No, this article will not be speaking to those instances where personnel get a promotion because of time on the job, no matter their abilities. I will not pontificate about what leadership should look like (too much) or what great world leader from the annuls of history should be your next role model. I am not even going to tell you about some new or old book that you must read to become a great leader within your agency. I am telling you; chances are pretty good that your department is doing leadership wrong.
By wrong, I mean for the sake of this article, you are picking the wrong people to either get specialized leadership training or mentorship. I can make this claim because organizations everywhere, in all industries, make the foundational mistakes about who to elevate into a leadership role I will discuss here. Law enforcement is no different. I am not saying you are making poor decisions this is for you to decide. I hope that by the time you finish reading this article, you will have some new tools and resources that may assist you in thinking about leadership's role in the decision-making process.
The Norm
All too often, senior leaders receive leadership training once they have the most experience, within the final years of their careers. Agency’s perform annual reviews and regular conversations of employees to identify who has high leadership potential. Generally, these individuals are the ones who have the most experience. Those with the most perceived potential are the individuals who need leadership training and mentorship the least.
Stick with me here.
In a previous article, I reviewed a book about mental models for overcoming biases in law enforcement. One bias discussed within that text requires mitigation as we look at leadership is Causation versus Correlation. This bias raises its ugly head when we see two things happening together, which causes us to believe that one is causing the other. Consider this example of Causation versus Correlation Daniel Kahneman gives in Thinking Fast and Slow:
Depressed children treated with an energy drink improve significantly over three months.
I made up this newspaper headline, but the fact it reports is true: if you treated a group of depressed children for some time with an energy drink, they would show a clinically significant improvement. It is also the case that depressed children who spend some time standing on their heads or hugging a cat for twenty minutes a day will also show improvement.
Kahneman wants us to understand that almost anything could be causing children to improve. Do they read the comics every day? Stand on their heads, or pet cats? All while drinking, or not, an occasional energy drink?
Depressed children are an extreme group, they are more depressed than most other children—and extreme groups regress to the mean over time. The correlation between depression scores on successive occasions of testing is less than perfect, so there will be regression to the mean: depressed children will get somewhat better over time even if they hug no cats and drink no Red Bull.
Kahneman’s example forces us to ask the question: How do we know if the effects of our current decision-making process on our agency are positive or, are we missing something? If you look at your agency’s decisions on development and promotion through the eyes of “The best thing for our department is to put effort into the perceived high potential personnel”, you are missing out on the overall growth potential of the department. More on this later.
The Gap We Create
Using the "we’ve always done it this way" process of investing in the top leaders for leadership growth appears to make sense: Those top performers deserve to receive recognition. These folks look like they will benefit from development and opportunities because they have the required experiences to grow even more. Right?
But, when you choose to select personnel for development in this way, you create a paradoxical issue within the agency. The employees that become excluded from development opportunities miss out, gaps are grown. In a 2018 study, scientists found that gaps created within disparate people groups cause physical damage to the brains and bodies of those excluded. Thus, when an agency creates gaps between those who do and do not get chosen for development opportunities, they create an environment that propagates poor work habits and harmful environs for the excluded persons.
This decision to elevate the perceived top performers can violate the expectations of employees. Workers generally believe that their agency is obligated to provide opportunities for development as part of the employment contract. When agencies do not live up to employee expectations, it starts down a path that leads to harmful consequences affecting both the worker and the agency. These are often recognized as diminishing work performance, lowered commitment to the agency, and heightened exits.
The Fixes
As leadership guru John Maxwell promotes; Leadership is people development. We must look at employees, not how they are today, but what they can become.
Sending employees to a leadership development program's ultimate intent is for them to perform better than before. Managers select the individuals they believe are most likely to benefit from training. Generally, those perceived as motivated to learn are interested in leading. These are the ones mentioned earlier are considered “developmentally ready". Within this tradition, individuals who have the most room to grow, those deemed in “developmental need” are often excluded from developmental opportunities.
So, what happens when we put some effort into those excluded individuals and give them training opportunities? How much will they get out of formal leadership training? What benefit is it for the agency?
Funny you should ask.
#1- Close the Gap
A recent paper published in The Leadership Quarterly explored this. Researchers followed over 200 cadets undergoing an intensive leadership development course designed to enhance their leadership capabilities in the style of leadership development offered to employees in many business agencies. During the training period, participants were tracked, documenting their growth in confidence when leading others. This metric is important because to be an effective leader an individual must be confident in their leadership capabilities. Previous research has shown that leader efficacy is a good predictor of leadership performance.
The researchers found that individuals with the greatest “developmental need”, you know, the ones that don’t generally get chosen for development opportunities. These are the ones we perceive to be less motivated to learn or uninterested in leading. These folks experienced over two times more growth in their leadership confidence than those deemed “developmentally ready”. When training was over, the gap in leadership confidence between the two groups had reduced by 35%. Those thought to be unmotivated to learn or lead benefitted the most from a development opportunity. If half of a 50-person agency is deemed “developmental need” personnel and are provided leadership training, on average, a rise of the entire department's leadership abilities of over 10% can occur. Not a bad return on investment.
#2- Success takes a village
Okay, not a village, but all employees come to your agency with a unique set of skills, experiences, and capabilities. Some of these attributes may not be under their control, but they come together to create varied and differing productivity and performance levels. High-performing individuals end up accumulating an advantage. They become more likely to be invited to attend leadership or skills development programs, promoted, and invited into exclusive conversations and activities.
