New Perspectives in Policing JUNE 2015

V E R I TAS

Kennedy S

Program in Criminal Justice

Policy and Management National Institute of Justice

HARVARD chool


 

Toward a Profession of Police Leadership 

Edward A. Flynn and Victoria Herrington 

Executive Session on Policing and 

Public Safety

This is one in a series of papers that will be 

published as a result of the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety. 

Harvard’s Executive Sessions are a convening 

of individuals of independent standing who take 

joint responsibility for rethinking and improving 

society’s responses to an issue. Members 

are selected based on their experiences, their 

reputation for thoughtfulness and their potential 

for helping to disseminate the work of the Session. 

In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing 

helped resolve many law enforcement issues of 

the day. It produced a number of papers and 

concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty 

years later, law enforcement has changed and 

NIJ and the Harvard Kennedy School are again 

collaborating to help resolve law enforcement 

issues of the day. 

Learn more about the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety at: 

www.NIJ.gov, keywords “Executive Session 

Policing”

www.hks.harvard.edu, keywords “Executive 

Session Policing”

Introduction 

Policing has changed in recent years and 

continues to evolve. Police agencies must 

contend with new threats, new technologies, 

new crimes and new communities, all of which 

create new challenges and opportunities for 

policing. The public’s expectations have changed, 

and the public safety arena now includes more 

stakeholders with whom police must work to 

tackle some of the endemic and complex issues 

facing communities. As a result, leading police 

organizations has changed, too. Police leaders are 

increasingly expected to run efficient businesses 

that effectively prevent as well as investigate 

crime. Thus, the skill sets required of police 

leaders in shaping their organizations today differ 

greatly from those required 20 years ago. 

Although pockets of good practice in police 

leader development are seen across the nation, 

the ability of the policing profession to translate 

these isolated successes into more effective 

leadership in general is debatable. Most 

departments continue to view leadership as 

a “property” of the individual rather than the 

organization and, therefore, attempts to develop 
 

 

 

2 | New Perspectives in Policing 

better functioning organizations rest heavily 

on “improving” individuals. Little attention is 

given to the system in which the leader operates 

or to how individuals can create and distribute 

a climate of leadership throughout a police 

organization. This — we argue in this paper — 

limits the innovation that is possible in a police 

organization, as it reinforces the role of the leader 

as the individual with all the answers. There are 

missed opportunities in this, given the complexity 

of the policing environment as it has evolved, and 

only by addressing these opportunities can law 

enforcement organizations hope to meet the 

challenges they face. Articulating what we hope 

to achieve through leadership, and how we might 

better develop and support the qualities that will 

allow police organizations to reach these goals, 

allows us to move farther toward a profession of 

police leadership. 

What Is Leadership? 

It is a truism that there are as many definitions 

of leadership as there are people asked to define 

it, and it is apparent that leadership — and good 

leadership in particular — means different things 

to different people (Northouse, 2013). Many 

theories guide the understanding of leadership, 

and thinking has evolved from the “great man” 

theories of classical leadership (e.g., Sun Tzu 

circa 400-320 B.C.) to a greater appreciation 

that leadership requires collaboration between 

groups of individuals operating in systems. We 

now talk about leaders as being transformative 

or servant in their approaches and their 

relationships with (and influence over) their 

followers as paramount. However, the focus on 

the individual characteristics of leaders remains 

strong (Grint, 2011). An understanding of the 

environment in which leaders operate is lacking. 

The Changed Environment of Policing 

Policing is both complicated and complex. A 

complicated environment has many moving 

parts that operate systematically and require a 

high level of coordination. This characterizes 

many of the day-to-day activities of police work, 

from responding to immediate threats to public 

order to the investigation and prosecution of 

cases. Complicated environments have known 

— if complicated — solutions and respond to 

well-thought-out standard operating procedures. 

A complex environment, on the other hand, 

involves multiple interacting and diverse 

elements, which create a setting that is not 

clearly defined (Uhl-Bien, Marion and McKelvey, 

2007) and may lead to unintended consequences 

(Sargut and McGrath, 2011). Responding to 

complex environments requires new learning, 

innovation and different ways of doing things. 

Standard operating procedures have little 

relevance because the environment calls for 

exploration, new discoveries and adjustments 

(Uhl-Bien, Marion and McKelvey, 2007). The 

organization needs to learn its way out of its 

Cite this paper as: Flynn, Edward A. and Victoria Herrington, Toward problems (Day, 2000). 

a Profession of Police Leadership. New Perspectives in Policing Bulletin.

