launch. We had some pilots going before that. You know we have, you know, several. I mean I think we're up to about 30 clients right now, a couple of very, very large organizations. It's working. You know, with one organization I can tell you right now we stopped a 12-quarter trend of staff reductions. You know we've reversed that trend. A 12-quarter trend, I mean we're talking over three years, 12-quarter trend, I mean we're talking over three years and we've increased their leadership participation in their organization by 250%, which is significant. When you've got a lot to do, you need every person on your team showing up and doing what they need to do, and so they're leveraging that capacity. It's fun to see.
Travis Yates:Well, I would imagine the data that you're gleaning from this, brian, is pretty incredible. I mean, people can respond to pretty much any question or issue a leader would want them to know in that organization, and it can be anonymous, correct.
Brian Ellis:Yeah, I mean we've got we got a significant amount of data on, you know, on officer wellness. I mean it's been a really amazing journey. I mean just thinking, for instance, one client, which is a rather large client. I mean in the first 12 weeks with that client we had over 86,000 data points I mean. So now we've been in business for two years with 30 clients.
Brian Ellis:You can only imagine just the amount of data that we're seeing and a lot of similarities with public safety.
Brian Ellis:There's definitely differences and then, of course, there's a lot of things that definitely differences.
Brian Ellis:And then, of course, there's a lot of things that we were surprised on. I mean, we knew that there was a lot of stress, but one of the fascinating things that we saw in our data is that young people really don't particularly like classroom training. You know they just they want training on demand, and so that really has been something repeatedly seen with our younger people within platform that we're like okay, well, we're right over target on that, because we're giving them access to skill development on demand when they want it, when they need it, you know, as opposed to readjusting their schedule around and you know and everything, all the other challenges that come to going to training, and I'm not saying that classroom training is bad. I think there's definitely a place for it. I think that, just like anything else, like a good communication strategy you know it's repetition, it's multiple mediums. You know it's repetition, it's it's multiple mediums, it's really making sure that that it, that whatever it is that you're trying to relay, is sticky.
Travis Yates:Right, right, and that's all incredible stuff and if you're listening from an audience standpoint, you're going to hear a lot more about Magnus Wurst and National Command Staff College in the months to come. It's really phenomenal stuff. And, brian, I want to sort of shift here as we bring this to a close and talk about our new podcast. So early September, september 2nd, we launched the Bravery Blueprint and it's another podcast. So we're going to ask everybody to go there and follow that on their platform of their choice. They can go to thebraveryblueprintcom and subscribe to that there as well. We'll mix in some articles here and there, but all the videos from that content will be there. But you can always go to Spotify or Apple or whatever type that in there and follow it. But that seems a little bit outrageous, because you know you're doing your thing, I'm doing my thing, but we came together to do this podcast, so I wanted you to sort of introduce that to the audience and kind of how that came about.
Brian Ellis:Yeah, I mean, realistically, it's just, you know, I think the big man puts you in places that you really need to be and and you know I've always loved the, the quote you know you must be the change that you know you want to see in the world and and so you just have to get out there and do it.
Brian Ellis:And and you know, in doing that and in just thinking, constantly, chewing on the things that you want to see happen, I think it's just a fate type thing that you know, you get aligned and you get put in places and cross paths with people that share similar passions and ideas. And that's exactly what happened, you know, with the. When I got to meet you I mean, we were at the same conference, we were, you know, we were introduced to each other and within five minutes it was like, oh man, I felt like I've known this guy for a really long time. And then, when I read your book, it was like we were even more aligned than what I thought on that particular day. And you give two guys that are action-first guys a mission and yeah, we're going to go tear it up. So anything that I can do to help our public safety. People count me in.
Travis Yates:Yeah, I'm excited about it. I think there's obviously there's. I think both of us would acknowledge that there's not too many of us out there. We're trying to make more people and more disciples. We're trying to get the message out and and we need to use that synergy. So it was really an easy decision on my part and it's going to be a little different format. You know it's. It's much less opinionated than people might be listening to.
Travis Yates:This one. It's going to bring in some really high-end leaders, some guests that you have heard about and some guests maybe you haven't heard about, and we'll be interviewing them every couple of weeks, and I think it's going to be more of a long-form podcast, probably, than we're used to. If you're listening to this podcast, it's going to be maybe even an hour hour and a half. On some of them, we're going to really dive a lot deeper into some issues. You're going to meet some really neat people. Brian, I saw your list of potential guests and I'm excited about talking to them. So between both of us, we're going to be able to bring some pretty cool people in.
Travis Yates:So I just want to encourage everybody. I know everybody's busy and you're listening, but, man, every couple of weeks, you're going to get a fantastic episode. Just type in the bravery blueprint at your favorite podcast platform, go straight to the website If you like the bravery blueprintcom and I would like to see other things come out of that. You're as you're listening to this, you're getting in on the early end, but I could see us, brian, rolling out some courses and even a book talking about that, because what we're trying to do is we're trying to mold greatness, which is better than great, which is what Magnus is, and then, of course, courage, which put all that together, just kind of synergistically, putting these philosophies together that are kind of one in the same, with a little bit of a different talking points on each side. But put those together and we'll see what happens.
Brian Ellis:I love it. Thunder and lightning right yeah.
Travis Yates:Well, man, I thank you so much for being here. I hope my audience will spread this around with you and Justin and Dr Mitch and everybody there at the Command and Staff College. I'm very, very grateful to be just to talk to you and to see what you're doing. If you truly want to see law enforcement leadership excel beyond your wildest imagination, you need to check these guys out, Brian. Where can they contact you and the Command College?
Brian Ellis:Yeah, so Command College is wwwcommandcollegeorg, and MagnusWorks is magnusworkscom and that's M-A-G-N-U-S-W-O-R-Xcom. Uh, love, yeah Love, to collaborate with, uh, with, with anybody listening. Uh, you know, shoot us uh some suggestions for for folks, or maybe even, uh, you know, submit your own story. Uh, that you know again, uh, we just need to elevate leadership, elevate leadership and kind of rid a lot of stress and things that impact this profession, this noble profession that the community most desperately needs.
Travis Yates:Thanks so much, brian. If you've been listening or you've been watching, thank you for taking the time out of your day to do that, and just remember to lead on and stay courageous.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates. We invite you to join other courageous leaders at www. travisyatesorg.
