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By Ashley Higgins, LCMHCS, LCAS
In a previous article for Police1, I wrote about building a sustainable employee wellness program. Since then, my work has expanded, and one pattern has become hard to ignore: wellness resources and coping skills are often expected to solve problems they were never designed to fix.
Many agencies are investing in resilience training and wellness programs. But despite those efforts, burnout persists, trust erodes and morale remains fragile. What begins with good intentions often turns into a cycle of more effort with less impact. The reason is straightforward. Employee well-being is shaped less by individual coping capacity and more by workplace conditions. Leadership behavior, workload and perceived fairness have a greater impact on burnout and mental health than coping skills alone.
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This isn’t about a lack of intent. Most police leaders genuinely want to support their people. The challenge is that the focus often lands on individual solutions rather than the conditions driving stress in the first place.
The most effective way to improve wellness is not to add more resources, but to look at how the work itself is led and structured. Research points to a small set of leadership-driven factors that shape employee well-being. These aren’t new ideas, but they are often overlooked. The starting point is simple: assess the conditions shaping your team and take action where it matters.
Caring and consistent leadership
One of the most influential drivers shaping officer wellness is leadership behavior. It matters more than any individual’s capacity to cope and has a direct impact on stress, burnout and willingness to seek help. Leaders essentially function as either a buffer that absorbs the strain of police work or as a force that amplifies it.
A well-researched amplifier is fear-based, paramilitary leadership, often associated with older command models. Increasingly, leaders are recognizing the cost of relying on punishment and intimidation to keep officers in line. While these approaches may produce short-term compliance, they also increase stress, disengagement and operational error over time.
Leadership sets the emotional climate employees work within every day.
Another, more subtle and less discussed leadership misstep is the harm caused by inconsistency. This is not the expected variation driven by assignments or operational demands; it is the destabilizing impact of unreliable leadership behavior. It is the strain created by not knowing how responses and support will show up from one day or one person to the next.
For officers, these inconsistencies are not neutral. They signal that vigilance and self-protection are required, both on the street and within the organization. Under these realities, silence becomes adaptive. Officers limit what they say and do, avoid attention and manage stress privately. That silence, often misinterpreted as professionalism or resilience, is actually self-preservation within an unstable system.
Effective, caring and consistent leadership is built through reliability rather than reactivity. In environments where standards are applied evenly, concerns are met with steadiness rather than emotion and support is routine rather than punitive, officers experience stability. That stability determines whether people speak up early, seek support and address issues before they escalate, or quietly carry the weight alone.
This form of leadership does not lower expectations or avoid accountability. It creates conditions in which accountability can exist without fear and wellness becomes a cultural norm rather than a personal risk.
Action: Audit when and why you check in with your people and ensure those moments are not limited to performance problems.
Load management
Load management is one of the clearest ways leadership decisions impact officer wellness. It is not simply about how much work officers carry, but how long they are expected to carry it without relief. Even the most resilient officers will break down if recovery is treated as optional rather than necessary.
Staffing shortages and high call volume are real and persistent across policing. Because these pressures feel immovable, workload is often framed as something leaders cannot meaningfully influence. If staffing becomes the only answer, the unspoken message is that leaders cannot control the load and officers are simply expected to endure it.
Load management determines whether stress is episodic or cumulative.
Burnout, however, is driven less by intensity than by accumulation. It is rarely a single call that overwhelms an officer. Instead, it is the steady buildup of unresolved stress without a meaningful opportunity to reset. In practice, this looks like moving from one critical call to the next without a moment to breathe, followed by administrative spillover that prevents cognitive recovery on days off. Dismissing unrealistic workloads as “just part of the job” sends a message of endurance over recovery, self-sacrifice over sustainability and inability to adapt as a personal failure.
While no leader can eliminate staffing shortages or call volume, leaders still shape how strain is acknowledged, distributed and buffered. Decisions about allowing time to reset after difficult calls, rotating assignment intensity, honoring time off, distributing undesirable tasks fairly and limiting unnecessary administrative demands all influence whether stress resolves or compounds. Employees experience these decisions as signals about whether they are supported or expendable.
The solution is for leadership to treat rest and recovery as a responsibility rather than a personal luxury. When this happens, stress becomes more manageable and the work more sustainable.
Action: Identify where recovery is being treated as optional and make one visible adjustment that protects it.
Ease of access to support
Sometimes, recovery from the work requires support. Ease of access is not just about whether resources exist, but whether employees can realistically use them when they are needed, without extra steps, unwanted attention or losing control over what happens next.
Across public safety, access is defined not by availability, but by whether officers believe using support is safe, practical and worth the risk. Research consistently shows that officers delay or avoid care not because they lack interest, but because they are uncertain about confidentiality, fear career consequences or do not trust how information will be handled.
