The Leadership Academy course offers an extensive evaluation of each leader. Here’s how it works. We’ve developed five sections for leadership training. Section 1: What is your job and role as a leader? Section 2: What are your obstacles as a leader. Section 3: What is Best Practice Leadership? Section 4: What are your plans for improvement? Section 5: Summary. Each section has anywhere from 7 to 15 sub-questions. These questions are answered individually by each attendee. The answers are in the form of writing. All 5 sections are reviewed in the traditional presentation format which lasts about an hour. Once the presentation ends, the attendee will begin with Section 1. Section 2 is the most extensive part of the training. Here, we are addressing obstacles like negative officers, poor performance (officers and attendees), work-ethic, burnout, stress, conflicts (peers and community), the police/citizen encounter, internal investigations, and so much more. Section 3 should be simpler as each attendee is identifying optimal policing and performance. And in this section as well, there are a series of questions that they must address. After Section 3, the fun begins. Attendees will participate in breakout groups to discuss their obstacles with their colleagues. Here they may find some of the answers to the problems, and here is where they discover that they already had the answer. Section 4 is also very extensive. The attendees will address each identified obstacle. They are equipped with their own experiences as well as the technical help that was provided in the breakout groups.
At the end of the four sections, each attendee will have their own written plan that is unique to their needs. The attendees should bring a laptop to the training as this is a writing intensive training. One question that you will want to ask is, “What makes you so sure that the leaders will actually be honest and go into depth with the plan?” Them being honest and comprehensive with their plans is a requirement of the course. Moreover, these plans are confidential, each attendee will keep their plan and are not required to show it to anyone, this ensures that they can be honest about pitfalls, obstacles, and poor performance. Here is what will make them participate and feel less challenged by the enormous task. The Questionnaire is about two and a quarter pages long. I took the questionnaire and played the role as an attendee. So, I completed the plan. The result was a little over seven pages long excluding the Summary Section. Each attendee will have a copy of this plan to guide them in producing the desired result. The Summary Section is based on their impressions of the training they went through. We already know that no one will be a fan of such rigor. We also know that what they would have accomplished, will bring an enormous sense of pride. We know that developing leaders leads to better leadership and better officers.
