Culture First: Building Legally Defensible Leadership

Eric Daigle (0:00)

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Guardian Mindset Podcast. I'm Attorney Eric Daigle, happy to have you back here as we cross into September of 2026 Listen, today, I want to do something a little different. Usually, when I'm outlining information for you, I'm reviewing cases or hot topics. But lately, I've been on a deep dive into some very important topics on organizational and operational sufficiency. Today, I want to discuss one of the most important topics in law enforcement leadership, a topic that impacts every use of force incident, every internal affairs investigation, every officer wellness challenge, every community interaction, and every organizational success or failure. And that topic is culture. I've been doing this for a while. And as I go in and out of police departments throughout this wonderful country, culture has always been a very integral part of analysis. How did this department get to the way it is when I found it? How did they get to a point where what they were doing was not not resonating on the leadership? That issue such as use of force or stops or rests was not becoming part of the analysis. So, recently, I read a book. I know that's surprising to many of you because I really wish I could find more time to read a book, but I read a book called Culture First, The Nine Leadership Practices That Build Elite Teams by John Becker. And I strongly recommend this book to you. And I want to talk about this book today because this book was exactly what I was looking for.

As I evaluate organizations throughout this wonderful country, a lot of these hot topics come into play. Now, obviously, we talk about use of force on a regular basis. We talk about internal affairs on a regular basis. We talk about culture and customs of agencies on a regular basis. And what I loved about John Becker's book is that it focused on military special operations and elite team performance. But as I read the book, I couldn't help but thinking about law enforcement because the lessons he discussed are not military lessons. They're leadership lessons. They're organizational lessons. And perhaps more importantly, they're lessons for agencies trying to navigate an increasingly complex environment where public trust, officer performance, accountability, wellness, and constitutional policing are all interconnected. Today, I want to examine how Becker's principles apply directly to police organizations and why culture may be the single greatest predictor of operational success. So like I said, when I look at organizations, I go into them for the past 20-plus years looking at how failures occurred. And a lot of times when I really start focusing on the operation of a department or an agency, there's a great misunderstanding about culture.

One of the biggest mistakes may organizations make is believing culture is a soft concept. We often hear things such as we need better policies, we need better training, we need more staffing, we need more equipment. While all of those things matter, culture determines whether any of them work. A police department can possess CLEA accreditation, excellent policies, modern equipment, extensive training and programs, yet still experience things like excessive force incidents, poor supervision, internal misconduct, low morale, and high turnover. So the question we should be asking is why?

And what John Becker has assist me on identifying is because culture determines behavior under pressure. Culture is invisible force that answers questions such as, how do we treat people? How do we make decisions? How do we respond when mistakes occur? How do we handle criticisms? How do we supervise employees? How seriously do we take constitutional rights? Culture is what officers do when nobody is watching. But more importantly, culture is what supervisors tolerate when they are watching. As Becker argues in Cultural First, elite organizations understand that culture is not an outcome. Culture is a leadership responsibility. Now, in the book by John Becker, he identifies nine leadership practices. And we're going to go through them in detail. And obviously, I recommend the book to you because I think the book deals specifically what we're looking at. And these nine leadership practices that he identifies are, one, build culture intentionally. Two, select for character. Three, develop selfless leaders. Four, create physiological safety or psychological safety for truth.

Push decision-making to the edge. Demand accountability. Align around a shared purpose. Continuously learn and adapt and enforce standards consistently. And as someone who focuses on custom and culture, which leads to pattern and practice abuse under Monell liability, this hit exactly where I wanted it to hit. And that's why it led me to having this podcast with you today.

Culture under pressure.

Why it defines law enforcement performance. First and foremost, every agency has a culture. The most powerful observations in Becker's book is this. Every organization has a culture. The question is whether it was intentionally built or accidentally inherited. Think about that. In law enforcement, we officer encounter agencies that say, we've always done it this way. This is what I talk about when I talk about custom. This is the way we do it here.