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 

2015. NCJ 248573
 

 

 

 

Toward a Profession of Police Leadership | 3 

Much of what occupies police time can be regarded 

as complex. It is often said that the police are the 

first responders to a whole range of social issues 

(Bittner, 1990/2005). Although police may not be 

statutorily responsible for fixing those problems, 

there is incentive for them to do so when those 

problems lead to a rise in crime and a reduction 

in actual or perceived public safety, the metrics 

against which police performance is generally 

measured (Millie and Herrington, 2014). Such social 

problems involve a range of factors that are more 

appropriately dealt with upstream, and to prevent 

crime, police need to engage with other agents 

to collectively solve complex social ills. We argue 

that complicated problems (e.g., public (dis)order, 

crowd control, and investigating crime) require 

something more akin to management and ensuring 

that established processes are followed. Complex 

problems, however, call for true leadership, which 

might be defined as using one’s ability to influence 

groups and systems to address complex needs. 

Although leadership models and development 

approaches generated to support organizational 

activity that was grounded in physical production 

may have been helpful during the last century, they 

are not well-suited to a complex modern policing 

environment (Uhl-Bien, Marion and McKelvey, 

2007). Modern policing organizations need to 

recognize the importance of the leader as an 

enabler of the learning, innovation and adaptation 

required rather than the top-down bureaucratic 

administrator of technical fixes to well-known 

problems (Uhl-Bien, Marion, and McKelvey, 2007). 

Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky (2009b) note that 

leaders most commonly fail by treating leadership 

problems with management solutions. This is 

particularly tempting, as management problems 

— even complicated ones — have a known solution 

or set of solutions. A leader can rely on using his 

or her authoritative expertise to get the job done: 

The answer is known, and the leader’s role in this 

is to encourage others to apply the “fix” effectively. 

Where issues are complex and only a group that 

has learned new ways of operating can tackle 

them, leaders need to experiment and engage with 

stakeholders rather than simply apply technical 

and authoritative expertise. Because complex 

problems do not have straightforward answers, 

leaders do not necessarily have the answer, and 

they achieve nothing by using their authority to 

dictate what should be done. “Faking expertise” in 

complex environments can be counterproductive. 

In Schafer’s (2009) review of the FBI’s National 

Academy development program for midcareer 

police supervisors, he noted that participants 

expressed the belief that leaders “[f]eeling like 

[they] have the answers and are always right” 

inhibited effective leadership (Schafer, 2009: 249). 

Our own experience working with police leaders 

across the world tells us that leaders feel pressure to 

use their technical expertise to try to solve complex 

problems. Members of police organizations 

continue to expect that the person with the most 

pips, crowns, bars or stars on his or her shoulder 

will be in a position to tell the rest of the group 

what to do (Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky, 2009a). 

Police leaders find this expectation hard to resist 

because authoritative expertise has most often 

been rewarded by promotion through the ranks of 
4 | New Perspectives in Policing 

the organization. As such, even if leaders accept 

that they do not always have the answers, they 

arguably feel an immense pressure to proceed 

as if they do. 

The Consequences of Using Authoritative 

Expertise Instead of Leadership 

Evidence shows that giving in to the temptation 

to treat authoritative expertise as a substitute 

for leadership is counterproductive for police 

organizations and for public safety in general. A 

study from the U.K. compared one force’s strategic 

plans between 1997 and 2009 to identify whether 

its strategic priorities had changed during that 

time (Marnoch, Topping and Boyd, 2014). The 

authors concluded that, instead of dealing with 

new problems, the strategic plans repackaged 

unsolved problems and recycled solutions across 

the years. Another, as yet unpublished, analysis of 

the minutes from the Australia and New Zealand 

Police Commissioners’ Forum from 1920 to the 

present demonstrated remarkable similarity 

in issues across the years (G. Ashton, personal 

communication, March 12, 2014). That problems 

have not been “solved” suggests that, instead of 

using leadership and learning new ways of doing 

things, police organizations have continued to 

administer the same authoritative and technical 

(and ineffectual) fixes to complex problems. 

Marnoch, Topping and Boyd (2014) concluded 

that this reflected a constrained form of decisionmaking that did not consider all options. To say 

the same thing another way, for the leaders in this 

force (and perhaps many others), when all you 

have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

Reframing Leadership and Its Development 

If the solutions to complex problems lie in 

galvanizing stakeholders to think about and deal 

with things differently rather than exercising 

authoritative expertise, then we can perhaps 

best characterize true leadership as an emergent, 

interactive dynamic between individuals 

working in networks to produce new patterns of 

behavior or new modes of operating (Uhl-Bien, 

Marion and McKelvey, 2007). Leadership is not 

simply the work of an individual but a process 

that individuals within an organization engage 

in. Leaders are those who act to influence this 

dynamic (Uhl-Bien, Marion and McKelvey, 

2007; Day, 2011; Iles and Preace, 2006). This has 

significant implications for our approach to leader 

and leadership development. Instead of treating 

leadership as the property of the leader, with 

individual enhancements resulting in hopedfor benefits to the organization, developing 

leadership must focus on creating social capital 

within an organization (Edmonstone, 2011). 