Leaders play a central role in shaping these perceptions. Officers take cues from supervisors about what is trustworthy and what is risky. Inability to clearly explain how wellness resources work, what confidentiality actually means or what happens after an employee reaches out leaves room for misinformation to fill the gaps. These cues of uncertainty, combined with the misinformation that follows, are often enough to stop help-seeking altogether.
Leaders influence whether resources are used through both visible actions and subtle cues.
Access is also shaped by usability and timing. Motivation to seek support often appears in brief windows after a difficult call, during a hard shift or in moments of vulnerability. If connecting with support requires waiting, navigating multiple steps or seeking permission later, those windows close quickly. Support that is not usable in the moment it is needed exists in name only, not in practice.
Usability is closely tied to confidentiality. Longstanding misconceptions about the career impact of seeking support create a significant barrier between officers and available resources. Confidential outlets that are legally bound to protect privacy are essential, but confidentiality is not only a legal concept — it is a behavioral one.
Even though leaders are not bound by formal confidentiality requirements, how they handle sensitive information matters. Support-seeking followed by unnecessarily escalating the response sends a clear message: support may be technically available, but practically unsafe.
Access determines whether help is reachable. A leader’s response determines whether reaching out was worth it.
Action: Ensure supervisors can clearly explain how support works, what confidentiality looks like and how officers can access help in the moment it is needed.
Alignment between values and practice
Public safety tends to attract employees who are values-driven. Officers enter the profession with strong beliefs about integrity, fairness, service and responsibility. These values shape how officers see themselves and how they measure whether their work still has meaning.
Police organizations also articulate values they encourage employees to uphold. Officers quickly come to realize, however, that values are defined not by what is written, but by what is rewarded, tolerated and enforced.
Values alignment determines whether work feels meaningful or morally costly.
Left unchecked, gaps between stated values and daily leadership practice result not just in frustration, but in moral injury. Officers are forced to reconcile who they believe they are with what the system requires them to tolerate. This quiet organizational injury leads to disengagement, cynicism, emotional numbing and the loss of pride that once fueled motivation. Over time, trust in leadership declines and even well-designed wellness efforts are met with skepticism.
At the leadership level, alignment shows up through fairness, consistency and modeling. Leaders who apply policies evenly, respond predictably under stress and create space for humanity without penalty signal that values are real rather than performative.
By aligning values and practice, employees are freed from having to choose between their integrity and their survival. In this context, wellness supports meaning rather than compensating for moral harm.
Action: Examine where policies, promotions or discipline contradict stated organizational values and address one visible misalignment.
Responsive feedback loops
While misalignment is inevitable and mistakes will occur, responsiveness is the repair that restores trust and credibility. Responsiveness involves both follow-through and follow-up. It is an active process, not a passive one. It includes acknowledging feedback or missteps, explaining constraints and clarifying next steps.
Unresponsiveness, on the other hand, looks like comments, questions or concerns that are met with silence or generic responses. These partial processes give the appearance that opinions are valued, but leave employees questioning the value of their voice.
Feedback loops determine whether problems surface early or go underground.
The long-term impact of unresponsiveness is predictable. Employees begin to say less, do the minimum and withdraw discretionary effort. This is not disengagement by choice — it is a learned response to the belief that speaking up does not matter.
Silence is also shaped by fear of retaliation. Officers watch what happens to others who speak up. Increased scrutiny, lost opportunities or subtle shifts in treatment teach them that voicing concerns carries risk. Retaliation does not need to be formal or intentional to be effective. Even small changes are enough to push feedback underground.
Effective feedback loops require fair and consistent responses. Even a response of “this cannot be changed, and here is why” is more trust-building than silence. If feedback goes unanswered or unexplained, organizations lose trust, credibility and their early warning system. Problems stop surfacing early and instead emerge later, louder and at far greater operational cost.
Leaders do not need perfect solutions to repair broken feedback loops. Closing the loop through acknowledgment and transparency restores trust far more effectively than silence.
Action: Close one feedback loop publicly, even if the answer is imperfect, to demonstrate that speaking up leads to acknowledgment rather than silence.
About the author
Ashley Higgins, LCMHCS, LCAS, previously served as the Senior Behavioral Health Specialist for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. She created and led the department’s Employee Wellness Clinical Team and spearheaded the development of multiple employee wellness programs, including the Clinical Care Access Program and the Paws for Duty therapy dog initiative. Ashley provided both clinical and strategic oversight to the Office of Employee Wellness. She is a licensed clinical mental health counselor and addiction specialist with over 10 years of clinical experience — more than half of which has been dedicated to serving military and law enforcement populations.
