Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Rob’s book is Policing for the 21st Century; McGraw Hill plans to publish it before the end of 2024. Since he discusses the concept of Ubuntu in our interview, you might find this book about it interesting: Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane (the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s granddaughter). Hardback: https://amzn.to/3HlRIgS; audiobook: https://amzn.to/3U28UQc.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
• Time and Chance by Kim Campbell
• Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Rob Elkington, Ph.D., currently resides in Canada, where he serves as Assistant Professor at Trent University Faculty of Business & Master of Management Program. Rob is the co-founder and CEO of Global Leadership Initiatives, Inc., which exists to “develop excellence in leadership globally,” http://www.globalleader.ca.
Rob also serves on the faculty of various universities such as:

• Associate Professor, Stellenbosch University School of Public Leadership.
• ​Adjunct Professor at the Ontario Tech University in the Faculty of Social Science and the Faculty of Education.
  • Supervising faculty with the Ed..D program for Education.
  • Graduate teaching faculty for the GDIPL for Social Sciences and Humanities.

Rob is a member of the International Leadership Association, an ICF Certified FLOW Business Coach and an MBTI practitioner. He has published a range of books, book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and has facilitated numerous peer-reviewed presentations.

Les Sylven is a Leadership Studies Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. His doctoral research project explores police leadership with senior Canadian police officers who regularly practice meditation and mindfulness. Les was a police officer in Canada for over 30 years, serving communities as a member of the RCMP, Victoria Police Department and the Central Saanich Police Service on Vancouver Island. In 2020, Les was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Merit (O.O.M) of the Police Forces by the Governor General of Canada. Later that year, he retired from policing as the Chief Constable of the Central Saanich Police Service in order to concentrate full-time on his studies at UVic.

Transcript
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Speaker 1 0:00
Can an organization change when its leaders don’t? Probably not yet. That’s what we expect from our police departments. But is there anything we can do in reality to upskill our law enforcement leadership? No, yeah. Today’s guests, a researcher and a former chief, have plenty of ideas and the data to back them up, helping you see your untapped leadership potential is at the very core of our coaching and cohort practices at the Innovative Leadership Institute. Learn more after this fascinating interview at Innovative leadership.com This is

Maureen 0:45
Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. We’re recording this interview for the 2023 International Leadership Association Global Conference in Vancouver. Today, we’ll discuss mindful police leadership with Rob Elkington and Les Silva. Rob is an associate professor at Trent University School of Business and Master of Management Program Durham. Les is Leadership Studies PhD candidate and in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. Welcome to both of you.

Speaker 2 1:22
Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Maureen 1:24
So, I love the topic of mindful police leadership, and Rob, I’m going to talk to you first about how you started to explore this topic, and the subsequent book you wrote.

Speaker 2 1:35
For me, policing has always been important to our family. I come from South Africa, South Africa, when we lived there, and as far as I understand, still has one of the highest crime rates in the world. We had a sexual assault every 23 seconds, so 13,000 women a year reported, and we had a lot of police officers who were our friends, they’d stop by and have coffee on their night shifts, and we’d spend time with them, so we see the importance of policing to a democratic and just society. We also see when policing falters, you know, we’ve seen both sides. When we came to Canada, we were struck by the difference in the environment and in the society, and how policing impacted that and really sustained a peaceful society. So, for me, policing and for our family, policing has always been really important.

Maureen 2:24
Your focus has been on transforming what police leadership looks like.

Speaker 2 2:29
Yes, you know, it’s a really interesting journey, because one never starts out with that kind of intention. I was asked to develop a certificate in police leadership by the university that I was working with at the time, and we built that into a 12 week university level certificate, and then as we worked through that, as we took offices through it, we began to see the impact that Development Leadership Program was having, we began to tweak it and develop it more, and we began to understand from the officers who were moving through it the transformational impact it was having, and so often those officers would articulate how they wish that many leaders in policing could have had that kind of development work done, so that there was more of a consistency and uniformity across policing in terms of how they viewed leadership, moving away from that kind of hierarchical top-down leadership, and again, not that there are times where that is not needed in policing, that is needed, but also then when one is not in those critical moments, How do officers relate to each other? How do leaders model good behavior and good leadership and care for those whom they’re leading? So those transformational aspects began to emerge in very powerful ways as we work through the certificate,

Maureen 3:41
my great grandfather was a police officer, my grandfather was, my dad was military police, military intelligence. It skipped my generation, and then my niece is now a police officer in the DC police force. So, as a topic very dear to my heart, especially with a young female officer in our family, how leadership is evolving in the police community is very important to me. And Les, why don’t you jump in, especially as you’re talking about mindfulness and meditation for police officers?