Instead of sending individuals to courses to 

make them better leaders, we must improve 

leadership as an activity in the organizational 

system (Bolden and Kirk, 2006; Edmonstone, 

2011; Ylitalo et al., 2006). This requires a move 

away from investing only in those at the top 

of the organization who have authority roles 

to recognizing the importance of (informal) 

leaders dispersed throughout the police force. 

It necessitates a very different approach to 

developing police leaders from that currently 

available across much of the U.S. In essence, we 

are talking about supporting the development of 

learning organizations. 
 

Toward a Profession of Police Leadership | 5 

Leadership and the Learning 

Organization 

In learning organizations, “people continually 

expand their capacity to create the results they 

truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of 

thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set 

free, and people are continually learning how to 

learn together” (Senge, 1990: 3; Davie and Nutley, 

2000). The development of learning organizations 

is facilitated by a recognition that learning 

is an investment that improves actions and 

performance, that learning is appreciated (and 

measured) by customers and client groups, and 

that being focused on staff engagement and wellbeing benefits this end (Shipton, Zhou and Mooi, 

2013). Challenging existing ways of doing things 

is key, and fostering the learning of staff members 

is a central strategic goal (Shipton, Zhou and 

Mooi, 2013; Yeo, 2005), even though this collective 

learning may be slower to achieve (Campbell and 

Armstrong, 2013). Stone and Travis (2011), in an 

earlier paper in this series, saw learning new ways 

of doing things (innovation as experimentation) 

as one of the four planks of a new professionalism 

(the other three are accountability, legitimacy 

and national coherence). Although this might be 

difficult for police departments to achieve, this 

learning is how policing can elevate itself from a 

trade to a profession. However, such innovation 

can be dangerous. Mitzberg, Ahlstrand and 

Lempel (1998) argue that an organization that 

values innovation must also be tolerant of 

mistakes and willing to celebrate and learn from 

errors as well as successes. We do not believe 

that this characterizes most police departments, 

although there is evidence from overseas that 

policing and learning organizations need not be 

mutually exclusive (Filstad and Gottschalk, 2011). 

There is something of a chicken-and-egg 

dilemma about creating learning organizations. 

Organizational cultures that facilitate collective 

learning are supported by formal leaders who 

value a distributed leadership approach, but 

such leaders can only be developed within a 

culture that values organizational learning and 

shared leadership. The role for the formal leader 

is in setting a climate in which employees can 

continuously expand their capacity to learn, 

understand complexity and set the vision for 

the organization (Dalakoura, 2010). For this to 

happen within existing leader development 

paradigms, organizations need to equip formal 

leaders with an understanding of leadership, 

as reliant on more than their individual roles, 

and create a climate conducive to such an 

understanding. The question is: how much of a 

refocus of existing leader development programs 

and organizational culture would this involve? 

Developing Leaders, Leadership and 

Learning Organizations 

Moving From Training to Developing Police 

Leaders 

We make a deliberate distinction between 

development and training. Training suggests that 

there are certain knowns that a leader must have, 

and that there are proven solutions to identified 

problems. Development, on the other hand, 

embraces the goal of building capacity to respond 

to a range of unknown and unforeseen problems 

(Day, 2011). Given our previous discussions 
 

 

 

 

6 | New Perspectives in Policing 

around the complexity of the police leadership 

environment, it stands to reason that we endorse 

a development rather than a training approach. 

The leadership-learning literature is evolving, but 

we actually know very little about what works in 

police leadership and its development. Much of 

what we know about police leadership is based 

on limited observations, small case studies, 

“and anecdotal accounts of ‘celebrity’ chiefs” 

(Schafer, 2009: 239; Pearson-Goff and Herrington, 

2014; Neyroud, 2010; Kodz and Campbell, 

2010; Campbell and Kodz, 2011), all of which 

invariably focus on the individual leader rather 

than leadership. As we attempt to articulate an 

approach to leadership development, we must be 

careful not to unconsciously revert to type and 

simply construct a technical-skills-based system. 

What we know is that, in moving toward being 

learning organizations, police departments need 

to consciously capture and develop the collective 

thinking of organizational competency programs 

for leaders. 

The process used to develop police leaders across 

the U.S. tends to be ad hoc. U.S. policing invests 

heavily in tactical and operational training and 

uses the U.S. Constitution as a text for governing 

activities. The police profession then provides and 

prioritizes training throughout the police officer’s 

career to respond to high-liability issues such as 

use of force or response to domestic violence, with 

more tailored training in operational excellence 

in specialty units such as organized crime, 

narcotics, gangs or violent crime investigation. 

