How do you drive this philosophy into your culture?
How do you get the new generation of employees to accept this?
You Manage Things – You Lead People.
Let me quickly explain the difference.
Management is about Policy, Rules, Process, Money, Systems, Standards, and Measurements. These is all very important functions.
Leadership is about People, Context, Culture, Purpose, Principles, Inspiration and the Preferred future
So management is about using skill sets to control things… and there is nothing wrong with that.
What happens is …some leaders treat people like THINGS.
You do not manage people – you do not treat them like THINGS, you lead them.
And this is where mix up and problems begin. For many, they are treated like things…micro managed like the way one would manage money or systems.
People are not things. People must be led and that requires a different MIND set, SKILL set and TOOL set.
The problem is – people are not sure if they are managers or leaders. Most people are probably both, but depending on the job – you could be more focused on managing … say an accountant, a dentist or an investigator…into the details that are necessary. |
There is nothing wrong with the management function, the magic is the ability to switch roles to a leader when you are dealing with people.
And this was the challenge for me in Policing – having my team, my supervisors switch roles – sometimes in an instant. It was not easy to put into place.
I was huge into continuous development and training of my people…every employee was leader so I ensured they had non-stop leadership training.
I rewarded and promoted those employees that performed as both leaders and managers – depending on their job description.
And I pushed all my leaders to walk the talk in everything they did. Their performance agreements, learning plans and assessments were all based on both management and leadership performance.
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Dear Ward–I’ve just been reading about the positive ticketing initiative and your positive approach to policing–I am so delighted to learn about this. I teach leadership courses at the Justice Institute and many different organizations around BC–I draw on the research of Appreciative Inquiry a lot. The premise of AI is that in every organization and every human system there are good things happening, lots of strengths, assets, resources, etc. and that when we focus on the good stuff we get more of it. When we focus on the problems, we get more of those! Your approach is a perfect example of getting folks to focus on what TO do as opposed to what NOT to do. I really appreciate everyone who works in law enforcement, and would love to get that idea across that if the big goal is community safety, then enforcement is one aspect of that, but a whole other domain is giving people positive feedback for doing things right.
I met an inspiring RCMP officer here in my home community of Bowen Island–Cpl Nancy Joyce. She was telling me about her idea of initiating a positive ticketing program here and I think it is a fantastic idea. I’d like to see a shift in the public perception of RCMP and policing in general (we always hear about the few who do less than commendable things, but rarely celebrate the vast majority of law enforcement officers who do a really great job and truly contribute to community safety on a daily basis) and I think the positive ticketing initiative would be great to implement here.
Thanks for the inspirational and game changing work you are doing.
Warm regards,
Kathryn Thomson
Hi Kathryn,
Thank you for the kind words of support and encouragement. I could not agree with you more…enforcement is just one of the pillars of community safety. Problem is…we have a system that is perfectly aligned around enforcement as the ultimate measure. I love Robert Peel’s principle around the fact Police should be measured for the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible presence of dealing with it.
Keep in touch – I am always around metro vancouver if you would ever like to have a java and visit. cheers ward