Leadership Resilience
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Leadership Resilience

Lessons for Leaders from the Policing Frontline

Ginger Charles, Jonathan Smith, Jonathan Smith

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eBook - ePub

Leadership Resilience

Lessons for Leaders from the Policing Frontline

Ginger Charles, Jonathan Smith, Jonathan Smith

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About This Book

Leadership is demanding and challenging. How do leaders cope? How do they remain fit and strong, and thrive? The authors of Leadership Resilience, a business school academic and a police officer, suggest that many challenges faced by leaders are similar to the challenges experienced by police officers. The isolation; the pressure not to show personal emotions; the expectation that they will deal effectively with confused, frustrated and angry people; and that they can deal with delivering bad news; all contribute to the pressures bearing on leaders and police officers everywhere. The authors argue that these challenges are more pronounced in policing and so more readily identifiable than in other leadership situations. They explore challenges experienced by police officers, look at how they cope with them, and draw lessons for those undertaking leadership roles more generally. Leadership Resilience provides accounts from police officers, in their own words, of difficult experiences they encounter. They describe their feelings about what was important and how they coped with it. Each account is followed by an analysis highlighting what is discussed, and not discussed, in the accounts and identifying lessons that can be drawn by leaders in other situations. All is presented so that it is relevant to different cultures demanding different styles of leadership. Analysis of the engaging experiences featured will help leaders struggling with the gap between leadership education and capability and the demands made of them to survive and thrive, while maintaining their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317106920

1 Introduction

We have written this book in an effort to assist leaders with the challenging role they perform. Leaders in the vast majority of cases do an amazing job. All too often they are unrecognized and undervalued even though they are the lifeblood of our families, our organizations, our communities and our society.
Leadership in all its guises is a demanding and challenging role to take on, and with globalization, increasing complexity, the rapid pace of change, and increasing expectations across the world it is only becoming more so. Whilst leadership capability and knowledge about how to perform the role effectively has no doubt increased considerably, this has by no means matched the large growth in demand and expectation placed upon leaders today, particularly in this time of financial and planetary crisis, upheaval and funding cutbacks that are being experienced in many parts of the world, where more is being expected with less. As a result, the gap between leadership capability and demands is becoming ever wider. This is one of the reasons why Rayment and Smith (2011) argue that we are currently experiencing a leadership crisis globally. We must also recognize that the leaders performing these enormous roles are not superhuman; they are just human beings, with all their frailties, worries and imperfections. This places huge pressures upon leaders, and as we shall detail later in this Introduction, this is having many negative impacts on leaders in terms of stress, poor physical and mental health, and burnout.
So how do leaders cope with the challenges they face today? How do they remain fit and strong, and prosper and thrive in such an environment of challenge, complexity, and change? How do leaders cope with the toxic work environment that is all too often seen and which can be worsened with redundancies, closures, financial cuts and all the people issues associated with these? What training and support do they have to enable them to cope effectively? In our experience, leaders are often provided with very little support, guidance or training in these areas, and are often left to just muddle through the best they can. In their own desperate searches for ways to cope, some leaders fall, become isolated, and are drawn to unhealthy coping strategies, seeking solace in many things, including sex, alcohol and drugs, as crutches just to help them survive the day.
The authors have been privileged to work and be able to conduct research within the police environment, both in US and in the UK. Police officers regularly deal with sometimes unimaginable and very challenging situations. Here they are often operating at the margins – between life and death, good and evil, health and illness, love and hate, success and failure, legal and illegal, right and wrong. These situations raise some of the most fundamental and important questions any person has to face, and at some point in all our lives we are all likely to be wrestling with at least some of these types of questions. Police officers experience many extraordinary situations, and deal with these using extraordinary skills and strategies, and yet these police officers, too, are just human beings – they do not employ superpowers to cope, nor are they immune from imperfections.
The police organization is well developed in terms of training and support mechanisms that are in place to support officers in the challenging role they perform, but this is often unseen and also under-valued. The central tenet of this book is our argument that police officers themselves and the police organization as a whole have developed some quite extraordinary ways of dealing with the demands they face. They have developed huge amounts of resilience, and also effective ways of building this resilience. Often this is not recognized in police organizations or agencies, nor in society in general. Of course, the situation within the police organization is not perfect, and there is still a long way to go. The challenges police officers face on a regular basis still have some major negative impacts on both the policing community and wider society in terms of police officer suicides, ill health, relationship breakdowns, and the use of ineffective coping mechanisms such as recourse to drugs and alcohol. Despite the enormous challenges clearly evident in undertaking the policing role and some of the negative impacts, however, the authors have discovered from their research that the vast majority of police officers are:
extremely resilient and demonstrate high levels of self-control, compassion, professionalism and love for the work they have chosen to do. Their dedication to service is for many inspiring, revealing some of the noblest acts of self-sacrifice and altruism. These officers appear to have an ability to transform negative experiences, redirect their emotionally charged frustrations and move from feelings of victimisation to using the experience to create new meaning and compassion.
(Smith and Charles 2010: 321)
We are interested in these success stories, the positive examples of high levels of resilience being demonstrated every day. Our focus in this book is not just on helping police officers, though. It focuses on leadership more generally, at all levels, in all countries, and in all organizations, including the emergency services and police. From extensive research, personal leadership experience, and teaching, the authors have come to realize that many of the challenges faced by leaders in general are similar to the challenges experienced by police officers. Isolation experienced by people in leadership roles – particularly senior positions – unable to show personal emotions, coping with very demanding roles, working effectively with people who are confused, frustrated, angry, and delivering bad news such as redundancies and severe financial cutbacks are just some examples of the current leadership challenges which police officers have wide experience and training in dealing with. Within the policing environment, however, the authors argue that these challenges are more pronounced and exaggerated, and therefore easier to identify than they may be the case in other leadership positions.
So how do these resilient police officers do it, how do they cope? How do they deal with the extraordinary situations they see on a regular basis? And can leaders generally learn from this about how they might build their own and others’ resilience to enable them and the organizations they work within to cope more effectively in the challenging, changing, and complex environments in which they operate?