Although this training is generally regarded 

as good quality and important for successful 

police work, it is technical and does not focus on 

developing leaders or supporting leadership. 

Leader development emerges at the more senior 

(largely captain or lieutenant) ranks as officers 

move into management positions and, through 

those, into executive leadership roles. Police 

agencies offer or sponsor some leadership 

development opportunities, but individual 

officers committed to their own advancement 

and growth seek other opportunities. Either 

way, the executive-in-training often has to 

aggressively seek out such opportunities rather 

than wait to be prepared for advancement by the 

profession or the police agency. 

Highly regarded programs and schools that 

provide leader development opportunities 

for mid- and senior-level managers include 

the University of Louisville’s Southern Police 

Institute, Northwestern University’s Center for 

Public Safety, and Johns Hopkins University’s 

Division of Public Safety Leadership. In addition, 

the FBI National Academy, the Police Executive 

Research Forum, and individual organizations 

utilizing the International Association of Chiefs 

of Police’s Leadership in Police Organizations 

(LPO) course (see sidebar, “Leadership in Police 

Organizations”) offer opportunities specifically 

for police leadership development. The wide 

availability of programs hints at a wide variety 

of views about what such programs should 

contain. Academic literature can provide some 

sense of what police leaders need, although 

the quality of the research on which such 

findings are based is often questionable, being 
 

 

Toward a Profession of Police Leadership | 7 

Leadership in Police Organizations 

With funding from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, the International Association of Chiefs 

of Police adapted a leadership course taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point (N.Y.) for use 

in law enforcement agencies, now entitled “Leadership in Police Organizations.” In 2001, the Arlington County 

(Va.) Police Department operated as a pilot site for LPO. At the time, the chief reasoned that traditional chain-ofcommand formulations had relegated police officers to the role of “privates,” not “officers.” This drove entry-level 

training and supervisory practices and belied that first-line officers operate in a leadership role in every sense of 

the word. Officers routinely exercise decisional authority in complex, ambiguous circumstances, under pressure, 

with insufficient information. And they must do so in a way that is fair, impartial, and perceived to be so. This 

requires leadership ability. The formal leaders of the organization must also have a firm grasp of management 

and leadership principles if they are to credibly guide the organization. The future of the organization and the 

profession depends on the caliber of leaders developed within police agencies, as the great majority of formal 

leaders come from the ranks. 

At the Arlington pilot site, leadership was defined as the process of influencing human behavior to achieve 

organizational goals that serve the public while developing individuals, groups and the organization for future 

service. The three-week course focused on behavioral science, leadership theories, understanding group 

formation, human motivation, concepts of followership, and the practical application of these concepts to the 

workplace. LPO was taught primarily to classes of officers from several agencies who would return to their own 

departments with enhanced skills and new networks. 

Milwaukee is another police department that has embraced the LPO program as part of a wider range of 

operational and technological changes designed to improve the department’s performance. This agency had been 

managed in a traditional, risk-averse manner; however, a generational shift in the junior- and middle-management 

ranks indicated receptiveness to positive change. LPO slotted neatly into this. 

In Milwaukee, rather than providing training to improve individuals’ skills and then sending learners back to a 

perhaps unwelcoming status quo, a vertical slice approach is used to generate a mixed group of ranks. Group 

discussions elicit different viewpoints and perspectives about the same topic. The stated goals of LPO in 

Milwaukee are that every department member (sworn and nonsworn) should have a shared understanding of 

organizational development, group behavior and human motivation; enhanced leadership skills and a common 

vocabulary to help solve conflict in the workplace; and a network of similarly minded colleagues. LPO’s mixedrank structure gives class members the opportunity to forge connections with officers of different ranks, with 

whom they can form mentoring relationships and from whom they can seek advice outside the formal chain of 

command. In this way, leadership, formal and informal, is truly dispersed throughout the organization, and the 

approach develops not just individuals but networks of individuals who can operate better within the organization. 

Excellent leadership cannot flourish in a dysfunctional culture but, if dispersed widely enough, it can create a 

new one. 
 

8 | New Perspectives in Policing 

largely based on perceptions rather than 

objective measures. There remains no objective 

assessment of what is needed from senior police 

executives (Pearson-Goff and Herrington, 2013; 

Schafer, 2009). This content becomes even 

more difficult to agree on when we consider 

the demands of the complex environment 

and what is needed to develop leadership, not 

just better technical leaders. Policing tends to 

rely on developing individual competencies 

to address organizational problems (McGurk, 

2010), but there is an important, although subtle, 

distinction between training for competencies 

and developing for capability. Competence 

involves telling people what knowledge and 

skills they need, whereas capability involves 

equipping individuals to adapt, generate new 

knowledge and continually learn (Fraser and 

Greenhalgh, 2001). Clearly, developing capability 

lends itself more readily to supporting leadership 

and learning organizations, although much 

leader development remains preoccupied with 

the technical knowledge and skills required of 

those at particular ranks. Although it is certainly 

important for effective management practices, 

this training does not develop leaders. 

