Training Leaders

Training police officers has never been an easy task; training police leaders can be even more challenging. Unlike any other profession, police officers and leaders are faced with rapidly changing environments and threat levels, often within the same shift or even call for service, all of which require their own specific set of rules of engagement from both a tactical and a supervision perspective. Attempting to deal with every possible variable in training would not only be costly and time-consuming, it would also greatly reduce the effectiveness of the overall ability of an agency to teach core or fundamental skills. In the last eight chapters we have walked through the process of defining leadership and building the framework for evaluating a leader’s individual effectiveness. The next step is to understand the mechanism for imparting knowledge and instituting sustainable leadership training. In simpler terms, it is about the organization as a leader. While we could rely on (and in most cases already do) the individual taking it upon themselves to take what they have learned and make it work for the organization, this approach is not only unrealistic but can also be frustrating when you hit that organizational brick wall known as leadership complacency.