Instructions:
- Post a new discussion related to the topics covered in this module. Your post needs to provide specific lessons learned with examples from this module helping you enhance your leadership capacity at work.
- After posting your discussion, review posts provided by other students in the class and reply to at least one of them.
14 Comments
Something that stuck out to me in this lecture was the statement that 99% of influence occurs in the middle. The middle management in a police department is the bridge between the upper management and the patrol division, they communicate the goals and visions from the people at the top to the front-line employee and ensure that the goals are met. Most top-level managers are concerned with the bigger picture. Middle management typically has a broader range of responsibilities and more connection to the front-line patrol officers who are the backbone of any organization.
I thought the 5 levels of leadership maturity were very interesting: Level 1 – highly capable individuals, Level 2 – contributing team members, Level 3 – competent managers, Level 4 – good managers, and Level 5 – great managers. Every leader can hope that they are staffed with level 1 and level 2 people. Growing between the level 3 manager up to a level 5 manager takes effort, but its rewards will pay dividends. Level 5 leaders are defined by their values, humility, integrity, and heavily promote the vision and mission to inspire others. They lead down and manage up and continually promote excellence in their agency. They also promote creativity and collaboration among their staff. They also make sure they take blame for bad decisions and give credit where it’s due for good ones. This encourage staff to take calculated risks which builds the agency.
These are all things we’ve previously talked about, but it was interesting to see the comparison between competent/good managers and great managers. I can identify people in my past that have been bad, competent, and great. It’s nice to have more markers for why they ranked where they did. It’s also nice to see these markers as things to focus on. To be great, we need all the skills/characteristics of a competent manager and also those of a level 5 leader.
One of the key statements made in this lecture and it really stuck out to me is “it is better to be understaffed for a while then having the wrong person on your team”. This is so true because that one person can lead a team down the wrong path and discredit your vision. When a person does not believe in your strategy or system and refuse to get on board in can be detrimental. I have always try to influence and provide multiple strategies to help build the person confidence level to succeed as a team. But sometimes this is not successful I often find that when you bring a union into the process it hampers your ability to adjust. If there is a solution to that I would be interested. Regardless of this I know that it is important to communicate effectively so I continue to do this and pray that one day this person will see the bigger picture and want to join in as part of the team.
That statement definitely stuck out to me as well. For the sake of staffing or “numbers,” so many employers seem to be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It’s tragic both for the organization and the individual. I understand that there are times that someone may be hired on who is either a slow starter or needs more training or mentorship than others. However there are times that someone just doesn’t fit and keeping them on will have a negative ripple effect to the other employees. After watching this lecture, great companies show sustained market domination for 15 years. When I think about this in terms of police departments, hiring the wrong employees leads to higher liability and costs agencies money in lawsuits and replacements which I suppose does not lead to “market domination.”
I felt that the lead down and manage up philosophy can be reflected here as well. If you have the selected employees that work well together and push each other (quality individuals on the bus), they will work harder and give you the opportunity to focus as a whole where you are going and you can manage the results upwards.
Being able to establish yourself better than others. Who else on your team makes the company stand out. How much time and effort is put forth towards your employees to make them stay and want to do better.
According to Nash, one of the most important aspects of being a level 5 leader is to decide who is going to be on the bus, once all the right individuals are on, that is when they decide together where they are going and how they are going to get there. It was also stated that it is better to be understaffed for a while instead of having the wrong individuals on your team (2017). I can agree with this statement 100%; I was given a member because she wasn’t doing a great job in her current position. Within a matter of months she had the entire unit at odds with each other, morale decreased, productivity completely tanked and there was no teamwork at all. Everything I tried just made the situations worse and administration believed that it was better to keep her around instead of being short. One by one I lost good employees until my unit was at a complete deficit of being down four out of six positions. She finally decided to move on to a different position and even when the unit was down so many members it began to flourish because they started trusting each other and we began to hire the right members for the position.
Reference
Nash, R. (2017). Good to great. 2.4, Week # 6. National Command and Staff College. Retrieved from https://cloud.scorm.com/content/courses
/NAGVXPB5E6/GoodtoGreatfff3df0d-a422-4ddf-bd90-0c5768fc9f4e/2/index_lms.html
I agree. Even though we are understaffed, we have a great team of people that have pushed through this pandemic and have worked countless amounts of overtime.
I also agree. The people you lead or work with can have dramatic influence on productivity and morale. If that one person is miserable (or if it is you), that can drown the entire squad and make for long day, shift, or bid cycle. While having people that are in a good position, they can work well like a steam engine (slow to get started in the beginning, but once in full motion it can be hard to stop).
This comment isa so true. I also, highlighted the same type of scenario. However, the problem sometimes comes in waves because the person may do the minimum and enough that you can not terminate the person. But when they do that it really restricts your ability to adjust. Getting them to see the bigger picture really is important when you are trying to improve the overall image of the team.
I absolutely agree about getting the right people on the bus being a huge step. Especially in today public safety world, less and less people are interested in the field for various reasons. It’s important now more than ever to maintain hiring standards and hire the right people. Sometimes working short sucks, but working with bad staff can be even worse, and worse yet can be a huge liability to the agency. As we all face critical staffing shortages, now’s the time to work on recruiting people who may not have otherwise thought about the path over those who are desperate to get hired anywhere that will let them, but wont muster up.
I agree that company’s that enact Collin’s “Hedgehog Concept” outperform other that do not. I believe it has to do with the organization using its resources effectively and minimizing waste potential from uninspiring concepts. A good example would be Apple and Dell. Both complanies make good computers, but Apple instills a certain amount of passion in their products that makes them more that just a product.
It is very interesting the difference between two companies who sell the same products but have different results; it all comes down to their way of operations. Utilizing their resources to their maximum protentional which includes their members. From my understanding Apple allows their members to be involved more in the innovation of products which is definitely going to make them more inspired as well as being more invested.
I am a Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPAC) evaluator and am testing the system.