Ryan Tillman
Most workplaces have stopped talking to each other honestly. Teams avoid the conversations that decide whether trust holds or breaks, and managers fall back on policy when what is needed is human judgement under pressure. Culture is set in those moments, not in the values statement on the wall.
Ryan Tillman is a serving Southern California police officer and founder of Breaking Barriers United who teaches leaders and teams how to communicate, de-escalate and build trust across difference.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Ryan Tillman
- Conflict and de-escalation content built from real shifts on patrol and in crisis negotiation, not adapted from a corporate training module.
- A direct, lived perspective on bias and inclusion from someone who once distrusted policing and chose to join it, which lands with audiences who have tuned out of standard DEI sessions.
- Author of Happy Eyes: Becoming All Things To All People, with a foreword by Dak Prescott and afterword by Gordon Graham, giving the keynote a published spine that leaders can read and pass on.
- Founder of Breaking Barriers United, a programme used by law enforcement agencies and corporate clients to rebuild communication between groups that have stopped trusting each other.
- Significant earned reach through the #ITSNEEDED podcast and a social audience that has accumulated over 100 million views, which lifts internal engagement before and after the event.
Biography highlights
- Police Officer, Chino Police Department, Southern California, since 2013.
- Founder and CEO, Breaking Barriers United LLC.
- Author, Happy Eyes: Becoming All Things To All People, foreword by Dak Prescott, afterword by Gordon Graham, endorsed by Michael Strahan.
- Host, #ITSNEEDED podcast, with more than one million downloads.
- Featured on FOX 11 Los Angeles, NBC Los Angeles, ABC News and Voyage LA.
- Training and content partnerships with Lexipol, Open Sesame and the Heal America Movement.
Biography
Most organisational fractures begin as a communication problem. A manager misreads a team member, a customer interaction tips into hostility, a difficult conversation gets postponed until it becomes a grievance. The skills that prevent those failures are the same ones a patrol officer learns in the first minute of a call, and they are rarely taught inside corporate training.
Ryan Tillman built his career inside that gap. A serving officer with the Chino Police Department in Southern California, he founded Breaking Barriers United to address what he saw on both sides of the badge: a breakdown in trust between people who needed to understand each other to function. The work began in policing and quickly moved into workplaces, where the underlying dynamics, bias, fear, misread intent, were identical.
His book, Happy Eyes: Becoming All Things To All People, with a foreword by Dak Prescott and afterword by Gordon Graham, sets out the operating philosophy: meet people where they are, lead with respect, and use empathy as a practical tool rather than a slogan. The #ITSNEEDED podcast has carried that material into more than a million downloads, and his social channels have accumulated over 100 million views across appearances on FOX 11 LA, NBC Los Angeles and ABC News.
What he brings into a corporate room is not motivation. It is a working method for the conversations that decide whether a culture holds together: how to read a situation before it escalates, how to disagree without losing trust, how to lead across difference without retreating into policy. Senior teams take from him the same thing his colleagues do on patrol, a steadier set of instincts for the moments that matter most.
Key speaking topics
- Communication and trust at work
- De-escalation and conflict resolution
- Bias, inclusion and bridging divides
- Leadership under pressure
- Crisis response and personal safety
- Culture change in operational environments
- Empathy as a practical leadership skill
Ideal for
- CHROs, heads of culture and DEI sponsors looking for content on inclusion that lands with sceptical audiences.
- Safety, security and risk leaders responsible for de-escalation, customer-facing conflict and frontline workforce protection.
- Senior leadership teams in operationally complex sectors (healthcare, retail, transport, public services) where communication failures carry real cost.
- Internal events focused on rebuilding engagement and trust after restructure, layoffs or visible cultural strain.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer read on how everyday interactions either build or erode trust inside a team.
- Specific techniques for de-escalating conflict before it becomes a formal incident.
- A more confident vocabulary for talking about bias and difference without defaulting to slogans.
- A practical model for leading across viewpoints that disagree, drawn from policing and negotiation practice.
- A renewed sense among managers that culture is set in their own conversations, not in the policy document.
Talks
A keynote on the practical use of influence and adaptability, drawn from Tillman’s policing and crisis-negotiation experience.
Key takeaways:
- Why adaptability across audiences is a leadership skill, not a personality trait.
- How empathy operates as a working tool in high-stakes interactions.
- The everyday habits that build credibility across difference.
A first-person narrative built around a shooting call involving a former student, used to open a wider conversation about bias and the cost of unexamined assumptions.
Key takeaways:
- How bias presents in routine decisions, not only in extreme moments.
- A method for leading with empathy when emotions are running highest.
- Why bridging divides starts inside the team before it reaches the customer.
A session on crisis management, de-escalation, risk assessment and conflict resolution, framed around the leader’s personal responsibility for workplace safety and inclusion.
Key takeaways:
- How to read a room and intervene before a situation escalates.
- The link between psychological safety and physical safety at work.
- Practical de-escalation moves any manager can use on the floor.