Speaker 3 4:14
Right, I can’t remember who said it before, but research is mostly me search, and so I was a police officer for about 32 years in Canada, here serving in three different police agencies, and one just north of here in Vancouver with the RCMP in Squamish in the 80s. When I was early in my career, I had a few experiences which led me to seek out a way of coping with the job and the challenges of the job. So I wandered into a meditation studio, Transcendental Meditation was what it was back in, like I say, the late 80s, and I have had a practice of meditation my entire life since then, over 30 years, a daily practice, and I am convinced that I am here chatting with you here now because of that practice and what it’s done for me, and so what happened was eventually I began to think well. Is this just me anyway, like these experiences that I had in policing, and, and I had the chance to do just about everything I wanted to do twice, from beginning as a constable in a rural community up here to when I retired, I was the chief of a police department, and so everything in between, but I just wondered, okay, well, I am so grateful for having had this contemplative practice, or this mindfulness practice. What about some others out there? And I’d love to chat with them and find out how they perceive leadership and everything that Rob was just talking about there, and you’d mentioned even that you know we are at a time in society where the police need to evolve and police leadership needs to evolve. I really think that there’s something here in this practice of mindfulness and meditation, but to take it back a little further, even when I first started in the late 80s, there the body was just starting to be really physical exercise. I remember the little detachment that’s not too far away from where we are here, me and another recruit, we talked the boss, the staff sergeant, into giving us an old file room, and we brought on all our homemade weights, and you know, because we wanted to work out, and I remember some of the older police officers that have been there for since the 50s, because this is the 80s, of course, and them sort of thinking, like, why are you wasting your breath on exercise, but now I mean, you won’t find a police station anywhere that doesn’t have at least a gym or something, because we recognize how important it is to the body, the adrenaline of the job, the physical demands of 12 hour shifts, the in and out of a car, hours and hours of nothing, followed by moments of extreme panic. You need to take care of your body. I feel like we’re in the 80s of the mind now, where we’re just bringing forward these ideas that you know we have to take care of our minds as well. So that’s what this research I’m doing up at UVic, and I’m just about done. I’ve defending my dissertation next month, and so we’ll see what they think of it, but again, the idea is that the ability to be aware, aware of ourselves, aware of our communities, you know, some of the issues around implicit bias, you know, these are all related to, in my view, anyway, a need to enhance awareness, and then the next thing, of course, is the spiritual side, but that’s that’s later, but the spiritual side of the job.

Maureen 7:01
What is the spiritual side of the job? Because I don’t think of policing necessarily intersecting the spiritual, I think of intersecting with catching the quote bad guys.

Speaker 3 7:12
You know, it probably took me two or three months of being a police officer to be in a situation where I was, how did that happen? How did that person die? How did this person not die. How am I still alive? Like, there are moments from an existential standpoint of just trying to make sense of the world, so you know, maybe a better word, I think sense making. I was a 22 year old young man when I started, and just barely figuring things out, and suddenly at the coal face of humanity, you know, in policing, and so, so I think police officers and the people that support them, they need a way to make sense of what they see and what they experience. There is no spiritual training in a police academy in that way, or there’s no discussion of this kind of sense making, and and then, of course, I think the leadership part is sense giving to others, and so that’s that’s what I think is important, but I think that’s a bit of a far bridge for a lot of police officers, you know, to talk about that, but the idea of mental training. But then I’d have to also say, Maureen, like at 3o’clock in the morning, when you’re it’s just you and the seagulls driving around, everybody’s in bed, or you’re meeting up with a police officer somewhere, you can have some really deep conversations about things. So, how can we prepare our police officers for the future evolution to be able to do their best,

Maureen 8:23
Rob. Back to you, because you are training these police officers, and you’ve written about it. Share a little bit more about what you’re doing to train the next incarnation of police officers, not that what came before was improper or bad in any way, but that as the world is evolving, our police officers need to evolve like everyone else.