Of course, even those programs of study more 

closely aligned with developing leader capability 

are only part of the story in developing distributed 

leadership and organizational capability to deal 

with complexity. Yet, in law enforcement in the 

United States and worldwide, the leader, rather 

than the system, is the focus of development, 

and little is made of the organizations to which 

transformed leaders return (Day, 2011; Bolden 

and Kirk, 2006; Edmonstone, 2011). Developing 

individuals is important, but if it is the exclusive 

focus of an organization’s attempts to generate 

leadership, it neglects the bulk of leadership 

capacity that resides in the rest of the organization 

as well as the importance of situation and context 

in achieving goals (Bolden and Kirk, 2006). 

Moving From Developing Police Leaders to 

Developing Learning Organizations 

Some development opportunities, such as LPO, 

promote leadership at all levels of the police 

organization by bringing multiple ranks of officers 

together (in Milwaukee, the ranks of captain, 

lieutenant, sergeant, detective and officer are 

routinely found in LPO classes). Although these 

programs still focus on the individual leader, they 

acknowledge that leadership happens as part of a 

larger system which is explored in the classroom 

(see sidebar, “Leadership in Police Organizations,” 

on page 7). This contrasts with most other leader 

development opportunities, which group 

individuals of similar ranks together to develop 

their skills away from the workplace. Although 

there are good reasons for this in hierarchical 

organizations (where dissent in front of the boss 

may end a career), this compounds the already 

individual focus of the development and limits 

the availability of a realistic, multiranked context 

in which to practice one’s skills (Bolden and 

Kirk, 2006; Edmonstone, 2011). To the best of our 

knowledge, LPO has not been formally evaluated, 

although it is well-regarded by senior officers 

across a range of jurisdictions (Rosser, 2013). It 

would be interesting to see if such multilevel 

programs result in better leadership outcomes 
Toward a Profession of Police Leadership | 9 

than programs that focus only on a small group 

of rank-peers drawn from across agencies. 

Leader development — even that which 

recognizes leadership in a system — does not 

automatically give rise to the development of 

learning organizations. Formal leaders have a 

role to play here through embracing and valuing 

organizational learning, but development must 

target the organization, too (Yeo, 2005). Yang, 

Watkins and Marsick 2004 provide a threelevel structure for a development approach that 

targets: 

■■	 Individual learning through engaging in 

continuous learning, dialogue and inquiry. 

■■	 Group-level learning through teams learning 

together and collaborating. 

■■	 Organizational learning, developing learningsupportive systems, empowering staff, and 

providing leadership around learning. 

Leadership and the development of learning 

organizations clearly rely on more than 

traditional classroom learning and require 

multiple well-coordinated activities to develop 

employees and the system in which they operate 

(Dalakoura, 2010). Dixon (1993) provides further 

insights into what such a development program 

might look like, describing it as: 

■■	 Located in the realities of day-to-day work, not 

away from them. 

■■	 Focused less on experts telling leaders what 

they should do. 

■■ Allowing longer time frames for “learning.” 

■■ Focused on community and organizational 

learning rather than individual outcomes. 

Development needs to be embedded in the 

workplace, grounded in an environment 

where individuals share their knowledge with 

coworkers, and based on an organizational 

structure that supports collaborative learning 

(Ortenblad, 2004). These underlying principles 

require a longitudinal, rather than a snapshot, 

approach to individual development; place those 

in the system (rather than the experts at the front 

of a classroom) in the central role; and support 

individuals in transforming their learning into 

workplace action. The term “action learning sets” 

has been used to describe such an approach 

and can be used to galvanize learning around a 

particular issue. For example, a vertical slice of 

formal and informal leaders in an organization, 

including those from external agencies, might 

be brought together (such as in the case of the 

LPO program) to collectively think about and 

address a specific problem. Such action learning 

sets allow for stretching conversations to identify 

and explore systemic tensions and dilemmas 

intrinsic to the problem, emphasizing reflection 

and review. This approach helps build social 

capital by encouraging people to understand 

how to relate to others, coordinate their efforts, 

build commitments and develop extended social 

networks (Edmonstone, 2011). The key features 

of this approach are less about organizational 

structure and more about how people within 

the organization think about the relationships 

between the outside world, their organization, 
10 | New Perspectives in Policing 

their colleagues and themselves (Davie and 

Nutley, 2000). Structures become more fluid, and 

a greater breadth and depth of resources (inside 

and outside of the organization) are available to 

deal with concerns. This is the real work for formal 

police leaders: encouraging their organization 

to change its values, its established hierarchical 

practices, and its culture to better prepare itself 

to meet the challenges ahead — which cannot be 

achieved by using authority alone (Heifetz and 

Laurie, 1997). The net result of this work is the 

development of organizational leadership and, 

in turn, learning organizations. 

