Looking for leadership

The police service is currently developing new ways to identify and nurture future senior leaders – as well as leadership skills – wherever they are required, from the top to the bottom of the service.

The notion of who is a leader and how best to improve police performance has shifted to reflect an increasing realisation that leadership is distributed widely through an organisation, rather than residing in a small number of senior managers.

The Government white paper, Building Communities, Beating Crime, sets out phase two of police reform and includes proposals to improve the development of police leadership.
Current leadership thinking recognises that within any department, station or unit there are those with more influence – both positive and negative – over colleagues’ performance than the highest ranked officer or manager.

Commander Allan Gibson, Deputy Director of Leadership at Centrex, recalls: “When I was stationed as a probationary constable early in my career, the person who exercised the greatest influence on the views and attitudes of the rest of the shift was a fellow constable, with certain less than positive consequences.

“This senior constable was exercising leadership influence, although he never received leadership training.

“We need to accept the reality that senior ranks have significantly less direct contact with staff. The person who has the most contact may be a personnel manager, control room operator, or perhaps the station sergeant. The positive implications from developing leadership skills in these colleagues could be dramatic.

“We now work with the concept of ‘cradle-to-grave’ leadership development. Joining the police service brings with it a responsibility to lead, regardless of rank
or grade.

“Most of the police leadership the public sees is delivered by operational staff in lower ranks and grades. The pressures of dealing with difficult public-facing situations can require as much leadership skill as high-level decision-making, which makes it important to equip all staff with relevant leadership skills.”

Broadening the delivery of leadership training requires an understanding of how leadership and management change with seniority. A ‘one size fits all’ approach is not appropriate; studies have shown that seniority proportionately brings a greater demand for ‘management’ expertise, but only a smaller increase in ‘leadership’ responsibility (see Diagram 1).

Supervision of other staff is at its maximum at a lower point in a career. Therefore leadership skills are important to learn as early as possible.

Centrex is currently working towards a strategy for leadership development that will set out to meet the needs of the service for the next five years. A key element of this will be to develop the skills of leaders at all levels, both police officers and staff.

External accreditation of leadership and management training will be another key element of the strategy. In the future, all of Centrex’s suite of national leadership development programmes will offer the opportunity to acquire external accreditation against Chartered Management Institute or Institute of Directors standards.

The Core Leadership Development Programme is already accredited by the Chartered Management Institute at levels 2, 3 and 4, the Senior Leadership Development Programme against levels 5 and 5A; from this year, the Strategic Command Course will also offer the opportunity to gain accredited membership of the Institute of Directors.

By relating leadership qualities to general management qualifications, the comparison with the private sector is inevitable. Although the lack of relevant data does make such comparisons difficult, police leaders have measured up well, as Cmdr Gibson explains: “There is little objective data on which to make such comparisons. However, the Campaign for Leadership, part of the Work Foundation, has a database of over 37,000 completed self and peer-assessment profiles on leaders in