Speaker 2 8:46
Yeah, it was really great, Ryan Sutto, eight yesterday articulated in complexity there are many points of entree, and I think there is a multiplicity of efforts and exertions that one looks at, of which this is one of them, so I think there are many things that can and need to be done. The police leadership book we’re writing, McGraw Hill is publishing, it’ll come out in 2024 We developed that because we saw a gap in working with the officers. The constant feedback I got was this is really great material, but there’s one thing missing: it’s not police centric, and we also believe in the power of virtual simulations, that it’s far easier if I’m a police officer learning about emotional intelligence or learning about cultural intelligence, whatever those pieces might be in my leadership repertoire, that I can practice that in a virtual simulation, look at where my mistakes are, where I fall down and recalibrate, so that when I’m moving out as a leader, I’ve already built some of those skill sets. So the book provides the kind of knowledge frame and really articulates a knowledge frame, but then the Sims are part of the practice that they can engender, but looking at that, when I worked with a colleague. In another police service, we mapped out really a development profile, a development portfolio that needs to occur from constable through to police chief, and that includes not just the leadership development, you know, ratios to native cognitive pieces, which is the book and the lectures and the discussions, but also coaching and mentoring and debriefing and kind of trajectory of development that we pour into their lives.

Maureen 10:25
I think of my niece going to the range and doing her exercise regimen until the point where if something happens she will be able to pull her gun without hesitation and nowhere to aim and all those things that happen only with hours and hundreds of hours of practice, and we often don’t think in the leadership realm of hours and hundreds of hours of meditation and practice. What does practice look like as a leader and as a human being with meditation, empathy, compassion, obviously different situations. If someone’s shooting at you, you don’t necessarily lead with compassion. You may lead with appropriate force. Other times, understanding is someone mentally ill or overdosed on drugs. I’m assuming an officer must also make that decision in a split second.

Speaker 2 11:19
One of the things for me that has really been pivotal is to help officers draw a distinction between when I’m functioning as an officer in the field as opposed to leading a group of officers, and whilst leadership skills can equip and capacitate people for almost every situation in life, what I’m hoping to do and what I envisage leadership development in policing doing is equipping police leaders to, as Richard L Dev says, love those whom they lead, like really deeply care for the officers they’re leading, and that’s just one component of it, to model the way is another piece that they model the behavior that they expect from those officers, rather than just simply barking out commands, but really showing those attributes of empathy and care and compassion, so that when an officer comes out of a very difficult situation, they know that the leadership is going to help them make sense of that moment, that they’re going to debrief and unpack, and that they’re not going to find that is vacuous, that in a sense there is no help there, and that the only way they can get through this is to, in a sense, stuff it down in the cabinet, and I’ve had this discussion with office, and that’s why you know I want to kind of punt the ball over to less than a moment here, but there’s the operational piece Katz talks about technical skills, human skills, and you know those conceptual skills, the technical skills are the operational piece on the front line, I need those. I need to know how to function technically, but I also think empathy and all of those pieces help in that moment. I’m looking at how do you lead those officers. That’s the leadership piece that I think we need to develop, so that there’s a much stronger retention piece. There’s stronger health in the officers, so that when they do go out there, they function very differently, because they know that they’re well cared for.

Maureen 13:06
My dad served two tours in Vietnam and came back with what we would now call PTSD, but back then there was no such thing, and people who got psychotherapy were weak, and I can’t imagine my dad meditating, or even considering that that was a viable option. So, as you talk about loving your officers, I’m just imagining my father responding to we don’t do that around here. How are people responding, and how do you get them to be open to the sense making a new way of being in the world that feels much more compassionate and empathetic than you cry, and I’ll give you something to cry about. How do I demonstrate consequences and care both, rather than over indexing on the rules and the commanding controlling piece?

Speaker 2 13:58
And for my part, as I’ve worked with the officers, one of the things we highlight is procedural justice and distributive justice, so we’re not saying that there aren’t structures in place and that there isn’t a hierarchy, but hierarchy doesn’t entitle me to be a bad human being. Hierarchy is a privilege that enables me to lead others with compassion and care, and there’s an ethic of care that I think we have lost, and if we, as leaders, if I’m a police leader and I’m leading a group of people, if I am not treating them well, how then can I expect them to treat the public with whom they interact well? So, procedural justice is really important, that we have policies in place, and we act according to policy, we don’t act impulsively or emotively in anger towards you. I don’t demean you as a person. I deal with the behavior that is aberrant, but I treat you as a person as respect. If I can see a person’s behavior as aberrant, but that person still has intrinsic and immense value, that is a massive move forward. It for humanity, never mind policing.

