Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen. Welcome to today's episode. You can connect to Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads and X. Links and other episodes are at bleedingdaylight.net. Please share episodes with others through social media and word of mouth. We're all leaders. We lead ourselves, our families and often many others in our lives.
Leadership principles that can be used in a workplace can very often translate directly to our personal worlds. Today's guest helps people to lead well. Earl Morrison has over 29 years of experience in leadership and organizational development, including firsthand experience in tackling the challenges of toxic work environments, dealing with issues such as poor communication, lack of teamwork and negative mindsets.
As a retired chief of police and former assistant director of the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, Earl has honed his skills in transforming organizations and individuals. He's also a published author sharing his insights in books like Leadership Lessons Learned, Leading and Learning with Character and Jumpstart Your Leadership and Spiritual Growth. I'm very pleased to have him join me today on Bleeding Daylight. Earl, thank you so much for your time today.
Well, thank you guys for having me. You've had an amazing range of experiences in your work life. What was it that drew you out of your previous careers to start helping others with things like toxic culture? About seven years ago, after I had become a chief for the first time, I found myself out of that job. Politics kind of came into play. One of the biggest things I wanted to understand is what was I supposed to learn from that experience?
Often we're in environments, we make changes, we make changes for the better, and then we find ourselves having to leave sometimes way before we're finished or way before we accomplish the things that we wanted to. After talking to my wife, we were like, what are we supposed to learn? How do you get past that? Because sometimes when you have to leave and it's not your choice, you can have some frustration and some anger and some bitterness.
I've learned over the years that sometimes writing things down gets it out. Sometimes you just write it down, throw it away, and you've done that. But I wanted more from this. I really wanted to learn a lesson. I wrote that first book, Leadership Lessons Learned. After it was published, the other thing that I wanted to accomplish with it was, if someone doesn't read the book, how do I still get the message out there? From that is where I really started developing the leadership classes.
I had another avenue to connect with people, help them understand. Sometimes we don't even know we're in a toxic environment, just because sometimes we feel like that's the way it's supposed to be. That's kind of how we started leading and learning with character. I started the path of writing books and developing leadership curriculum to help folks understand things that they were dealing with and how to improve themselves and be better as they move forward.
While we tend to divide our lives into various compartments, work, family, social life, faith, leisure, and fitness, and so on, we're still obviously whole people. A bad culture or fractures in any of those areas is going to touch on all others. How do you help people to build a good work culture when other areas of their life are perhaps in chaos?
One of the things within some of my classes that I talk about is that the topics that we go over, which some of them are build a strong foundation, learn from your mistakes, making good decisions, your attitude, your responsibility, that it's not just a work issue. I think a lot of times we want to blame the way we act when we get home from work and we go out and interact with society on the challenges that we have to deal with at work.
One of the things that I teach is that you're changing your mindset to a positive mindset. You're putting positives in so positives will come out, and they all touch each other. It's hard to draw a line from work to home. We don't do that nearly as well as we think we do. One of those things that is going to affect us in our life at work, but also at home, especially in relationships, is that whole idea of communication.
That seems to be really the hot button in any organization, no matter how good it seems the communication is. There's got to be someone sticking their hand up and saying, well, the problem in this organization is communication. I sometimes think, yes, it might be, but other times it's actually people are not taking on the communication that's directed towards them. How do we solve that one?
Certainly in a workplace, but also personally, because if they're connected, we need to be good communicators in whatever sphere of life we're in. You're absolutely right. I ask, what are some of the biggest struggles that you as an individual or within your organization? Effective communication is usually one of the top ones that is given. We've got to understand that we can't communicate the same way with everyone.
I may communicate really well with someone in my inner circle, but I've got to find a way to connect with more people. Today's world, we have so much technology that some people don't understand when you try to communicate face-to-face. People want a text message, or some people still like phone calls, but there's emails. The biggest thing, especially in leadership, is learning about your folks that you have influence over, trying to understand them.
As Stephen Covey put it years ago, seek first to understand and then to be understood. I'm trying to find out what works best for them. I try to teach people that really honestly, depending on the situation, if I just want to get information out, I may send you an email because it gets it out quickly. If I want to be a little more personalized, I may send you a text message or a phone call. But if it's serious and it's very critical, I like face-to-face because you can see my body language.
