Preparing individuals for leadership in Australasia, the United States, and the UK

ABSTRACT

Much is said about the importance of leadership in policing. In policing leadership is a key variable in organisational effectiveness, public confidence and employee well-being. We demand that our police leaders are ethical, decisive, skilled, and have the internal and external legitimacy needed to exert influence inside and outside the workplace. There are many advantages to such a pipeline approach to organisational leadership, and it presents organisations with an unparalleled opportunity to develop leaders and leadership talent over an extended period. There are questions, of course, about how much advantage our police organisations really take of this opportunity; how coherently leader development is planned and organised; and how effective our development models are. In this paper, we explore leader development in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on data collected through semi-structured interviews with established senior police leaders in each country we explore development journeys, opportunities for learning inside and outside of policing, the impact of leader development on leadership-style and decision-making, and how well-prepared leaders feel for their roles having transited their organisational pipelines. Drawing on these data we present a model for leadership development that calls for individual and organisational work. By seeing leadership in terms of organisation capacity, rather than individual capacity, the model encourages a comprehensive and more cohesive approach through police education and other initiatives to developing our organisational leaders, and recognises too that preparing individuals is only part of the story.

KEYWORDS:

• Police
• education
• leadership
• leader development

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jenny Kodz, Isla Campbell, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Talent management is about getting the right leader in the right position at the right time (Cappelli & Keller, 2014).

2. For example federal law enforcement or serious crime organisations.

3. We recognise that some jurisdictions are addressing this reality with adoption of a more shared approach to leadership, or programmes that aim to empower lower ranks to exert their expertise through – for example – the UK’s Advanced Practitioner Pilot.

4. It bears noting that interviews were completed prior to the initiation of the Direct Entry scheme. It is unclear whether experience with that process and the involved leaders might have shifted the views of research participants.

5. The practice of secondments is less well known in US policing.

6. These are transitioning from managing self to managing others; from managing others to managing managers; from managing managers to being a functional manager; from functional manager to business manager; business to group manager (which tends to be at CEO level); and group to enterprise manager (Charan et al., 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Victoria Herrington

Dr Victoria Herrington is the Director Knowledge at the Australian Institute of Police Management. Victoria has a long history or working in universities, applied policy research institutes, and within policing in the UK and Australia as a researcher using both qualitative and quantitative research designs, interactive evaluation methodologies and participatory action research. She is an Adjunct Professor within the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University; is Australasian Editor for the journal Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (Oxford); a member of the International Editorial Board for the Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism; and the Journal of the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers; and an Associate Editor of the Salus Journal; and founding editor of the AIPM’s Public Safety Leadership Research Focus publication, a quarterly periodical published by AIPM to help translate academic research into practical implications for public safety leaders. She holds a Bachelor degree (Hons) in Psychology, and a Masters degree in Criminal Justice Studies, both from the University of Portsmouth, as well as a PhD in Laws from King’s College London.

Joseph A. Schafer

Joseph A. Schafer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice. He has served as a member of the PFI/FBI Futures Working Group, as past president of the Society of Police Futurists International, and a visiting scholar in the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy, the Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (Griffith University, Australia), and the Australian Institute of Police Management. He is currently a Commissioner with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA). He has presented research, conducted training, and provided testimony for a variety of state and federal agencies in the US, as well as Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Hungary. Currently, Dr. Schafer is researching organizational change, police innovation, police leadership, fear and victimization, and emerging issues in policing. He has served as Department Chair since 2011.