Maureen 15:02
I can see it from both sides. I can imagine if you are facing disrespectful behavior on a daily basis, it would be natural to respond accordingly. So, it would take a significant inner strength to treat someone who had mistreated you with respect and appropriate response, it may not be kindness on some days, but it’s, it’s not demeaning.

Speaker 3 15:26
Yeah, when I was young, I had the police at my house a lot when I was growing up, and some would make it better, and we were so grateful that we called them, and some would make it worse. And at some point, when I was 1011, 12 years old, whatever it was, I came to this realization that I’d like to be one of the good ones that come and make things better. You talk to a handful of police officers. If we were in the room here having coffee, I’m sure the vast majority would have a personal story like that. So, when I became a police officer, and when I was on the street, I could see my brother and everybody, like these are the people that I’m dealing with, my sister, because I know that that line is so thin. I think the ability to hire police officers that have that lived experience, that have been in a situation that I know we often recruit straight out of high school, straight A’s, certain look athletes, but if there is that lived experience, then you’re entering into the profession as seeing people as your brother or your sister, your mom, your dad, what that does to your behavior, I think, is significant compared to seeing us versus them. We’re the thin blue line, we’re all that’s holding chaos back from destroying society. So that was my story, and I know if you were to bump into a bunch of police officers, ask them that is not an uncommon experience to have something personal happen to you, or that drew you into this profession. The other part of the job, you talked a little bit about compassion and kindness. Yeah, I would often say that less at 7o’clock starting a shift, if I bumped into you, and, and you were doing something, and you needed some help, you would get a version of less that would be different at 4am less who would come and see you when I’ve gone from call to call to call to call again, like I said. Very lucky to have done almost everything that you could do in policing for a number of years. I was part of the emergency response team in Greater Victoria there, and I was a sniper on that response team. You talk about that strapping the gun belt on at the beginning of the shift, and this is part of sense making again. But how does a person do that job for five years, every day I woke up and thought today could be the day that I have to do my job, and again it’s trying to make sense of that responsibility when it gets to that, or anytime a police officer is in that situation, someone is going to get hurt really badly or die, and so the responsibility to make sure it’s not the innocent person is what it comes down to, but regardless, I think there’s lots of room for love, I think there is lots of room for kindness in policing. We need to continue to build the future leaders who are showing there is another way to go. Here, there is another way to be, and for me, my skill set has been around mindfulness and the practice of being aware and paying attention, being present through this daily practice, but the mindset for me, I happen to just love servant leadership as an approach, and I think it is absolutely makes a ton of sense when it comes to police officers as a leadership philosophy, as they gain more and more formal responsibility, as Rob was talking about formal leadership, because you’d start the job holding up your hand to serve and protect. I’m here to serve, I’m going to serve the community, it’s on your police car, it’s on your uniform service, you know, it’s all about service. And one of the things that appears to happen is that you go from serving the community, you’re put in formal leadership positions, and suddenly it’s about they’re there to serve you as sergeant or as inspector or as the chief.