The 70:20:10 Framework for Leadership 

Development 

Some workplaces are seeking to support 

leadership development through the 70:20:10 

framework. Although it is still focused on the 

individual, this framework contextualizes 

individual learning in the workplace environment 

and, in doing so, facilitates an organizational shift 

in thinking about leadership — from regarding 

it as an individual attribute to viewing it as an 

organizational commodity. The 70:20:10 approach 

— based on the work of McCall, Eichineger and 

Lombardo at the Center for Creative Leadership 

(Kajewski and Madsen, 2012; Jennings, 2013) — 

posits that 70 percent of the learning an individual 

does occurs at work, through stretch assignments, 

projects and day-to-day experiences; 20 percent 

occurs through networks and, in particular, 

through being coached and mentored by peers 

and more senior staff; and 10 percent occurs 

through formal schooling opportunities outside 

the office. Of course, it is the 10 percent that has 

characterized much of what we know as leader 

development, and few approaches hold the 

organization to account for nurturing the 90 

percent of development that occurs outside the 

classroom. That 70 percent of learning occurs 

through daily work means that if an organization 

does not create an environment in which 

individuals can reflect, experiment and adapt, 

a significant opportunity is lost. This 70 percent 

does not necessarily need to be structured, 

although the individual is undoubtedly aided by 

a better understanding of his or her own learning 

objectives and actively seeking out opportunities 

to meet these. Instead, the 70 percent relies 

heavily on the latent culture of the organization, 

and the nurturing of learning in line with the 

characteristics of a learning organization. There 

are undoubtedly challenges here for policing, 

with a fast-paced operational life leaving little 

opportunity for such significant cultural shifts, 

unless these are undertaken consciously. For 

an example of the 70:20:10 framework, see the 

sidebar, “The Australia and New Zealand Police 

Leadership Strategy.” 

Challenges to Developing Learning 

Organizations 

We have already said that, whereas the right 

organization will support the right sort of leader 

development approach, the right sort of leader 

(and leadership) development is also required 

to give the organization a fighting chance of 

developing into a learning organization. This is 

where formal leaders — chiefs and their senior 

staff — have to lead by example and clear the 

cultural obstacles that stifle the values inherent in 
 

 

 

Toward a Profession of Police Leadership | 11 

The Australia and New Zealand Police Leadership Strategy 

The Australia and New Zealand Police Leadership Strategy (PLS) uses the 70:20:10 approach to blend individually 

focused classroom learning with action and development in the workplace. Instead of employing a traditional 

didactic approach to leadership development, wherein a more knowledgeable person imparts this knowledge to 

others, PLS focuses on sharing tacit knowledge about leadership and experimenting with new ways of operating 

in practice. There is no training in running meetings, setting budgets or dealing with labor contracts, although 

this may be added into the mix through the selection of technically focused courses to make up the 10 percent. 

Rather, the focus of the strategy is on exercising and building leadership in the workplace and on reflecting 

deeply on what true leadership means. 

PLS lasts 18 months and includes five three-day workshops held at the Australian Institute of Police Management 

(AIPM). These workshops account for the 20 percent component and are set up as learning circles. The 10 

percent of formal classroom learning and the 70 percent of workplace learning are structured through individual 

development plans. Individual participants develop these plans and identify what formal courses they feel they 

need to increase their individual technical skills as well as what workplace experiences and opportunities they 

require to enhance their leadership practice. There is no standard blend of activities, and participants must identify 

their own development goals. For some, this includes a commitment to experiment with different approaches 

to their leadership in the workplace, to test out new ways of doing things and monitor the results. For others, 

this includes seeking out opportunities to shadow the commissioner at national meetings or identifying and 

addressing complex organizational issues. 

The learning circles (20 percent) provide a sounding board for leadership challenges for the group and an 

opportunity for individuals to learn and benefit from the collective wisdom of their peers. The organization assists 

in the development and execution of the individual development plans that structure the remaining 80 percent. 

If a participant requires an opportunity to experiment with leadership through a stretch project, the organization 

needs to support this. Similarly, the organizational hierarchy must encourage and sanction opportunities for 

participants to act in more senior roles (with greater duties). And, of course, applications for external classroombased learning must be funded. 

PLS is designed for aspiring commissioners, deputy commissioners and assistant commissioners from across 

Australasian policing and law enforcement, and the first cohort completed its 18-month involvement in mid-2014. 

