I’ve made personnel decisions that looked right at the time and didn’t work out. I can interview somebody, review their record, talk to people who’ve worked with them, and watch how they perform, only to discover later that I misjudged their ability to supervise other people. Sometimes the promotional process itself is the problem. Other…
Everybody likes transparency when the answer makes the department look good. It’s easy to talk about accomplishments, successful investigations, improved response times, or something the department has done particularly well. The harder part comes when I have to acknowledge that something inside my own organization isn’t working the way it should, especially when admitting it…
One of the easiest things to say about a leader is that they need to stand their ground, and sometimes they do. If you’ve made a sound decision for the right reasons, criticism by itself isn’t a reason to abandon it. Leadership would be pretty useless if every decision changed based on who was complaining…
One of the easiest things for a supervisor to say is, “I treat everybody the same.” I understand why that sounds fair. Nobody wants favoritism, special treatment, or a boss who changes the rules depending on who is standing in front of him. But I don’t think fair treatment requires pretending every employee and every…
A police chief answers to somebody, and the people he answers to are allowed to ask hard questions about how the department runs, how the money gets spent, and whether the town is getting what it expects. That part isn’t the problem. The problem starts when the question stops being about the department and becomes…
It’s pretty easy to judge the boss when you’re not the boss. I’ve done plenty of it. I’ve looked at decisions made above me and thought they were slow, unnecessary, poorly timed, or just wrong. Sometimes I was probably right. Becoming the person in the chair didn’t suddenly convince me that bosses know better than…
In a previous life, I delegated a lot more than I do now. I had to. I was responsible for more than 2,300 employees who depended, in one way or another, on the decisions I made, and there was no realistic way I could personally handle everything that came with that. On a normal day,…
I’ve made enough mistakes in my life to know I’m going to make more. Some have been poor decisions. Others were decisions I thought were right at the time, only to find out later that I was wrong. Either way, once I recognize the mistake, I have a choice. I can spend my time explaining…
It’s easy to look like a committed leader when something goes wrong. A complaint comes in, somebody misses a deadline, an employee makes a mistake, or a problem finally gets enough attention that it can’t be ignored. Now there are meetings, new expectations, closer supervision, and plenty of conversation about what needs to change. For…
Most organizations don’t keep bad employees because nobody realizes there’s a problem. They keep them because everybody realizes there’s a problem and dealing with it is harder than working around it. The supervisor knows who isn’t carrying their weight. The coworkers definitely know. Sometimes customers know, and in government the public probably knows. Yet the…