Speaker 3 18:35
What I talk to anybody who cares to listen is the importance of just shift your focus from serving the community, now you’re there to serve the police officers you’re responsible for, and I know it can be a hyper toxic, masculine, patriarchal profession, and we’ve had cases here, many cases in Canada, and commissions of inquiry around sexual harassment and policing, abuse of authority, that type of stuff, but I just keep saying, look, if this person that you’re the leader of, if your job was to serve them, so that they have everything they need to be the best they could be, would you be sexually harassing them? This is, I think, the power of this philosophy of servant leadership. I do believe there is something in here, and combined with mindfulness, which is the practice of being able to better and better at paying attention, so you’re aware of what you’re seeing in your people, you’re aware of the struggle, the trauma, whatever that they’re going through, and you give them what they need to do the best that they can do, which kind of inverts the whole pyramid, because it’s a paramilitary organization, policing, you’ve got visible manifestations of your power on you all the time, you know, look, I’m more important than you, on your shoulder, on your arm, and they’re saluting, and there’s sir and ma’am, and it is naturally funnels up to this this chief sitting on the top. When there is a hostage taking, when there is a crisis, we absolutely have to have a command and control style of keeping people safe, the community and the police officers. We’re not going to have a debate about where you’re going to go and what you’re going to do. What happens is that. Ability to use that direct power, it seems to be used when you’re trying to decide where we’re going to put the water cooler in the police department. This command and control style, so easy, you just use your power, and people are typically worried about their own career, so they’re going to respond in a way that fits into that narrative. The analogy I use is it’s like using force on the street, like as a police officer, there would be times when there’s an expectation that I use the authority I’ve given to keep people safe, and that could be to arrest them, to take, you know, whatever it is, I can use force from just my presence to my authority to physical force to up to, if you have to take a life one day, you are expected to do that, that’s part of the job. The corollary there for me is at four in the morning, less if I meet you outside of a bar or barcode, you’ve been fighting, and you’re my fifth fight in a row that I’ve had to go to. I have the lawful authority to tie you up like a pretzel and chuck you in the back of my police car. What is harder is to talk you into the back of my police car, and that takes time, takes patience, it takes the ability to see this person and want to give them that extra second, that’s the analogy I use when talking to police officers about using their power. You have the stripes, you got the pips, you can tell the constable, get the heck out of here. When you get promoted three times, then you can, your ideas matter. What we need to do is just think about it’s like force on the street. It’s always better not to use force, you don’t get hurt, the person doesn’t get hurt, it’s always better in the police leadership to not rely on that force that you’ve been given the power. So that’s the little analogy I share.

Speaker 2 21:29
So powerfully articulated the model of leadership that I present in the first chapter of our book really looks to build bench strength, and it sees people as inherently capable, able, and powerful, so the fact that I am a sergeant or a staff sergeant. Yes, I’ve earned that. Hopefully, I’ve earned it because I show leadership acuity, have the technical and human skills, but that doesn’t make me better than or greater than the others on the service. You know, the mark of a great leader is that I’m developing other leaders, and so if, as a leader, I can see the real potential in power and capacity and capability in those who come into the service, and I have a developmental mindset that I want to develop you to be the best person you can be, that I want to see your strengths deployed and articulated not just on the street but in this police service, and that I want to build bench strength, so that we have this new model, and they said it so well. When you’re a new constable, don’t come with your ideas. Once you’ve earned, you know, two, three pips, then come back, and now you have value. No, you’re on the front line. You’re experiencing things that I, as a sergeant or staff sergeant, am not seeing, because I’m no longer where you are. There’s a story, you know, of different officers, they observed something, and they came up with a really interesting, innovative idea that would have improved the situation, but their idea was immediately abrogated, not because it was a bad idea, but because of their status, they were just juniors. I think that we have to recalibrate back to the value of the people who take that step to serve and to protect, they do it because they care. There’s very few police officers I’ve met, if any, that become police officers for the pay or the prestige. Most police officers I’ve met become police officers because they deeply care, they care about people, they care about the society, and they want to make a difference, so why, as leaders, do we not take that impetus, that trajectory, and cultivate it and build it into something really significant and powerful that transforms policing and then transforms society, because there is the duality between the two, is less is so clearly articulated for me, the model of leadership is, yes, I understand this hierarchy, and at times there needs to be that hierarchy, but there is a difference between power and authority, and I want to be an authoritative individual, not leveraging my power, and authority comes from influence, and influence comes from competence, character, credibility, when officers really see and use someone they can emulate and follow. I was working with military, and I was with a military leader, and I was with a group of military officers, and I said the mark of a true leader is, would you follow this leader into battle? I said, I would follow this leader into battle, because I’ve watched and observed how he cares for each of you. You matter to him. I know he’s not going to take any decisions without weighing what that means to your lives, and I look at police officers, and I say, is this a person I could follow? Do they care about the people they’re leading, and if they do, then that’s someone with followers.

