If you’re going to get great leadership in your agency, you must pay attention to three things. You must recruit the best possible people. You must train them in a way that helps assure that those with the willingness and ability to lead will do so. And you must pay attention to the personal development of your leaders and potential leaders.
Recruiting
Recruiting is where it all starts. To some extent recruiting is the task of bringing people into your agency who have the “born” characteristics to become leaders. Do this well and training and development are much easier, not to mention the fact that your agency is likely to be much more effective.
Begin by being clear about what you’re looking for. Then go out and find those people. In this day and age that may take some work and some money. It's worth it.
Keep your standards high. Select the best folks you can for recruiting duty. And then go after the candidates. When George Hart was transforming Oakland into an excellent department, he started with recruiting.
Chief Hart told his recruiters that he believed that there were enough qualified folks of all kinds to fill the ranks with good people and develop a department that reflected the community. “Your job,” he told the recruiters, “is to get those people.”
Special standards tend to create second class citizens. Keep your standards high for everyone.
Make the process rigorous. Effective testing and background investigations catch problems before they get hired. They won’t catch all of them, but they’ll catch a lot.
Training
Training is the start of the nurturing process. It's where you begin turning the raw material of leadership into leaders. It stars with the first moment of the first basic training session.
Remember that training communicates values as much as knowledge. It's not just important to teach folks how to do things. It's important to teach them why you work a certain way. It's important to teach them the culture of your agency, what Deal and Kennedy famously described as “the way we do things around here.”
Remember that your trainers are role models for the people they train. How they look and act will have a powerful formative effect on how your trainees look and act.
Remember that critique is part of training at all levels. You learn it, you do it, and then you critique your performance.
Remember that training is part of life in law enforcement. Communicate that to your trainees along with the substance of their lessons.
Development
Training is not enough, though. Adults learn more from life experience than they do from formal training sessions. Development continues the nurturing and growing process by extending them into the world of everyday work.
The most important part of development is assignments. Use assignments to check and see if the “borns” you thought were there in an individual are there indeed. Use assignments to make sure that lessons have been learned and to develop valuable experience.
And don’t forget to use permanent and temporary assignments to connect individuals with good role models. Leadership is very much of an apprentice trade. We learn a lot by being exposed to it.
That's it for the basic presentation. Move ahead to a review of key points, or jump right to the Resource List.
