I establish ground rules, like we diminish no one, everyone's opinion is respected, no name calling, no use of profanity. I'm not the bad person, or the parent. I'm the one that reminds them of what they've agreed to and it feels a whole lot different then if I'm going around and pointing fingers. If that doesn't work, then I caucus with them. I think I've violated the confidence that people had that I was going to keep it safe.
Police chiefs seem to be especially concerned about it.
They don't want to come to some meeting and let people chew them up and my assurance to them is I'm not going to let that happen. People may vent their feelings or their frustrations and they need to do that, but it won't be personal. But if I violated that then I violated my trust. Those were the kinds of steps that I used to honor that. The most important thing is that they buy into some behavioral ground rules that I can call them back to.