Maureen 24:30
I’m just processing, and maybe unprocessing paradigms I’ve seen. So, I had the opportunity very briefly to teach leadership in a police academy with mid-career folks, and some were kind of the old school mindset, and some were much more what I hear from you, especially less listening to you. Your voice is so calm and peaceful, and yet as a sniper, that’s a skill, and you’re taking a life at that moment, or potentially the mind. Said of how you serve the community’s health and well-being, and balancing what that must feel like,

Speaker 3 25:07
such a good point, Maureen, because there’s kind of three big challenges I see with police leadership and policing in Canada right now. Number one is there’s the traditional mindset, there are traditional mandate of policing, federal, provincial, municipal statutes from being broken, and when they happen, then you go hold the person responsible. What’s happened, though, is there is the increasing complexity of society’s problems, mean that society’s expectations of the police have also changed. So, the vast majority of the time, a police officer is going to be dealing with someone experiencing homelessness, someone experiencing mental health crisis, or someone experiencing addiction, or poverty. So, this is the old idea that you’re just gonna go and arrest bank robbers all day and do that type of work. Policing is expected, and I think this is part of the evolutions that’s needed, is to see themselves as part of community well-being, and to embrace that idea, and they don’t need to be in charge of everything either. They could be at the table and bring what they bring to community safety and well-being. And so that’s the first thing, is understand shifting that with the limited resources. Again, I’m speaking to the Canadian experience here. After 11 o’clock at night, in a lot of places, the mental health workers are not funded to work 20-four hours a day. The addiction counseling is what we get you a bed in a few months, so the police are the de facto social workers of society, so that requires a different mindset that I’ll run around, lock everybody up, you know, and be the crime fighter. I’ve seen an interesting study that compares social workers and police officers, and it’s fascinating. A lot of times a police officer doesn’t like to be called a social worker, and a social worker doesn’t like to be called a cop or a police officer. They do 80% of the same work. People will say from time to time, you’re 30 years, 30 plus years on the job. Wow, thank you for your service. I just can’t help from saying thank you for letting me have an opportunity to do this job. I feel so incredibly lucky to have found a job where I get to serve the community in this way, the way I was raised. I just happen to be able to hang in there when we’re talking about conflict and violence. It’s an honor, and it really is a privilege for all police officers to be able to serve the community in this way. That other stuff that you talked about, about taking lives and whatnot, that is such a very, very, very minute part of the job, even use of force, and you have to be ready every day that it could be part of your day, but again, back to why we need sense making, and we need people to be good with that, young 2223 year old men and women joining the police department. Okay, here’s your job, you talked about, you know, your niece in DC, there, and the hours and hours that goes into firearms training, you know, firearms is just having the ability to put a hole in a piece of paper 25 meters down the road. The real training in firearms is when not to shoot, when do you not shoot, that is judgment, and that is that’s where all the work needs to be done, because it’s a mechanical skill, otherwise, but between the police finding themselves at the center of complex social issues most of the time, the second thing is in Canada, anyway, we are at a time where policing has never been thought of so poorly. The reduced positive perception of the police, the one study in particular, over the course of two years, 2022 was the first time police took a hit in public quite substantially, the researcher at the time, I’m not sure what his first name it is, but Riddell is his last name. He identified the police involved killings or murders. So, George Floyd happened in the US.