You can see my facial expressions. In it, you can get the tone of how important and critical it is. I think understanding those things when we're communicating is huge, and it's probably why we're all over the place with it. We don't understand sometimes our audiences. We communicate with how it is comfortable for us, and sometimes we miss the mark. The reality of it is that about 70% of our communications are either misunderstood, they're distorted.
A lot of it is because in today's world, there's tons of distractions, and usually we all are carrying one with us. That's a distraction that everybody can't unhook from. It's trying to get folks to just understand that you can't just throw stuff out there and expect that that's going to happen. Then when you learn and understand to be very consistent in how you communicate and who you communicate to.
One thing I know is that where there's an absence of information, people will actually create a story in their own mind. How do we go about circumventing that and making sure that people have enough information knowing that sometimes in an organization, it's not right to share absolutely everything? How do we deal with that?
One of the things that I always try to tell everybody is that you've got to build that trust and build a relationship because I think sometimes within our organizations, we don't have the relationship, so we don't have the trust.
I will even tell somebody, there's times when I can give you tons of information, and there's times where you're just going to have to trust that I have your best interest at heart and know that I'm going to make decisions that are what's best for all of us so that the communication is going to be there. I've experienced where you don't communicate enough and people will make their own rumor mill or add to something.
Especially when I was in public service, I wanted to put the information out so that we're controlling the narrative as opposed to someone only puts out a piece or they see us somewhere and they're like, oh, they were supposed to be somewhere else.
If we're just transparent and we're open and honest, we build that trust and we build the respect, then it doesn't affect us nearly the same if we happen to mess up in some of our communication or some of our actions because we've actually communicated who we are and what we're about instead of making people wonder. You are invited into organizations by the leadership where a leadership says, we're not happy with the culture here, we want to make some changes.
I'm sure that there's some times that leaders aren't quite ready for all the changes that you're wanting to bring about, but other times there are people who are stuck within an organization where the leadership doesn't recognize that there's a need for a change in culture. What encouragement would you give for people who are stuck in that kind of toxic culture? Can they actually bring anything to bear there? Can they be an influence in a place like that? Oh, absolutely.
And it goes to your mindset, change your mindset, change your attitude, change your mindset, change your life, your attitude, your responsibility. If you just concentrate on you and making sure that you're healthy and positive in your mindset, you're not allowing other people to control that. And so you're putting things in place. You're reflecting daily, you're reading, you may be a person that prays or meditates or works out.
Those are things that are healthy for you and keep your mindset clear. And I tell people, if you've experienced the toxicity and maybe you've been a toxic person, because I was at one time, I can tell you that that was how I knew when I made that transformation was when I started looking within and looking in that mirror and making some changes. You can start with yourself. A person that I was teaching in one of my classes, he came up to me on break and I mean, he was just like, nobody listens.
They're not going to hear anything. I said, well, here's what I'd ask you to do. If you get anything out of my class, you go back and you talk to everybody at your agency that you can to get them to listen to you. And he said, well, I'll do it, but they're not going to do anything. They're not going to change their ways. And within two weeks, I got a phone call from that agency asking me to come there to present that class. So I always tell people make an effort.
If you make an effort to be positive and be different, you're going to set the example for somebody else. And at the end of the day, if you can't make that change and it doesn't feel like it's a place for you to be, either stay well or you leave well. And sometimes if they're not following your example, it may be time to find a different organization if you can't make the right influence there. Don't stay stuck somewhere that you really aren't going to thrive and you don't belong.
Find someone that'll help you understand that and help you understand that you have options because we always do. One of the interesting things is that you connect your faith to your teaching. How does that interact when you're working with a group of people who may not hold faith, who may not be believers in Jesus? How does that actually influence the way that you teach, the way that you share information with organizations?
I've always professed my faith and the reality of that is that my behaviors, my actions, people will see that. In the classes that I teach that are in those environments, I never shy away from it. I don't push it in those environments because it is a fine line and I don't want it to be where then there's a negative connotation that comes from that class. In the books that I've written, when I teach those classes, I'm always talking about it.
