Chapter I: Introduction
“Don’t let your members park their brains at the door” (Tom Peters)
Leadership, Really?
The experience introduced in this manuscript is not a how to be a leader directive, albeit there is encounters with leadership characteristics and styles, but rather an inspiring essential as to why one should become a leader. Within each of us lies differing levels of courage, confidence, enthusiasm, experience, and knowledge. Incorporated in each being is the willingness or reluctance to share their personal characteristics in a leadership role. Problematic to this type of discussion survives underlying motivations escalating the less qualified individual to the forefront, specifically holding “No capacity nor desire to lead.” Herein enters an essential point in this writing: How to motivate the qualified, probably yourself. In order to adequately address such a vital concern regarding leaders, leadership generally, developing leadership skills/traits, and what may work for our future leaders while remaining ethically inclined, I have chosen to break this discussion into four concrete sections. These are: Drink, Swear, Steal, and Lie.
I write these sections highlighting an excessively scrutinized personality. A person of no nationally recognized prominence. A person similarly situated with most readers. A person of a thousand mistakes that perhaps the reader may associate. A person involved in a highly volatile, ever evolving, and controversial profession. The vocation of law enforcement. That person is me. A police chief/police commissioner for 28 years in three differing settings of a near 40 year policing experience, achieving continuous dissection of decisions by critics, second guessers, the knowledgeably bankrupt, and political prostitutes. I do not know of your personal situation, but I can assert with reasonable certainty that being a police chief is akin to wearing a pressure cooker as a permanent derby.
The reader may question what police leadership has in common with your occupation. Actually, everything. I submit that my job application has everything to do with leaders—parents, teachers, coaches, institutional, corporate, and organizational leaders. Regardless of your chosen vocation as a teacher, professor, manufacturer, public servant, administrative assistant, business person, and especially a parent, leadership is critical. You may not be faced with millisecond reactionary decision making related to threatening situations, but your level of jeopardy is relative to your personal situation or job description. Certainly, you have had to make decisions and often have been looked up to as the formal or informal leader—the go to person.
Additionally the diction, tone, categories, and fluctuating between first and third person, moderate citations, accompanied with associated humor is hopefully acceptable to the reader. If not, put this material down and fear not, I have been rejected by higher authority. The material is pres