I disagree with a lot of what comes out of California’s legislature. Some of their laws seem to create solutions for problems that don’t necessarily exist. But every now and then, they get something right, and their recently enacted No Robo Bosses Act is one of those occasions. In fact, I think every state should…
I saw a story about an AI manager at a San Francisco store recommending that an employee be fired. The employee had been late 17 times in 23 shifts, so I’m not going to pretend the attendance problem wasn’t real. A human manager probably should’ve dealt with it long before the AI did. What caught…
I’ve seen some impressive resumes in my life. College degrees, command schools, leadership certifications, specialized training, and enough certificates to cover an “I love me wall.” There’s nothing wrong with any of that. I believe in education and training, and I think officers should take advantage of every opportunity they have to improve themselves. But…
The main argument in Extreme Ownership is hard to disagree with. If you’re responsible for a team and your first explanation for every failure is that everybody beneath you screwed up, you probably haven’t looked hard enough at your own part in it. That doesn’t mean every failure belongs to the leader. That’s where I…
Sometimes an officer asks a supervisor what to do because he doesn’t know what to do. Sometimes he asks because the decision isn’t his to make. Those aren’t the same thing. I want officers who can think for themselves. If every traffic stop, report question, complaint, or minor problem has to go through a supervisor,…
When a decision affects people, “Because I said so” usually isn’t enough. That doesn’t mean everybody gets a vote, and it doesn’t mean every decision has to be defended forever. Sometimes I’ve listened, made the call, and we’re moving on. I can still tell people what I was trying to accomplish and why I chose…
When I’m looking at a police promotion, I don’t start with who deserves it. I start with the job that needs to be done. An officer can be very good at their job and still not be the person I want supervising other officers. They may handle calls well, make good cases, stay productive, know…
One of the easiest ways to lower a standard is to do nothing. I don’t have to change a policy or announce a new rule. I can just see the same problem enough times and keep walking past it. Eventually, everybody figures out that whatever the written rule says, this is what we actually accept….
When a police officer screws up, the officer owns it. If he violated policy, used bad judgment, lied, mistreated somebody, failed to do the job, or made a decision he should’ve known better than to make, supervision shouldn’t become a way to explain that away. But once I understand what the officer did, I want…
A chief can get a pretty clean version of a department without anybody lying. A sergeant gives the short version. Somebody trims it down again. A detail gets left out because it doesn’t seem important, or because it makes somebody look bad. By the time the story reaches the chief’s office, the part that might’ve…