Now, again, if someone asks questions about it or we spend more time, it's only because it's opened up. I found from the beginning that part of that what I was supposed to do was not shy away from it, not push it unless it was brought up, but be ready either way. But everyone can tell you at the end of the day that they know that everything that I do is faith-based. Everything that I do comes from God because, again, I don't shy away from it.
In those environments where I know that it could be an issue, I just don't push it. Sometimes we're caught in a situation, maybe of our own making, maybe not, but it's a real pushback or a setback. How do you handle setbacks and maintain resilience in the face of that kind of adversity? This has been a theme for me over the last couple of years.
Honest to goodness, whether it's the secular world or the faith-based world or whatever, if we're going to believe in God and we're going to have faith and we're going to trust God, we have to do it even when it doesn't work the way we think it should. We've got to trust Him in the valleys and the tough times and the challenges, just like we do in the mountaintops and in the things when they're going well. For me, it's like you've got to stay focused.
You've got to stay disciplined and intentional. You've got to read your Bible. You've got to pray. You've got to pour into that relationship with God because that's what keeps you going with all the setbacks. That's what keeps you going when things don't happen. I don't let the world decide for me what success looks like. God decides that because He's in control. He doesn't give me everything that I want. He gives me everything that I need, for sure.
Those are some lessons sometimes, Rodney, that are hard to learn. It takes a while sometimes. Faith is what it's all about. You can't have faith only when it's good, and you can't have trust in God only when it's good because He's in control no matter what. Again, you're dealing with a lot of leaders in organizations, and they may want to bring effective change.
I would imagine that oftentimes they're bringing you in around the time where there's maybe change within the organization, where there's restructure, and so they're wanting to really look after the culture. How do you continue to lead when you have some in your workplace that say, yes, I'm ready to go with the change, but others that are stuck in their ways and feeling like, I don't want to go there. We feel that this has been working. Why do we need to fix it and change?
The module that I teach on that is titled Embracing Change. There's the resistant, then there's reluctance, there's acceptance, and then there's embracing. I think we have to understand each one of those and what it means and understand that every single one of us, no matter where we've been or what phase of life we're in, we've all gone through one of those phases. It's how long you stay in each phase. It's okay at first to be resistant or reluctant.
You've got to process what change is because I've been in organizations that it seems like every few months we make a change that may not be what's best for the organization. At the end of the day, if it's going to happen no matter what, the only thing that I can control is how I react to it and how I embrace it moving forward. You can be upset. You may not like it, but my job, depending on where I'm at in there, is to make sure that everybody understands the need and why it's happening.
If there's nothing we can do, the only thing that we can do is get ourselves to that part where we accept and then we will work ourselves to where we can embrace that change. A lot of times, I think as leaders, we miss the mark because we don't give enough information. We don't give the why. I can tell you that we need this change and give you a why.
I can even say, hey, look, I understand some of you are not going to be on board and may not understand, but I'm going to try to answer as many questions and help you understand the why as we move forward. Then the other side of that where someone just says, hey, we're going to do this, and it is what it is. I tell them there would be times as a leader that I would say, hey, look, we're going to do this because I said so, because that's the way we have to do it right now.
But if I built the trust like I should, you should know that I'm going to help you along the way to embrace that as we move. I just try to tell them, look, you find people that can help you help others embrace that change. Don't put it all on one person, but I need to be able to communicate the vision and give understanding because a lot of times if people know the why, they're much more inclined to accept and embrace than if they don't.
Can you perhaps give me an example of someone who was initially very resistant to change and you were able to help them come to that place of saying, yep, I'm willing to go on this journey? Honestly, I had a whole organization that was that way when I walked in the door. Very toxic environment. I'm not going to use the name, but very toxic environment, very poor leadership within, kind of imploded on itself, lots of major changes happening, leadership left at the top, COVID happened.
Really, it was just kind of in a big disarray. I was asked to be an interim in a couple of spots. And so one of the things that for me that I saw as an outsider coming in, I go into those places trying to observe as much as I can, looking for the good mostly, but you're going to see some of the things that maybe are not so good. I just said, we've got to change our internal thought process because we didn't get along internally.