Speaker 3 28:32
There’s protests right outside the window here in Vancouver about it, and Canada’s had its fair share of those as well, where police are involved in someone’s sudden death, and that, particularly to George Floyd, people think is happening everywhere in their communities, and so this was sort of what he identified first as a cause for this lack of public positivity. Secondly, is during the pandemic in Canada, anyway, the police were pushed into the front of it to be writing tickets, to be shutting down parties. Suddenly, the police are no longer seen as someone who’s here’s a set of rules, they’re just going to enforce. The third one is in Canada, in particular, we have a long history. We’re founded in a colonial past in Canada, the justice system is patriarchal. As a result of this, indigenous, vulnerable, marginalized communities and women are underserved by policing in Canada, and we have had countless inquiries year after year after year that have come back with some major, you know, some major incident happens, and these issues keep coming up, but we keep carrying on. We had a horrible situation in Nova Scotia. From that, a commission inquiry came out with many recommendations about police training and police hiring, and the fact that police officers, they should have one of the recommendations, at least a bachelor’s degree, before they start the job. They’re doing so much social work, they need that critical thinking. Yet, at almost the same time, because there’s such a shortage of police officers, one of the provincial governments announced that week, we’re getting rid of any requirement for education, because we’re so short. This is the space that all this is happening in. And and then the third thing I’ll say is many researchers, and I agree with them, is that there is a crisis of well-being in policing. I would say most police departments you’ll have right now 30% of the police officers are off with PTSD or stress leave. It is a crisis, and the study that I’ve just about finished there for my work up at the University of Victoria with police officers across Canada who have long-term meditation practices of the small group that I had, and I know it’s not statistically significant or meant to be extrapolated outside of the study I had, but when I sent this invitation out in this police organization, do you practice meditation? You want to talk to Les about it? I had 11 that fit the study criteria, nine of them, when I asked them, well, why did you start meditating, nine of them said, well, I was getting PTSD therapy, and my psychologist told me that I needed to engage in some type of contemplative practice, or some type of mental training. It’s kind of like starting to exercise after you’ve had a heart attack. Let’s do it before that happens, and I know that’s a bit callous, maybe, but that’s what I think about when it comes to this crisis of wellness, is that we need to give people everything we’re talking about here. All three of us are talking about, is it’s about that, it’s about the foundation, is how can we keep them well, how can we keep them to go out there, and one of the expressions, just in the day to day, is how to check yourself before you wreck yourself, that is, when you’re out working the street, when you’re inside, when you’re a chief, when you’re given formal authority, see the other thing too, and Rob, I know he knows this as well, but in policing you become in a formal leadership role after you started on the street, on the bottom, every police chief, every police deputy chief, they will have a ton of baggage that they’re trying to deal with themselves from the time they were on the street, maybe they processed it, but everyone has that lived experience of trauma, and so this idea of a trauma-informed leadership, so that when you’re dealing with an officer who’s, you know, not themselves or the role of trauma, it’s present as part of the job. So, how can we do that? Well, we can help again through these mental practices. The research proves you can, the way I call it, is you can control your time machine.

Speaker 3 31:55
The idea of metacognitive self-regulatory capacity, so the ability to think about what you’re thinking about, and shift it, so am I. I think of my own space, although I’ve been retired a couple years now, I still surprise myself with the images and the memories that I have of my career. But then again, having this long-term practice, I can think about what I’m thinking about, and go just like as I’m sitting on the meditation cushion with my mantra, and I’ll be distracted, and while I come back to my mantra, same thing, I’m in the shower, and I’m all of a sudden thinking about something that happened a long time ago, and I can think about, okay, yes, that was a long time ago, and how is it serving you now? Let it go,

Maureen 32:32
or reinterpret it, how do I make sense of that thing with my new evolving sense making,

Speaker 3 32:39
that’s even better way to put it, or yes, rather than keep jamming it down like Rob was talking about, or just forget about it. How can I reinterpret it? And you’ve got to make sense of

Maureen 32:49
it, and find the learning and the positive that comes out of the crazy that we see, because I think you, especially in policing, but in other organizations as well, we’re running into more, I’ll say politely, silliness that we didn’t have to deal with as much in the past.

Speaker 3 33:07
Again, I don’t have the research to back this up, but it’s just a thought of throwing the table for us. But we have all been traumatized because of the pandemic in ways that we never, as humans, have before. It’s manifesting itself in a lot of things we see right now, and I think having that understanding for me has helped me make sense of some behavior that you would just think, why would someone ever think that’s a good idea? As

Maureen 33:28
we checked into the hotels, as we go to restaurants, and I don’t think this is unique to Canada, but the signs that say we don’t tolerate, and then it says, you know, profanity, inappropriate behavior, those kinds of things. It must be happening often enough that they need a sign. We’re seeing more inappropriate stress-based trauma-based behavior now than I’ve seen in my professional life, which is not short. So, Rob, jump in, please.

