When I did the original research for this I identified 42 top performing sergeants from law enforcement agencies around the country. They were all rated excellent by their command, by their peers and by their subordinates.
Then I spent time with them to identify what they did that separated them from their less excellent peers. The idea is that if you can identify the top performers and learn what they do, then you can be a top performer, too.
Here's the list.
Great Leaders Show Up a Lot
This is really simple and really powerful. It plays out differently at different levels.
If we’re talking about supervision, then this is almost always showing up physically. The supervisory leader needs to be around enough to learn about his/her people and so that showing up is not an event.
When the leader is up the chain of command aways, showing up involves frequent communication and attendance to the most important things. When he was growing the Oakland Police Department into a great department, George Hart was always visible and giving feedback to the officers and others involved in what he felt were strategically important tasks: recruiting and training.
Great Leaders Maintain a Realistic Picture
Fact is, the higher you go in the organization, the more folks work to tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than what you need to here. The great leaders I studied all found a way to get their own perspective by bringing in information and opinions that didn’t come through official channels.
The striking difference I noticed in my research was that the great ones worked to get a realistic picture of their own leadership performance. It was habitual for them to review what they did in a supervisory session and what lessons they could learn from it for next time.
The after-action critique is something that's common in law enforcement. But only a few leaders apply the principle of after-action critique to their leadership performance. Those few tend to be the great ones.
Great Leaders Rehearse Mentally
We saw this first in Charles Garfield's study of “Peak Performance.” He was looking at athletes, but his finding holds up in other research. Rehearsing mentally can take several forms.
Great leaders, like great patrol officers, play a lot of “what if?” in their head. They’re constantly working to imagine what might happen and playing out how they’ll respond.
Great leaders also rehearse leadership moments like speeches or supervisory interviews in their heads. They imagine what they’ll do and how others might respond. They imagine how they’ll respond to a range of different actions by the other person.
Great Leaders Work Hard to Assure Understanding
Great leaders understand that understanding is hard to come by, so they do several specific things to assure it. They start with working hard to give clear instructions.
Giving clear instructions is devilishly hard to do. The problem is that we all think we’re being clear, so we have to consciously work at clarity. In my supervisory training we do several exercises in giving instruction so that folks understand how hard it is and what options they have to improve.
Part of giving clear instructions is checking for understanding. This is the “Active Listening” part of communication, but our great leaders work to do it all the time.
Great leaders take the time to assure understanding and they listen a lot. In one short study I did of supervisory interviews, I found that most supervisors interrupt their subordinates, on average, 18 seconds after the subordinate has started speaking. The great ones were different, their average listening time before speaking was over forty seconds.
Great Leaders Manage Consequences of Performance
Great leaders understand like no one else that you’ve got to pay attention to the things you control and not worry about the things you don’t. Despite what some authors have written, you can’t “make” someone do anything. All you can do is set up the system so that they’re more likely to do what you want.
Great leaders understand that their job is influencing behavior. Behavior is what people say and what people do and nothing else. It sure isn’t “attitude.”
I teach new supervisors to ask a question whenever they’re tempted to say that someone working for them has a bad attitude. I want them to ask themselves, “What does that person do or say that leads me to think they have a bad attitude.” If you can answer that question, then you can concentrate on influencing the behavior. You do that by managing the consequences of behavior.
The consequences of behavior are praise and punishment. Years of behavioral science research have sharpened our knowledge of how to use them to influence behavior.
Use praise a positive consequence and you use it when you want someone to do something new or to continue to do something. If you can’t praise the final result, praise the effort or the improvement, or the attention to learning. Praise is best delivered inconsistently.
Use the negative consequences punishment or admonishment when you want folks to stop doing something. Be careful not to use them too much, though. If folks get dinged every time they try something, pretty soon they quit trying anything. Negative consequences are best delivered consistently.
There are two rules for delivering consequences. The first is that consequences should match performance. Phrased more Biblically: “the just shall be rewarded and the unjust punished in accordance with their deeds.”
The other rule is that consequences should be as inevitable as nature. Whether you screw up or whether you do wonderful things, you should receive the consequences.
Great Leaders Take Every Opportunity to Communicate the Key Message
Great leaders understand that there are only a few things that are really important to get across and they make those the key message. They know that simple messages are more likely to get across and so they make their messages simple. They know that even a few simple messages need to be communicated over and over again to be effective. So they take every opportunity by word and deed to communicate their most important messages.
OK, now you know what great leaders do differently. How do you go about improving leadership in your agency?