We had lots of different divisions because of the work, but we also had divisions because we just didn't interact with anybody. And we thought each division thought they were better and more important than the other one. I said, why don't we just say that our goal this year is to respect each other. We're not going to get all crazy, just respect each other. We did some things where we tried to respect each other. We learned each other's jobs. We let people see what the other person does.
You let people see what it's like when somebody's answering the phone, they're dealing with the customer service aspect. And our reputation is bad because of things that all of us has done and watching them and saying, okay, would you like to turn on the phone and understanding that if we don't change that, then it's just going to continue to get bad. And so as we adapted that, and as we made respect for ourselves internally, our desired outcome that started to slowly turn.
And before we know it, as we were doing it internally, we were giving it externally and then we started to receive it. And so our whole mindset changed, people got on board. I'll tell you without a doubt, if you find someplace that you get 100% of the people on board, send them to me because I want to pick that person's brain. We got pretty close.
We probably had about 90% on board, which I think is pretty good when you go through such a transformation from a negative toxic place to a very positive teamwork, cohesion and unity and gaining respect internally and externally. We can use cliches like teamwork makes the dream work and those sorts of things. But we know realistically that we must have teamwork within organizations and even within our personal life. We're in teams in various aspects of our life.
And yet we're probably taught right from in school and in college where we have those group assignments. And we know that there's always going to be one or two people that do all the work and the others don't. How do we counter that, especially in a workplace where we're all meant to be working on something? Because it can very quickly sour and those people who want to do the work are going to lose that passion if not everyone is pitching in.
So how do we deal with teamwork in those sorts of environments? I think the biggest thing is across the board, you've got to establish what that means to your organization. When I talk about it, when I teach it, somebody always says teamwork makes the dream work. I said, okay, we'll get all that out of your system. Now let's break that down because I think we don't establish roles within our organization. What's your each member? What are they supposed to do?
And then teach those people how to do that. Because when we're doing that, we're adding value. When we really want to be a team, we need to add value. We need to have everybody understand the value that they bring and what happens if they don't meet the expectations. Because it's not just enough that we establish the roles. We've got to know the roles, but we've got to understand the expectations and the responsibility.
When you look at a team, when you're looking at American football or you're looking at basketball, someone is the leader. Someone is the team captain or the quarterback or something there that calls the shots. If that person doesn't have it together, your team's going to suffer. But you got to understand that there has to be somebody that paves the way for that person so that they can throw the ball, hand the ball off or pass the ball.
You've got to have people that do their job, but they can't do that if we don't teach them, if they don't understand that and know the expectation. And then again, at the end of the day, if we're not valuing our people, we're going to struggle.
In a couple of the organizations that I was at, we developed some mentoring programs so that the minute somebody came into our organization, we began to take them and teach them and show them the value, but also teach them about us so that they could understand the value that they add once they know their job the way they need to. And the thread through a lot of this is good personal interaction.
I mentioned at the start that we are certainly whole people and so everything we do touches every other part of our lives. I'm wondering if there have been times, maybe even in your own life, where you've been in relationship with someone or there's been a situation and you've thought, aha, that actually connects to some of the stuff I teach in organizations. I should know this. I teach this. And you're able to actually put some of those things in practice within your own personal life.
Oh, absolutely. I'm constantly learning because again, it's like, you know, when you write books, when you write curriculum, when you teach, every time you interact with somebody and it kind of hits one of those topics, you're like, oh, I better make sure that I do this the way that I'm teaching that. It's kind of a way to keep yourself accountable. For me, if I'm putting that out there, then I need to be practicing it.
Now, that doesn't mean I get it right all the time, but I definitely know sometimes in those interactions and those relationships, when I hit one of those moments and I'm like, yeah, here's what I did. So I understand how to navigate through that. You've written a number of books, as I mentioned, one of them is a devotional for people who are in leadership. Tell me about writing that book.
From the first two, after I wrote those, I just was kind of like, you know, I have verses for each one of those as a reference point throughout the book. What I wanted to do is it takes a lot of the topics from the first book, the leadership lessons book, and it kind of breaks them down. I just kind of wanted to slow walk people through that aspect.