An initial process evaluation was undertaken by the AIPM. Among other findings, this evaluation identified that 

the real success of the program is hard to pin down. Should retention, promotion or portability be regarded as an 

accurate measure of success? Or is the strategy’s success better measured through qualitative and personalized 

means? Certainly all participants perceived a benefit from their involvement, and several have moved on to 

more senior roles. But it is perhaps too soon to assess whether the strategy has had its desired impact on an 

organization’s learning culture, such that leadership is viewed as owned and nurtured by the organization as 

well as the individual. 

This novel approach to development is not without its challenges. A key aim of the strategy was to move leader 

development away from a focus on classroom-based learning and empower organizations to take ownership of 

leadership in the workplace through the 70 percent. This departure from traditional development approaches 

(where individuals are sent on programs and courses and their development becomes the responsibility of the 

educators) can be overlooked, with aspects such as the formal workshops and learning circles becoming the 

strategy instead of being viewed as complementing a broader — workplace-based — approach. To say the 

same thing another way, organizations must not underestimate their role in building leadership and a culture of 

continued on page 12 
 

 

 

 

 

 

12 | New Perspectives in Policing 

The Australia and New Zealand Police Leadership Strategy (continued) 

learning under a 70:20:10 framework, and a strategy such as PLS must guard against being seen as little more 

than another formal learning opportunity (i.e., externally provided via the 10 percent and 20 percent components). 

As such, it is important that, as we experiment with novel ways to develop leaders and organizational leadership, 

we do not inadvertently rebottle traditional approaches and undermine the bulk of development that must occur 

in — and be nurtured by — the organization. 

organizational learning. Some of these obstacles 

are personal and ego-related. It is challenging for 

a chief to acknowledge that he or she does not 

have a monopoly on the good ideas that will take 

the organization forward. But acknowledging 

that they do not have all the answers and leading 

from the front in this way is — paradoxically 

— the sort of authority-laden action required 

of formal leaders to signal a shift in approach 

and provide the space required to encourage 

collective and shared leadership (Jones, 2014). 

Of course, chiefs tend to become chiefs precisely 

because they have good ideas, and they are held 

to account by their political masters to enact these 

good ideas. It is therefore risky to one’s career 

to admit that others may have better ideas, lest 

one be replaced. Importantly, also, such culture 

change is a long-term project, the fruits of which 

may only be realized after a chief’s tenure ends. 

Buy-in to such an approach across the profession 

is needed to ensure that when one chief leaves, 

his or her replacement is more likely to be aware 

of (and sympathetic toward) the leadership work 

in progress and to continue to support this work 

rather than reverting to a traditional technocratic, 

bureaucratic and authoritarian approach. This is 

why agreement on what we mean by a profession 

of police leadership is so important: to protect 

an organization from lurching back and forth 

between the ideologies of individual chiefs. When 

that happens, the opportunity for the longer term 

development of organizational leadership and a 

culture of learning may be lost. 

Other values inherent to learning organizations 

can be challenging for police departments to 

reconcile (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel, 

1998). We have noted the difficulties police 

organizations face in tolerating and learning 

from mistakes. Typically, mistakes lead the 

pendulum of risk appetite to swing to the extreme, 

and internal and external calls for bureaucratic 

safeguards are heeded and applied. Individuals 

are found at fault, and a culture of blame 

overtakes any deep and meaningful learning that 

might be found. Arguably, police departments 

face a similar problem when learning from 

their successes. Police culture values individual 

modesty and concentrating on getting the job 

done. Focusing heavily on a win is not always 

rewarded by one’s peers, and valuable lessons 

tend not to be exploited for organizational good. 

Paradoxically, those seeking to make the most 

of successes for personal gain, through the 

promotion system, are rewarded for articulating 

their individual roles in the success rather 
 

 

 

Toward a Profession of Police Leadership | 13 

than exploring the organizational dynamic 

that worked. As a result, experimentation and 

innovation — when they do occur, and even when 

they succeed — tend to remain parochial. 

Police departments tend also to be inwardlooking. Many promotions are made from within 

a department, and with this insularity comes 

the baggage of individual and departmental 

history — the good and bad — and a stifling of the 

diversity of ideas and experience needed to tackle 

problems in new and innovative ways. Mobility of 

staff between departments is not common, and 

neither is lateral entry into the management and 

leadership of organizations from nonpolice roles. 

This is starting to emerge overseas, and the U.K. 

is experimenting with lateral entry of nonpolice 

into superintendent-level positions (the U.S. rank 

equivalent would be commander in California, 

major in many state police agencies, and 

inspector in most northeastern police forces other 

than Boston’s) (Winsor, 2012; Home Office, 2013). 