Speaker 2 33:58
So, a couple of things I wanted to pick up on. One is just the rising incivility that we’re experiencing in society as a result of Covid, and you know, I did some work, some research on the impact of Covid on a certain sector, and I talked about it with three metaphors, as a magnifier, as a filter that it really magnified some of the things that we kind of just were not cognizant of pre-pandemic, and it filtered some things that kind of created some real cleavages, shall we say, through filtering positions and people’s stances on things. So, a journal approached me to write an article on how Ubuntu, the principle of Ubuntu, might address the rising incivility in the workplace, where we’re seeing it as an epidemic, so I think that intersects policing. Ubuntu is a causa or Zulu word, and it means I am a person by virtue of other persons. So we knew hurt, I hurt, and we knew when I win. And it was used initially by Bishop Desmond Tutu to give a framework for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and it was, of course, used. By Prism Mandela to talk about our humanity, and how, as human beings, systemically we often make the mistake of thinking that if I can win at your expense, that I’ve won, not realizing systemically that if I cause you to lose, I may myself, in the sense, be losing, and there’s a lot of intricacies to that, so when you think about Ubuntu and the rising incivility in the workplace and in society, I have to come back and think about the fact that if I treat Maureen badly, that dehumanizes me and it dehumanizes you, and it actually then robs me of my humanity, and that makes me the poorer, and it makes you the poorer, and there’s a lot more to that, there’s layers of elements built into Ubuntu as a paradigm, as a worldview. So, I think that we need to address the rising incivility in the workplace, tied into that. If I could just draw it back to policing, and I want to pick up on something Lei said to me a while back that was to me very powerful. I don’t know that he even knew how impactful it was, but he was talking about servant leadership, and you know, when we talk about caring about people and loving people and investing in people, that doesn’t mean a carte blanche do whatever you want whenever you want, but we’re not talking about no standards, because if I truly care for someone, if I see that you don’t fit in this police service because of your attitudinal deficits or because of your lack of passion for the job, or because of whatever it might be, I’m actually not caring for you as an individual if I simply leave you in that dysfunctional framework tied to that. In the Ubuntu mindset, is if I don’t address that dysfunction, or that challenge, or that pathology that you’re expressing, I’m also not being fair to the police service that I am called to serve and to lead, and I’m not being fair to myself, but I’m also not being fair to society. So, when we think about the framework of Ubuntu, the framework of love and leadership, to care for a person is to care for the whole person, but systemically within a larger system, and that’s why, again, I come back to this idea of procedural justice that we’ve mapped how we respond, so that it’s not emotive, it’s not knee-jerk, and it’s distributive. It is carried out fairly to everybody. There’s no one who’s singled out. If I do this for you, I do this for the others.

Maureen 37:16
I’m trying this out. Let’s see if I fail or fast. So, caring for both of you and appreciating your wisdom and respecting that respects myself, respects you, respects the field of policing. If during this conversation I felt the need to demean either of you, it would demean myself, it would demean the profession, and it would demean the field of leadership. That’s a total lose, even though I may get some dopamine hit for trying to feel superior for a minute or two. The idea that we elevate, not to be confused with I’m giving everybody what they want, because that’s not elevating, that’s wimpy.

Speaker 3 37:55
You have the power, Maureen, to tie us up like pretzels and put us in the back of your police car. During this, you could, I say that, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but yet, as you just finished explaining, how does that hurt you? How does that hurt us, even for the little hit that you would get of us turning red and feeling embarrassed, or whatever.

Maureen 38:13
Well, I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead. Thank you both. This has been incredibly thought-provoking. I can’t wait for my niece to hear it, and hopefully share with her colleagues. This can elevate the conversation and help people reframe how they see our police, because we in the US also have concerns and help the police who serve tirelessly, who are also trying to elevate their sense making. Many struggling, as you’ve said, with PTSD and trauma, and just feeling disrespected.

Speaker 4 38:50
Thank you so much for the opportunity. That’s wonderful. It’s been wonderful.

Maureen 38:53
So, how would people learn about your book? Follow up on your doctoral work when it’s approved and defended.

Speaker 2 38:59
So, our book is coming out. It’s policing for the 21st century, new paradigms for a novel context. I’m the lead editor. Also, Christopher O’Connor, who’s a criminologist, is one of the editors. Jessica Nowaski, she was a deputy chief for chief before she stepped away from policing. And then Tiffany Castell, so those are the four editors. McGraw Hill will be publishing it, phenomenal book. I’m really excited, because we have chapters from all over the world, evidence-based policing, women in policing, just so many great chapters in there for folks developing police leaders. There’s just so much to it. So,

Maureen 39:35
thank you for your work in policing, and for addressing the field and elevating the field, it’s so crucial.

Speaker 2 39:41
Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 39:42
Yeah,

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