Our Approach

This book is not a traditional text on resilience, stress, or leadership. It does not contain large amounts of theoretical ideas, facts, and figures on resilience, leadership, or how leaders cope. It is a book about practice, practical application, and example. We use police officers’ own narratives extensively to draw real-life practical examples of how ordinary people cope – with extraordinary events, and also with the dilemmas and difficulties which they experience in doing this. This will provide leaders with direct examples of how officers have become resilient through the experience. We then seek to draw lessons from these experiences, both for the wide variety of people undertaking some form of leadership role as well as for the police community specifically. Most importantly, the book also raises questions for you, the reader, to reflect on and answer for yourself, as well as offering you encouragement to raise further questions and keep the dialogue going.
In this book we argue that leaders in all organizations and at all levels can learn something from how the police organization as well as individual officers cope with the challenging nature of the role they perform. From this we hope leaders can build greater levels of resilience for themselves, and for their organizations, so they and the people they lead are better equipped to cope with the ever-increasing demands that are placed upon them. Resilience is key, not just for leaders’ own health and wellbeing, but also for the organizations they lead and the societies they are a part of. As Loehr and Schwartz highlight: “Leaders are the stewards of organisational energy [resilience] 
 they inspire or demoralise others, first by how effectively they manage their own energy and next by how well they manage, focus, invest and renew the collective energy of those they lead” (Loehr and Schwartz 2003: 5).
This book raises a lot of questions, many quite deep and challenging. You can choose to simply skim over these questions and read the book for general points about leadership and resilience, but the book also offers you the opportunity to embark on a more significant personal journey of building your own and others’ resilience. This journey can take place at whatever stage you are at in your life, as you can always become more resilient.
If you wish to embark on this more significant journey, we would ask you to pause for a moment and identify how you are going to find the time and energy to do this so that you will be able to reflect effectively on the questions raised in the book. It will not be easy, particularly if you are feeling that your resilience is quite low anyway – which is quite likely since you are reading this book and possibly wanting to travel on this journey. The first thing that may be useful is to develop a clear picture as to why you want to read this book: What will be better for you when you have done this? What will the new, more resilient you look like? What will it feel like? What can you see yourself doing? What will you be able to achieve that you do not feel able to now? Is there a person you know who you seek to be more like in the way they cope with the challenges they encounter? What is it specifically that they do that you want to try to emulate? Be as specific as you can with your answers to these questions.
When you have reflected on these points, it may be useful to develop a plan of how you are going to work through the book. Be kind to yourself, focus, and take a small step at a time, perhaps reflecting on one question each day, and reward yourself in some way when you have achieved this. Bear in mind that you may be reflecting on some difficult questions at some point in your journey. What support do you have to assist you with these? You may wish to draw on family and friends to help you, as talking through the issues and questions that are raised can certainly help. Also consider any support mechanisms you may have in your work environment, such as human resources or counselling departments that you could talk through difficult questions with. Not that this entire book is going to be difficult – we hope the vast majority will be enjoyable, engaging, interesting, rewarding, and exciting.
Before we embark on the main body of the book, the police officers’ narratives, it will be useful to introduce some of the terms we are exploring. In the following four sections we will introduce resilience, stress, fitness, and spirituality, beginning with resilience.