The hope is that this will bring much needed 

diversity to policing and, with this, diversity in 

how entrenched and complex policing problems 

are tackled. 

The ledger is not entirely in the negative, however, 

and one factor in favor of police departments 

moving toward becoming learning organizations 

is the policing structure. Rank and discretion in 

most police departments are inversely related; 

the further one progresses through one’s 

organization, the less freedom one has to exercise 

discretion. By dint of the (relatively) low level of 

supervisory visibility and high level of discretion 

experienced by most front-line police during their 

day-to-day work, they are encouraged to use their 

judgment and their tacit knowledge rather than 

rely entirely on the directions of others. The trick 

for police leaders is to permit the same freedom 

in decision-making and problem solving when 

front-line police are in the company of those 

of higher rank, instead of reinforcing the more 

natural tendency to default to authority. If we can 

hold on to this, we can better develop distributed 

organizational leadership and the learning 

organizations that we need. 

Conclusion 

The development of learning organizations 

rests on a shared approach to leadership and a 

commitment to ongoing organizational learning. 

Supporting this starts with developing leaders 

and their individual skill sets, but it does not 

end there; consideration needs to be taken of the 

organizational settings required for leadership 

to flourish and organizations to thrive. If we 

want true leadership in policing, then we need 

to support it within police organizations. And 

that means we need to better understand that 

leadership is about creating a climate in which 

innovation, experimentation and collaboration 

can flourish, valuing this, and accepting that this 

may be challenging. This new type of leadership 

requires, perhaps, a new type of chief, a new type 

of leadership accountability and a new type of 

leadership development. Rather than simply 

equipping individual leaders with a given set 

of competencies and skills to enable them to 

make the right decisions and do the right thing, 
 

14 | New Perspectives in Policing 

development must encourage the creation of an with 100 or more staff; Reaves, 2011) think about 

environment that allows for collective learning their organizational strategy for dealing with 

and feeling one’s way through situations. Such complex problems, and how their leader and 

leadership development is part of a broader push leadership development approaches contribute 

to develop learning organizations, although we to this. 

need to understand more about what it is that 

works here, and how police organizations and Our second call is for systematic research 

public safety can benefit. on leadership and leader development, their 

impact on developing learning organizations, 

With this in mind, we conclude this paper with and the net benefits of this. The established 

two calls. First, we advocate a two-pronged literature on police leadership is noticeably 

approach to developing a profession of police lacking in outcome-focused studies, with most 

leadership, incorporating both police leader research concentrating on perceptions of “good” 

development and leadership development to leadership rather than objective measures 

generate learning organizations. Leaders require (Pearson-Goff and Herrington, 2013; Schafer, 

a blend of management skills (e.g., planning, 2009; Neyroud, 2010; Campbell and Kodz, 2011). 

organizing, budgeting, staffing and directing), Little research has conceptualized or measured 

personal skills (e.g., the ability to communicate, the impact of leader or leadership development 

motivate and inspire others), leadership skills on an organization, and it remains difficult to 

(e.g., strategic focus, analytical competency and articulate the measurable outcomes that one 

cognitive flexibility), and, in policing, a healthy hopes for. Are crime rates a good measure of 

dose of operational experience (still seen as the police leadership? Is community satisfaction? 

sine qua non of credibility). Leadership requires What about an assessment of the strategic 

the organization to support the use of these position that a police organization adopts and its 

skills to create a learning environment. No one engagement with complex social problems? We 

course of study will achieve this, and it requires would argue that if we are looking to identify real 

an individual and organizational commitment leadership in action, then effort and evidence of 

to learning. The particular challenge for U.S. law innovation throughout the organization might be 

enforcement is developing both highly skilled better indicators than outcome success, as they 

leaders and organizational leadership coherently indicate a willingness to experiment rather than 

across the U.S. Perhaps it needs to start as a maintain the status quo. In any case, the debate 

pocket of activity in one or two of the larger needs to continue and we need to identify ways 

agencies, with flow-on benefits emanating from of more meaningfully measuring leadership so 

there. It would certainly make sense that police that this — rather than short-term gains — is 

departments of sufficient size (e.g., the 5 percent encouraged within our police organizations. 
Toward a Profession of Police Leadership | 15 

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18 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Author Note 

Edward A. Flynn is Chief of the Milwaukee Police 

Department. He is the former Massachusetts 

Secretary of Public Safety and has led the 

Springfield, Mass., and Arlington, Va., police 

departments. 

Dr. Victoria Herrington is the Director of 

Research and Learning at the Australian Institute 

of Police Management (AIPM). She has almost 20 

years’ experience as an applied policing scholar, 

working in a number of industry and university 

roles in the United Kingdom and Australia. 

Findings and conclusions in this publication are those of the authors and do not 

necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 

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