Leadership Resilience: Lessons for Leaders from the Policing Frontline

Citation

Greg Michael Latemore (2016), "Leadership Resilience: Lessons for Leaders from the Policing Frontline", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 153-155. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-06-2015-0119

The editors of this engaging work are well-credentialed. Jonathan Smith is a Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge UK and teaches into master’s courses in leadership, strategy and organizational change. His PhD explored the relevance of spirituality within police training. Ginger Charles has been a Police Officer in the USA since 1986 and gained her PhD in health psychology in 2005. Ginger’s current research interest is focused on the health risk factors in the law enforcement community.

The authors of the main chapters are all police officers, which brings credibility to their contributions when they write about stress, and policing in crisis situations. The audience for this book is intended to be managers and leaders in general and not just other police officers.

The book commences with definitions and makes the good point that resilience is not the same as strength but is the ability to recover from and adjust easily to misfortune or change (p. 5). The change management literature might indicate such robustness or hardiness as “readiness for change”. The authors define stress by echoing Lazarus in his Psychological Stress and the Coping Process (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) as a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that the demands exceed the personal and social resources (p. 10) and they rightly recognize that not all stress is negative (p. 13). This book provides a helpful mapping tool to determine one’s support mechanisms during stressful events.

Fitness is another key aspect of resilience. The Global Fitness Framework juxtaposes physical, mental or spiritual holistic depth with strength, stamina and suppleness on the “fitness plane” and whether the person’s level of fitness is individual, group or society oriented (p. 16).

What was surprising and encouraging was an orientation to spirituality and the holistic development approach throughout. The authors are interested in the spiritual resources that are an important aspect of resilience. The chapter contributors also refer to this spiritual dimension of resilience, especially in the aspect of meaning and purpose in their work and the importance of being connected to something bigger, even to the sacred when they are faced with stressful and challenging situations.

The basic intention of this book is not to provide a framework or answers but stories and concepts to generate more questions for self-reflection (p. 3). Nevertheless, the book still employs some impressive models such as:

• David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, London: Prentice Hall, 1983).

• The embedded values cycle (Rayment & Smith, Misleadership: Prevalence, Causes and Consequences, Farnham: Gower, 2011).

• The UK police’s national decision model.

• Howard’s (presentation at the British Association for the Study of Spirituality, 4-6 May 2010, Windsor, UK) holistic development cycle. This excellent model addresses the four compass points of being, doing, self and others, to highlight four aspects of spiritual development: developing self; expressing full potential; unity with others and serving others (p. 86).

All of these models provide a visual and integrating integrity to what otherwise would have been lots of text. The book is also adequately indexed with all references at the end for ready accessibility.

Leadership Resilience presents 16 chapters around seven major case studies. The case studies highlight the need for resilience in situations such as natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, hostage situations at gunpoint and policing in Northern Ireland. Each case is presented by a different author with expertise in the situation, whether this occurred in Northern Ireland, England or the USA. One of the two editors then provides an analysis or commentary of each case as a dual offering to the reader.

It is understandable that there is special consideration given to police compassion fatigue which is an occupational version of over-commitment. Examples of compassion fatigue range from cognitive and emotional manifestations to behavioural, spiritual and relational ones. Officers might experience responses such as: apathy, depression, impatience, hopelessness, loneliness and sleep disturbance. For many serving police officers, policing is more than a job but clearly embodies a sense of calling (p. 61), even a spiritual vocation.

The stories in Leadership Resilience cover the whole range of human experience, from birth to death and the many emotions and traumas in between. The book is adequately referenced and provides additional readings at the end of each chapter. Each chapter from the police officers ends with a few questions for reader reflection such as – “what stands out for you in this narrative regarding resilience?”

The book would have been enriched if there was a clearer summary of the key strategies to acquire and develop resilience. The reflections at the end are indeed accurate commentaries on the seven major case studies but the overall lessons for the reader are still fragmented and somewhat elusive.

A real strength of this work is its realism and credibility from voices on the “frontline”, from those behind the “thin blue line” which is often drawn between society and the criminal mind. Their sense of devotion to duty and their commitment to care for their communities transcends the cynicism one might expect from experienced police officers as they confront the best and the worst of human nature. Their heightened sense of dealing with life and death situations comes alive – “the entire event felt strange and unique, weird and wondrous” (p. 30). This is a useful book for students of stress and resilience as well as for practicing managers.

I was impressed with the conscious consideration of the importance of values, respect, ethics and relationships in what the police officers were doing every day – their role is clearly much more significant to them and to their communities than merely a “9 to 5” job. As Ginger reflects on one of the cases, “Perhaps, as leaders, we can find our resilience by actually living and loving in the communities where we work and reside. Instead of hiding in the house and running from the garage to the car to get to work, we can immerse ourselves and find the richness in our communities in similar ways to the ways these police officers have shared with us” (p. 200).

While one might have initially thought that policing is too specialized to be of relevance to mainstream managers, this is nonetheless a worthy contribution to an increasing literature on resilience. I recommend it as a realistic, first-hand consideration of an important current issue.