Culture by Design: My Conversation on The CopDoc Podcast
I recently sat down with Dr. Steve Morreale on The CopDoc Podcast. Steve found me through LinkedIn, reached out, and a few weeks later we were talking for close to an hour about leadership, culture, and what it took to build a police department from the ground up.
I've listened to Steve's show for a while. He talks with people across policing and academia who are trying to move this profession forward, so being asked to join that conversation meant a lot.
Where it started
I started at 19 as a 911 call taker in Paulding County, then moved into the jail as a detention officer before I turned 20. People are sometimes surprised when I tell them that's where I learned the most. Taking calls taught me what it's like to pull information out of someone in the worst moment of their life. The jail taught me how to talk to people, reason with them, and get through situations that could have gone bad fast. I still lean on both.
Administration is not leadership
Steve asked me the difference between a good police administrator and a good police leader. Don't get me started. Leading means knowing the work, being willing to do it yourself, and having your people's back. It also means challenging them, never letting them get comfortable with the status quo, and giving them a vision instead of a checklist.
We also talked about something our profession has gotten wrong for a long time. We promote the best technical performer and hope they can lead people. I've made that mistake myself. I've promoted people who knew case law and policy better than anyone in the building, and within weeks I had resignation letters coming in from their shift. Technical skill is easy to measure. How someone communicates, regulates their emotions, and influences others takes more work to see. That work is worth doing.
Leading through questions
One of the biggest shifts in my own leadership came from executive coaching. When I was getting ready to step into the chief's role, our city manager asked me when I'd last looked outside law enforcement for leadership development. That led me to an executive coach with no police background at all.
I'll be honest. I was frustrated early on. I expected mentorship and answers. What I got was more questions. Over time I realized those questions were growing me in a way answers never had. I stopped trying to fix everyone's problems and started getting curious about why the problem existed in the first place. Relationships shifted. People started solving their own problems. That experience is a big part of why I do coaching work today.
Culture by design
In the lightning round, Steve asked me culture by design or culture by default. Design, every time. When we started Brookhaven PD, we hired 54 officers from 26 different agencies in about three months. That's 26 different cultures walking in the door on day one. Building one shared identity out of that took years, and it's the heart of the book I'm finishing up, Leadership Culture Under Pressure. You can sign up on the homepage to be notified when it is released in early 2027.
The lesson I keep coming back to is simple. You can send people to training, but they come back into your culture. If the culture can't support what they learned, the training is wasted money. Culture work starts at the top.
Listen to the full episode
We covered a lot more, including how we run command staff meetings, why chief tenures are so short, and whether policing is counting the wrong things. You can listen above or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Buzzsprout.
Thank you, Steve, for the conversation and for giving leaders a platform to share what they're learning.
What's one leadership lesson you learned early in your career that you still lean on today?