Resilience

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, resilience is the “ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”. It is not the same as strength, with which resilience is often confused. Strength enables you to resist or remain unaffected in the face of life’s difficulties and challenges. As the above definition highlights, resilient individuals are moved by misfortunes or change, they are not robots, they do feel sadness, fear, and pain, but they are able to recover easily from this. Ideally, they can also “adjust” to this “misfortune or change” and move to an even more resilient state. Resilience, then, is that ineffable quality that seems to distinguish those who face challenges and fail from those who are knocked down by life yet come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, resilient people somehow find a way to carry on and grow stronger from the experience.
We argue, as does the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in the UK (2011b), that in the increasingly and endlessly turbulent context of today’s working world, the resilience of both individuals and organizations is paramount in order to survive and thrive.
The resilience we talk about here is different from, though in many ways connected to, an interpretation of resilience commonly seen within the emergency services environment, such as the UK’s National Resilience Programme.1 This programme aims to strengthen national and local resilience by improving the infrastructure, and capability of the Fire and Rescue Services so they can respond more effectively to natural disasters, large-scale accidents, the threat of terrorism, as well as day-to-day incidents. Our focus in this book is not on these structural policies and procedures as much as the people aspects of resilience in organizations, including the Fire and Rescue Services.
CAN RESILIENCE BE DEVELOPED?
This is a key question to begin our exploration with, because if resilience cannot be developed there is little point in leaders studying the area or reading this book – or for that matter, in our writing it! To allay any concerns you have here, we believe firmly that resilience can be developed – many thousands of police officers are testament to this. A number of research studies and training activities also suggest clearly that resilience is something that can be developed (see, for example, Alexander et al. 2012). Brigadier General Cornum (2012), who until recently led the $125 million emotional fitness regime for the US military, has also shown that resilience can be developed through her work with the US Army since 2008. Of course, there are some elements of resilience that are undoubtedly part of individuals’ make-up and cannot be changed, but we argue that many aspects of a person’s attitude, approach, and behaviour related to resilience can be developed and improved.
We also believe that a powerful way for leaders to develop their own and others’ resilience is by exploring and reflecting for themselves upon examples of how others cope. Whilst the situations discussed are unlikely to be exactly the same, as Cornum (2012) identifies, with resilience we are talking about transferable skills that can be applied in many different situations – hence the narrative approach we have adopted in this book.
Our emphasis here is on building the skills and resources that are necessary for greater resilience, and being as proactive as we can in building these skills prior to difficulties arising. It seems of much less benefit to sit back and leave it until people experience problems in coping, and then invest large amounts of money in treating or counselling these people, and on training others to identify those who are having problems coping with the stressful nature of their jobs. There are many very effective and successful programmes in the police and military that seek to identify and help people when they have problems, and we do not wish to devalue these, but we argue that in many ways it is too late to leave it until people experience problems.
Building resilience is a major personal and organizational issue, and it needs to be managed effectively and proactively.
GlaxoSmithKline, one of the leading pharmaceutical companies internationally, is an example of an organization that is proactive in this area, and is doing a great deal of work to develop resilience in its leaders and employees. It applies the following definition of resilience in its work on enhancing the effectiveness of individual employees and teams. We find this useful in encapsulating what this book seeks to assist you to do:
[Resilience is] the ability to be successful, personally and professionally, in a highly pressured, fast-paced and continuously changing environment.
(Campbell in Casey and Corday 2007)
A HOLISTIC APPROACH
There has been a great deal of work and research into resilience, and one major aspect of this focuses on developing emotional resilience. As an example, Business in the Community has developed a useful Emotional Resilience Toolkit (Business in the Community 2008) which provides practical guidance on promoting the resilience of individuals and teams in organizations as part of an integrated health and wellbeing programme. In this, it uses a definition of emotional resilience by Vielife (as cited in Business in the Community 2008: 10), who suggests that emotional resilience is: “the attitude and skill set of an individual allowing them to cope with great efficiency and effectiveness in periods of change and stress”.
We agree that one of the keys to building resilience, as emphasized in this definition, is the “attitude and skill set of an individual”. However, we argue that the attitude and skill set required does not just relate to emotions, and there are important elements beyond both emotions and the individual that have to be considered. Kevin Gilmartin, a clinical psychologist who specializes in issues in law enforcement, has produced an excellent book, Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement: A Guide for Officers and their Families (Gilmartin 2002), which identifies some important aspects with respect to building emotional resilience. Again, though, he only focuses on the emotional aspects to resilience.
Beddoes-Jones (2012: 46) goes further than just emotional resilience, and highlights physical, mental, and emotional resilience, but does not exp...

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