Editor’s Note: This week’s PoliceOne First Person essay is from PoliceOne Member Raimundo J. Socorro, a law enforcement professional with 26-years of experience at the Miami Police Department In PoliceOne “First Person” essays, our Members and Columnists candidly share their own unique view of the world. This is a platform from which individual officers can share their own personal insights on issues confronting cops today, as well as opinions, observations, and advice on living life behind the thin blue line. If you want to share your own perspective with other P1 Members, simply send us an e-mail with your story.
By Ray Socorro, Ph.D.
Police1 Member
A leadership position is very challenging. This is truer for law enforcement. Law enforcement leaders have the responsibility of the community and their personnel on their shoulders.
Whether you are a unit commander, area commander, or the top cop, certain leadership principles remain static.
As someone who has led personnel and has been led, there are a number of factors that provide significant encouragement when observed emanating for the top cop. These factors tend to have a contagious positive effect on the motivation of their personnel. These factors are passion, communications skills, foresight, and commitment. These are a few factors, but arguably, among the most important.
Directed Passion
Leaders must have passion for the community for which they serve. Leaders that are passionate about their community will operate responsibly and exercise maximum effort to safeguard it (Maak & Pless, 2006).
They will meet with stakeholders and get the pulse of the community. Those leaders will regularly drive around, assessing the sense of order/disorder. Organizational policy and practice will reflect the desire to improve the quality of life within the community. Those leaders will hurt when the community hurts and celebrate community achievements with them.
Leaders must also have passion for their personnel. It is a balance, but attainable task to focus on the community without neglecting your personnel. Leaders look out for the interest of their personnel, providing them with the tools necessary to achieve the department’s vision (Spreitzer, Perttula, & Xin, 2005).
The tools needed are not merely equipment and training, more importantly, the leader must model the principles he or she espouses to enable others to act and understand that mutual respect is what sustains extraordinary effort.
Additionally, leaders encourage the heart by recognizing individual contributions (Kouzes, & Posner, 2012; Maak & Pless, 2006). A leader’s passion for the community is also depicted in how they develop their personnel for leadership positions. A true leader makes certain that a developmental process includes a focus on improving a community’s quality of life.
This safeguards continuity of thought, practices, and behavior from future leaders and personnel.
Communication, Vision, and Commitment
Having good communications skills is considered key to leadership. On a daily basis, leaders work with people who have different opinions, values and beliefs (Kotter, 1996).
A leader’s ability to exchange ideas with others, understand their perspectives, and solve their problems depends significantly on how well they communicate with others. Leaders must be able to deliver their message in a format tailored to their audience (Cialdini, ND).
They must be able to articulate the vision and mission of the department to their personnel in a fashion that is understandable and acceptable. Buy-in from the personnel is essential to the success of the organizational mission (Moore, 1995). Good communications skills also allow the leader to gain support from stakeholders. Without support from stakeholders, a leader’s action is destined to fail.
Foresight is another important factor for a leader. Like all other organizations, police today operate in a complex environment.
The importance of foresight cannot be overstated. The primary function of a leader is to make certain the community he/she works for is safer and feels safer than the previous day, thereby continually improving it.
To do this, a leader must see beyond the present day. This is a difficult task today because no longer are police organizations closed to outside influences. They operate with input from politicians, the courts, and more importantly, the community (Peak, 2012; Worrall, & Schmalleger, 2013). And as such, law enforcement leaders must have the ability to see “over the horizon.”
They must be able to identify upcoming needs of their organizations, taking into consideration the legitimacy of their actions (Moore, 1995). In other words, a leader must understand crime patterns, operational capabilities, trends associated with policing (best practices), and the political landscape. Only with that thorough knowledge and the ability to communicate it, is a leader able to receive the legitimacy and support necessary to enact any approach.
A true leader understands that taking on the calling of a top cop requires a significant amount of hard work and commitment. A leader’s commitment must be to a number of different areas. Those areas of commitment not only include the community, the personnel, but also the leader must be committed to principled behavior. Significantly important is the leader’s demonstration of their values and beliefs, depicted by how they perform their daily functions.
They need to commit themselves to modeling behavior that is consistent with what they espouse (Argyris & Schon, 1996; Schein, 2004). Advocating a certain philosophy, but depicting contrary behavior, contributes to a confusion of the personnel by delivering conflicting messages.
The factors listed are in no way the only ones to consider. They are among a variety of factors that are considered important. However, when articulated in the way this article is intended, it becomes apparent that modeling these factors can improve the performance of a department and reduce negative behavior from personnel.
By continually communicating a clear vision that identifies goals for success, a leader directs personnel into desired behavior. Depicting passion of the personnel by listening, continual assessment of behavior, and providing them with the tools necessary for their job, a leader can provide a sense of community within the organization.
Demonstrating passion for the public they serve through their actions, leaders depict the importance of that community and that the ultimate goal is improving their quality of life. Through the foresight of a leader, obstacles to achieving organizational and community goals can be anticipated and overcome.
And finally, leaders must be committed to principled behavior, their personnel, and the community. Without commitment to those areas, leaders will most certainly fail.
References
Argyris, C. and Schon, D. (1996) Organizational learning II: Theory, method and practice, Reading, Mass: Addison Wesley.
Cialdini, R.B. (ND). Influence: the psychology of persuasion. HarperCollins e-books
Kotter, J. (1996). Leading change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press
Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (2012). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Maak, T., and Pless, N. M. (2006). Responsible leadership in a stakeholder society: a relational perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 66: pp. 99-115. Doi: 10.1007551-006-90467-z
Moore, M. (1995). Creating public value: strategic management in government. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.
Peak, K.J. (2012). Policing America: Challenges and best practices. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Prentice Hall
Schein, E. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership, 3rd edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Spreitzer, G.M., Perttula, H., and Xin, K. (2005) An examination of the effectiveness of transformational leadership in the United States and Taiwan. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vo 26. Pp. 205-227. Doi: 10.1002/job/315
Worrall, J. and Schmalleger, F. (2013). Policing. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Pearson Education, Inc.
