PHOENIX — At a conference focused on real-time policing and the technology that supports it, Simon Sinek turned the discussion to the people responsible for putting those tools to work.
Sinek, who founded The Curve with a group of police chiefs and sheriffs to help modernize police leadership and organizational culture, joined the National Real Time Crime Center Association (NRTCCA) conference virtually for a discussion about leadership, purpose and trust moderated by Doug Shoemaker, a founding board member of The Curve.
Asked whether human skills are keeping pace with technology, Sinek’s answer was direct.
“The simple answer is no,” he said. “The pace of technology is going to be ridiculously, ridiculously fast.”
Technology can improve quickly. Learning to listen, communicate, build trust and lead people takes far longer. For public safety leaders, his message was clear: As the technology gets better, agencies must become more deliberate about developing the people expected to use it.
Here are six lessons from the discussion.
1. Policing has catching up to do on leadership development
Sinek contrasted policing with the attention the military and corporate world give to leadership development. “The corporate world is very interested in leadership theory,” he said. “The military, every promotion you get, there is training for how to lead at that level.”
Policing, he argued, has not made leadership development part of its culture to the same degree. “You don’t get leadership training built into the culture of policing,” Sinek said. “How we choose to promote is not necessarily based on who’s the best qualified leader.”
The problem becomes more apparent after someone advances through the ranks. The skills that helped an officer, analyst or dispatcher earn a promotion are not necessarily the skills required to lead others. “You’re no longer asked to do the job that you spent so many years doing and training for,” he said. “You’re now responsible for the people who do the job that you used to do.”
That requires agencies to treat leadership as something people must learn rather than something automatically conferred by promotion.
2. Human skills are not optional
Sinek does not call empathy, listening, curiosity and communication “soft skills.” He calls them human skills — a term that does not suggest they are less important than technical abilities.
Effective professionals, he said, need both the skills required to perform the job and the human skills required to work with and lead others. “If you’re only good at hard skills, nobody wants to work with you,” Sinek said. “Nobody wants to trust you.”
Human skills without technical competence are not enough either. Public safety personnel must be able to perform the work and work effectively with other people.
Supervisors generally perform less of the technical work that established their careers and become responsible for the people doing that work. “As you make your way up the ranks, the human skills become more and more important,” Sinek said.
For an RTCC supervisor, being the best analyst in the room may help earn the promotion. It does not, by itself, prepare that person to lead the other analysts.
3. Employees want meaning and recognition
Asked what employees are seeking from their leaders, Sinek identified two recurring needs.
“Number one, meaning,” he said. “We want to know that our work matters.”
Employees want their work connected to something larger than a shift, metric or paycheck.
“We want to know that the work we’re doing is more than just hitting a goal, hitting a number, punching a clock,” he said. “We want to know that we’re contributing to something bigger than ourselves.”
The second need is recognition.
“We want to be seen and recognized,” Sinek said. “I want to be understood and seen for the human being that I am, for all of my ambitions and insecurities and stress and excitement and idealism.”
Younger employees may be more vocal about those expectations, he said, but they are shared across generations.
This is particularly relevant inside an RTCC, where personnel may not see the ultimate outcome of their work. An analyst may locate a vehicle, connect a subject to another incident or provide information that changes how officers approach a call, then immediately move to the next request.
Leaders need to close that loop and show personnel how their work affected the outcome.
4. “Law enforcement” does not describe the whole profession
Sinek challenged the use of “law enforcement” as a complete description of policing. “Law enforcement is one of the things that those in the profession do,” he said. “It might be a major one, but it is only one.”
He offered an analogy: “That’s like calling a pilot a plane lander. Yes, vital, important — only one aspect of being a pilot.”
The term also fails to capture the work of analysts, forensic specialists, dispatchers, RTCC personnel and others who contribute to public safety without directly enforcing a law.
“If you’re in forensics, are you enforcing the law? No,” Sinek said. “But you are in the profession of policing.”
Sinek offered a broader purpose for the profession: “The purpose of police is to protect the vulnerable from harm.” That definition, he argued, changes how people understand the job.
“If you tell a rookie, ‘Go out and enforce the law,’ you’re going to get a certain kind of behavior,” Sinek said. “If you tell a rookie, ‘Go out and protect the vulnerable from harm,’ you’re going to get a certain kind of behavior.”
It also changes who may be considered vulnerable. Once a suspect is restrained and in police custody, officers become responsible for that person’s safety.
For RTCC personnel, the broader definition connects work performed behind a screen with the larger policing mission.
5. Being tired is not the same as being burned out
Staffing shortages, mandatory overtime and sustained call volume leave public safety personnel exhausted. Sinek did not dismiss those pressures, but he argued that burnout involves more than workload.
“Burnout is also that idea that the sacrifices I’m making don’t feel worth it,” he said.
People can sustain difficult work when they believe in its purpose. “Working hard for something we don’t believe in is called stress,” Sinek said. “Working hard for something we do believe in is called passion.”
That led to an important distinction: “Being exhausted is not the same as burnout,” he said. “Burnout is having no motivation, not just being tired.”
For leaders, that means staffing and overtime are only part of the equation. Culture and meaning also matter.
“Perhaps the cultures that we’re asking our people to work in don’t give them a sense of meaning and aren’t making them feel seen or heard or understood as human beings,” Sinek said.
6. The same employee can show up differently under different leaders
Sinek illustrated the effect of culture with the story of Noah, a barista who worked at two Las Vegas hotels.
At the Four Seasons, Noah was engaging, funny and enthusiastic. When Sinek asked whether he liked his job, Noah immediately corrected him.
“No, I love my job.”
Noah explained that managers throughout the hotel regularly stopped to ask how he was doing and whether they could help. At the other hotel, managers focused on catching employees doing something wrong.
“There, I keep my head below the radar so I get through the day and collect my paycheck,” Noah told him. “Only at the Four Seasons do I feel I can be myself.”
Sinek’s point was that this was the same person performing similar work in two different environments. “What that tells us is how quick we are to blame the people,” Sinek said. “But so often, it’s the leadership environment.”
For leaders, taking care of employees is not separate from serving the public. “When the people in the organization feel cared for, they will, in turn, take care of the people they serve,” Sinek said. “They will be better at service when they feel served.”
When employees do not feel supported, they redirect their energy toward protecting themselves. Sinek pointed to “CYA emails” and defensive files of correspondence as signs of a low-trust culture. “That’s a sign that you’re taking time and energy out of your day to protect yourself from your own organization,” he said.
A supportive culture does not eliminate accountability. It changes how a leader begins the conversation.
When someone falters, Sinek suggested beginning with curiosity: “What happened there?” That creates a different conversation than: “Why can’t you do anything right?”
Leaders can still address poor performance, identify patterns and deliver difficult feedback. Beginning with curiosity gives them a chance to understand what actually happened before deciding how to respond.
For more information on The Curve, click here.
