Performance-ship vs. Relationship

The true measure of value is not what leaders may think

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

It seems that recently there’s been a no-holds-barred push to start bringing into the light a deep scrutiny of law enforcement. Certainly, this is culturally driven and keeping our profession professional always has relevance, and the topic written about here is no exception. Without a true understanding of what law-enforcement does each shift, people default to rating an officer’s performance subjectively.  How many stops did he make? How many reports did she take? Did the squad work on the project today? If so, for how much time? We brush off most of the criticism when it’s negative or ill-informed when coming from civilians as some sort of agenda setting.  But what do you do when your own agency uses tangible created performance metrics to evaluate the intangible character, competency, and the courageous nobility of an officer? 

What image comes to mind when you hear the word “performance?” For me, I think back to the days of playing sports and being pushed by a coach and my teammates to succeed to outperform everyone else to be better. In school, it meant getting straight A’s from birth to graduation. In physical fitness it meant bringing my body to its highest level of function regardless of the task that I was calling on it to achieve. Task and then optimal result equals performance. It was simple math.

In police work, the math is not so clear.

Part of me just wants to highlight that measurements of performance in police work have changed over the years, and how what the consenting citizens demanded from the police department has changed as well, which is why we are where we are. But that would lack institutional courage and put me right along with what Michael Savage once coined as the “sheeple” in our country. You see, ways to determine the metrics of tangible performance in police work have changed over the years with officers engaging in stop-and-frisk contacts, broken window theory enforcement, problem-oriented policing projects, to where we are today with community-oriented policing.  Those metrics been centered around creating safer cities, no doubt about it,  but the slant driving the politics of our profession has also changed and plays a large part in this idea of performance-centered management. 

This type of approach has the potential to appease those whose views on policing are derived from a negative encounter once or twice with an officer, rather than taking the totality of contacts in line with the mission and values of the agency just to minimize the negative political backlash that could arise from explaining a simple rule I learned my first day of field training: “No” is a complete sentence.

Police work has changed over the years and how what the consenting citizens demand from the police departments around the country also has changed. Our profession needs to change as well. We need to take an objective look at the ways that performance is measured to determine what’s the best metric to determine success.

Expectations Matter

I was applying to enter the Army at the same time I applied to be a police officer. I got hired by my agency before I completed my required forms and tests to enlist. I understood there were standards of performance in the military that were not subject to my feelings on how they related to my work. The assumption in law-enforcement can be similar in that staff may push down directives and expect blind obedience to achieving the goals given. That may work in environments like the football field or the military under a Theory X-style leadership, but rarely is that successful in the law-enforcement profession.

The crux behind this problem lies with the interactive nature of policing. We spend our shifts in constant interaction with people. From traffic stops, calls for service, business checks, community events, or arrests, law enforcement has to take each situation separately and weigh their decisions on what to do against their training and experience. There is infrequently the one-sided mission, for example in Special Operations incidents, that requires the stated directives to be followed regardless. Most times the people wearing the badge are credited with the trust and responsibility to use practical wisdom to do the right thing, the right way, in the right situation, and at the right time.

Back to the topic at hand. Explain how a patrol officer or district deputy tells their supervisor they took less reports then requested because they had stopped at an elementary school to talk to kids about the danger of using drugs. Or that they took a homeless family to a shelter and paid for new clothes and food, which is why they had no traffic stops that shift. What if they simply were out of cadence from the tempo of the calls coming in and found themselves active yet not the disposition person for the calls throughout the shift? None of those examples show work done through a performance lens. Yet, those situations happen all the time. Over twenty years in law enforcement and I still haven’t seen a full staff supervisory briefing done where the goal to measure success was to go and contact kids in a park when no calls were holding. As a credit to my agency the Chief told the officers in a patrol briefing years ago he would pay for 10 hours of an officer’s time if they just hung out with the kids playing in a park throwing a football or playing basketball because he knew that was where real change would happen. He is the only staff I have seen come out in that way to the troops. I have been in too many meetings where the absence of crime in an area is noted and then glossed over to get to a tangible metric to show production. Reduce catalytic converter thefts. Decrease shoplifting in a district. Relocate transients to services designed to get them off the street. We are missing a critical shift occurring as leaders. Our officers are recovering from the demands from the government imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic wave and starting to believe in the mission again. Just to find that when they play basketball with some kids, get their parents involved, and learn about drug activity in the area, they are told “that’s good” but the real issues of crime reduction require X, Y, or Z elsewhere.

Seeing What’s Not There

The real metric for success is counter-intuitive to the militaristic rigid standards of performance. It lies with relationships. Seems simple to say, harder to do. Police will do the things that give them the highest pleasure and least amount of pain routinely. In certain circumstances, personal feelings are put aside to accomplish a set of goals or tasks in the short-term. But even then, the response received when that mission is completed will determine the level of involvement the next time around. You cannot constantly draw from the leadership bank account with people without doing a deposit once in a while.

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.

I have worked mega events requiring 12-hour rotating shifts seven days a week for weeks at a time in some cases. This completely uprooted my stability at home, which caused resentment and cynicism to creep into my work. At one point after a particularly difficult shift, I was pulled into my Lieutenant’s office at the end of the day and he told me, “Thank you for how you stepped up all day today. We would have been lost without the work you did to keep the officers and citizens safe.” That was it. He didn’t give me a gift card to a restaurant or offer me time off work as a bonus. He simply took a minute to appreciate the person behind the badge and the stress the job was causing. That revitalized my work and my performance increased!

The rest of the 12-hour shifts I worked with energy looking to help the officers with their family situations, helped citizens when available, and spent more time proactively heading off potential problems from the onset rather than being forced to solve them reactively at the end of the day. That’s the key. Courageous leadership recognizes that the person wearing the uniform is more important than the tasks given to that person to complete. It means setting a crime reduction plan with high target crime data points, but also means incorporating working with the community-based organizations to saturate an area resulting in lasting change occurring.

As leaders we have to look beyond the numbers. We have to look not just at the reports taken, traffic stops done, or arrests made, but at the absence of crime in an area that can be attributed to a Koper curve theory philosophy of “hot spot” policing. To effectively supervise someone, you have to know what the important things are to them. This takes time and a transparent investment into making that person’s life better. The benefit of caring about your people will be seen in lower sick time usage, higher morale, less complaints, and a more effective and productive employee. That metric never changes and is achievable for everyone. I spoke with a family who has three brothers all in my agency. The first one to join said his boss did everything he could to get him the training and support he needed to be the best he could be on the job and in his personal life. That officer was so bought into the mission he told his other brothers and recruited them in. The outcome speaks for itself. People-centered servant leadership is how we walk well into the future. Learn to see what isn’t there and put a premium on it if you want your agency to thrive.

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Sergeant Jeff Daukas has over 20 years in law-enforcement working through patrol, investigations, and special operations both at the line level and as a supervisor. Through the last 20 years, Jeff has embraced his passion instructing officers and civilians through the nobility of policing. He is a certified FranklinCovey Nobility of Policing instructor, as well as a certified instructor for the Blue Courage curriculum. Jeff holds a master’s degree in criminal justice with a focus on terrorism and homeland security and teaches in that discipline at the college level.  He is a graduate of the FBI-LEEDA Supervisor Leadership Institute program consistently implementing servant-leadership into training the next generation of law-enforcement professionals in both courageous leadership and followership.