The remaining employees are at a cumulative disadvantage. This occurs as those perceived as low- or mid-performance individuals remain un-promoted or lessen their performance because they recognize they are excluded from development programs that could improve their skills and capabilities. Thus, these “remainders” get pushed into a cycle of ever fewer opportunities for career advancement. Remember, these folks came to work at your agency expecting knowledge and skills growth and development as part of the employment contract.
#3- Previous works DO NOT predict future performance.
I am a big fan of disliking Bayesian probabilistic thinking. Simplified, this is the idea that past behavior predicts future behavior. A streetwise example of this is that individual you have contacted on while on patrol a dozen times. Or more. Never has this person been anything less than cordial and compliant. But then, that one time you walk up, knowing that this contact will be the same as all the rest, WHAMMO! He fights. Were you prepared?
That is probabilistic thinking, and it is problematic. Nassim Taleb alludes to probabilistic thinking in The Black Swan:
Consider a turkey that is fed every day, every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It (the turkey) will incur a revision of belief.
When probabilistic thinking is implemented to reward high performers with further developmental opportunities, the manager assumes that these individuals will continue to perform well in the future. However, within the following two scenarios, I will describe some of the pitfalls of this thought process.
First is the Peter Principle, a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence". Employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they no longer perform well, as skills in one job do not translate to another. When promotions are awarded based on past performance alone, every role in an agency will tend to be filled by someone who struggles to perform the required tasks above a nominal level.
Second, what does the nature of police work look like in the future? We do not need to look too far out to see what automation and technological advancements are arriving. The use of tethered drones on patrol vehicle roofs and 5G mobile phone integration with AI overlay of the drone’s view is already here. Are your employees able to pivot as your department fields the tech? What about the popularization of co-responder programs where Behavioral Health Specialists and Officers are teamed to respond to situations based on dispatch criteria? Are your type-A “developmentally ready” personnel able to empathize and work alongside Behavioral Health Specialists? Your agency is facing the challenge of identifying and developing individuals for as-of-yet unidentified and unseen roles. Judging an employee’s performance in their past or current role is only a small piece of the puzzle when predicting their performance in future roles.
One approach to addressing this is to assess an individual’s attributes which indicate their possibility of developing for agency needs instead of looking only at their past or current performance. Indicators that must be assessed include their ability to learn, which shows their willingness and ability to learn or perform new skills. Another indicator is the individuals’ relations between personality and intelligence, this reflects the person’s desire to engage with and understand the environs in which they interact. Multiple systems to measure the characteristics are commercially available. But personnel can be gauged through interviews, reviews, and observations. Managers can focus their view on when individuals last learned a new skill and implemented it, under stress of the job. Or use a basic tenet of leadership (not management), get to know your people. Ask them questions like, what do they like to do in their free time, what are their hobbies and interests?
Conclusion
Overall, agencies need to implement a regular, bi-annual (at least) assessment process to guarantee they are investing in the right people for development. Use scientific, reliable systems. Without data, all you have is an opinion. Opinions are not the best items upon which to build the future of your agency. In a 2013 talent benchmark study, researchers found that only one-in-four agency’s implement systems to identify high potential personnel. Is your agency the one? Or one of the other three?
I am calling out some issues, so I figure now would be a good time to give a hint, trick, or conversation starter for mitigating the diminishing opportunities caused by the lack, or perceived lack, of professional development provided by agencies. Many private and traded companies offer reimbursement up to some dollar value for a worker's educational growth. Some even pay for degree programs. This may be impossible for the average budget-bound police department. But what about creating a system where employees apply for the opportunity to attend a specific training.
My favorite simple fix, utilize a one-for-one system of decision making. For each employee considered “high-performing”, an individual needing development goes too. This ensures that the leadership competency gap within your agency is reduced. And the potential of disparity is removed. Specific programs for the two groups may vary. But as their professional development goals differ, both groups still receive development opportunities. Ensuring your agency has a strong, deep bench of talent.
No matter how you decide to choose to dole out development opportunities, make sure the attendees know in advance that they are required to convey the information gained to the rest of the agency in a structured way. If you can teach it, you know it.
About the Author
Eddie Killian is a leader, instructor, speaker, and consultant. Having spent over two decades working, training, coaching, and leading in high-liability environments, Eddie enjoys bringing together a wide body of experience and training assisting industry leaders to utilize to create their competitive edge in the Military, Law Enforcement, and Public Safety communities. Eddie has garnered work with government agencies, both private and public corporations and non-profit entities worldwide. In addition to Eddie's extensive operations, business building, and training experience, he is a leadership and human performance coach.
He lives with his wife, daughter, and dog in Durango, CO.
If you have any comments or questions, you can contact him via email at: [email protected] or Twitter: @eddiekillian0
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Feel free to read Eddie’s other works and subscribe to the conversation at his ever-growing Medium.com page: medium.com/@eddiekillian
Eddie Killian
As a leader, instructor, speaker, author, and consultant, Eddie has spent over two decades working, training, coaching, and leading in high-liability environments. Garnering work with government agencies, both private and public organizations and non-profit entities worldwide, Eddie incorporates his body of experience to train industry leaders in creating their competitive edge in Corporate, Military, Law Enforcement, and Public Safety communities. In addition to Eddie's extensive operations, business building, and training experience, he is a leadership and human performance coach. Eddie lives with his wife, daughter, and family dog in Durango, CO.
If you have any comments or questions, you can contact Eddie via email at: [email protected]