But the other piece of that was to connect the leadership with the spiritual aspect and have people understand is that honestly, there's no separation if you're doing that the way that you're supposed to. Sometimes we get complacent, we get nonchalant, we get caught up in day-to-day life. What a better way to jumpstart your leadership and your spiritual walk than doing it at the same time, because that connects.
When you're talking about building strong foundations, learning from your mistakes, making good decisions, everything translates from the leadership side to the spiritual side. I wanted to have a way to just go a little bit deeper for folks and make it easy because starting anything, we always have excuses that, well, it's going to be hard. I made it really easy because it had to be easy for me.
We have a topic, we have a daily verse, and we have a daily prayer that when you read it and you apply it, then you start seeing the results of that. Once you start practicing that and you start jumpstarting that, it just keeps you moving along. So that was the thought is that make it easy as possible for somebody when they struggle, take away as many of the excuses, and just give them a real walk through leadership and your spiritual growth and how they connect.
Leadership is a very interesting topic because we often view leaders as those people who have a title that suggests leadership, those who are on a higher pay grade than we are, those who are given that position within an organization. Yet in many ways, we're all leaders, whether we're leading our family, whether we're even in an organization and we have to lead up, we all have some aspect of our lives where we're leading. Do you think most people understand that that's the case?
No, and I'll go a little bit further for you. Every single one of us, Rodney, are at least a leader of one. I tell everybody that, look, if I can't lead myself properly, how am I going to lead someone else? I think that's the problem that a lot of leaders have is that we're not leading ourselves very well.
Then we add the aspect of, okay, I'm supposed to be leading myself because if I'm leading myself well, I'm setting a good example for the other people that I have influence over, which is my family, my spouse, my children, and anybody else that I may come in contact. If I did have the title or if I had a position or if I had the big money coming in, then I understand that my responsibility just grows, but it all starts with the person that looks in the mirror back at me.
I think that's where we miss a lot of the opportunities that we have is that nobody likes that because self-reflection, taking a hard look in the mirror is not a fun thing, especially if we're not on the right track. How do I hold someone else accountable if I'm not accountable to the things that I think, say, or do? How do I lead someone else in a positive way if I'm not leading myself in a positive way?
The opportunity that you have to go into organizations must be really satisfying, especially when people start to take on those lessons and you see a turnaround in that workplace, and you get to do that day by day. But I guess through your books, you never know who's going to be reading those. You don't know who you're influencing until they've read them and get back in touch.
Have there been times where someone has gotten hold of one or more of your books, and then they get in touch and say, I need to tell you about the change that has happened for me personally or organizationally? That has been real encouragement for you? Absolutely. I had one a couple of years ago that I had passed on at a conference that was a continuing education conference, and I passed it on to one of the presenters and had not had contact with this gentleman for about a year.
It was a couple of years ago, right before Christmas time. He sends me a message and tells me the impact that the book had. We talked on the phone and talked about it, and now we stay in touch through social media. But you can't really describe the feeling because it's like you didn't even know that impact.
It was happening, and then all of a sudden you found out about it, which makes it one of those things of you always have to be aware of the seeds that you're planting because you may not always see the crop. But it's really satisfying and very gratifying when you do because it's like you know that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
I mean, I know that because I feel like it's God's calling, but when you get that feedback from people, man, you just know that you're doing what you need to. With all the negative, with all the setbacks, it only takes one of those that has been encouraged from your work, from your words or whatever, to make it like, okay, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
Bleeding daylight is heard right around the world, and so there are some places that you're not just going to walk into to bring change, but I'm sure that people can still contact you. They can read your books and they can see change that way. What is the easiest way for people to find your books or to connect with you online? My website is earlmorrison.com. However, I am on Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on all the social media.
I have online versions of a lot of my classes, so someone can actually take it online. They don't have to bring me in live. My books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. They're available e-book as well as the hard copy. They can just reach out and ask for information and we can talk. I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find your books, find your website, find your Facebook easily. Earl, it's been a delight to speak to you.
Thank you for sharing some of your experience today on bleeding daylight. Yes, sir. Thank you very much for having me on. Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight. Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others. For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net