For several decades, organizational psychologists have studied the phenomenon known as a “work culture” in both the private and public sectors, especially with regards to organizational performance.¹ Work culture is best defined as the invisible personality unique to the organization, made up of the collective beliefs, values, and behaviors that socially drive the work of that organization.²

During the last few years, there has been a revolutionary interest in looking for ways to improve the quality of work environments that lead to improved organizational performance. Today, the workplace landscape has changed dramatically from the game-changing social forces accompanying the Information Age, such as the speed of change, information explosion, and complete diversity. This shift means that companies and organizations have to re-think basic concepts like success metrics, team performance, leadership strategies, business models, work processes, and organizational purposes.³

This growing challenge is a particular challenge for law enforcement agencies, since they are part of the criminal justice system where organizational missions, goals, and values may be conflicting or controlled by community interests or local politics. Fortunately, sound research has identified the “what” of building a quality work environment that leads to better job satisfaction and improved work performance. It will be up to today’s leaders in law enforcement agencies to determine how to apply these important principles to cultivate their own unique work cultures, particularly the “achievement culture” identified by the 2005 culture research article published in Police Chief by Police Psychologist Thurston L. Cosner and Chief Greg Loftus.⁴

1. Start Right

It’s difficult to identify the best starting point for building an achievement-focused work culture for law enforcement agencies. The typical police department’s purpose, metrics measurement, and methods of succeeding are moving targets, which are subject to external influences not necessarily under the organization’s management control.

One prison warden in Omaha, Nebraska, found the right starting point the hard way after his team implemented its game plan for creating a quality achievement culture in a newly established prison. They won one of the highest achievement scores in the rigorous ACA accreditation process, after only two years of operation. However, when disruptive organizational conflicts and security incidents starting accumulating, the team had to pause and re-find the right starting point, which turned out to be understanding just how deteriorated the prison culture had become due to the glaring incongruence of agreement with the mission, goals, and values throughout the organization, from management to employees, to inmates to stakeholders, in the everyday operation of the prison.

The lesson here for law enforcement agencies is to pause and find a reliable way to assess the present quality of their work environment, without assuming that, since performance is good, the culture is healthy There are numerous free or inexpensive work culture assessment tools available on the Internet for interested law enforcement leaders.

The prison’s starting point previously discussed is a good example of what Herb Gross, a former professor at MIT, termed “perturbation point.”⁵ Originally, this was an engineering concept referring to critical stress points on a building that facilitated implosion, but this idea later translated into the present author’s “P Points,” or the small, strategically well-timed, and well-placed interventions that lead to the biggest results.⁶ This idea can be applied to hiring the right people and all of the other approaches presented herein when building a quality achievement work culture in law enforcement agencies. For example, another P Point application is designing a physical work environment that promotes an achievement culture.

2. Be Ambitious

Most flagship success gurus like Brian Tracy, Jack Canfield, Tony Robbins, John Maxwell, and Lou Tice agree that nothing great happens that doesn’t start with a vision of where the individual, or organization, has the infinite potential to explode.⁷ The consensus is the larger, the better, as human potential is limited only by the ceilings humans place on themselves. Also, potential team members are always looking for a huge calling to join—knowledge which is unfortunately exploited by terrorist and extremist organizations.

Even though a chief is often restricted by the economy and political forces, he or she can still “sell” stakeholders on huge dreams. For example, Steve Harris, a former IACP president and chief of police, had a big dream that was realized with his brokering role of public-private partnerships. Before his death, he championed this worthy vision in Washington State through influential organizations such as ASIS International; IACP; WSPC; and the Washington Law Enforcement Executive Forum (WLEEF).

Of course, sometimes ambition needs to be tempered with discipline by breaking complex problems and complicated solutions into smaller, more manageable parts or by focusing on just a few approaches to bring end-game success. In North American football, this is most often being in the right place at the right time to continue possessing the ball longer than the opponent or not losing possession due to turnovers or penalties. In business, this involves building the company around one key value discipline such as customer care, shopper convenience, innovation, reasonable pricing, quick response time, or no-hassle product return.⁸ In law enforcement, this balance of ambition and discipline lies in knowledge, intelligence innovation, and enhancements in predictive policing, situational awareness, and social media promotion.⁹

3. Hire Right

The changing workforce and workplace landscapes may be calling for changes in the traditional police hiring profile to include screening in of known critical success factors of skills, attitudes, and personal characteristics most conducive to a quality achievement work culture. These softer qualities include things like emotional intelligence components of self-awareness and understanding, empathy, emotional management, achievement motivation, and social skills. New hiring profiles should also include characteristics such as commitment, concern, teamwork, and continual learning and improvement in building a quality achievement work culture for the organization.

Hiring right is a good start, but the organization must also cultivate its garden, which may mean weeding out unsuitable employees. When employees are clearly and carefully trained and fairly corrected on violations of the established work culture norms, these violations then move into the realm of willful misconduct for which they need to be disciplined for the good of the organization. The problem is that management often sees more potential in an individual than that person sees in him- or herself and, thus, is reluctant to cut unsuitable personnel before the point of no return passes.

Right hiring also means selecting, cultivating, and mentoring the front-line ambassadors for the organization’s aspired work culture. These potential leaders are often instrumental in facilitating important changes that need to be made in an organization during the process of building a quality work culture. Fortunately, these employees stand out in interviews or through their job performance, training, and enthusiasm.

4. Communicate Clearly

In real estate, the main mantra is “location, location, location”; in building a quality work environment, it is “communication, communication, communication.” In the early 1960s, communication researcher Jack Gibb identified a particular communication climate that impeded interpersonal relations. He called this climate “defensive communication” as opposed to the more successful “supportive communication”, which is still the one preferred by experts today.¹⁰

Supportive communication, as applied to building an achievement culture in a police department, involves conveying a sense of freedom, spontaneity, empathy, equality, and tentativeness. This is the opposite of creating a defensive climate by conveying control, manipulation, indifference, superiority, and certainty. Another important communication skill needed by police officers is two-eared listening—active listening to accurately hear what is being said or not said and keen observation of non-verbal behavior verifying or masking the speaker’s true meaning and intentions.

There are several important topics to communicate clearly with a supportive tone to improve the quality of an achievement work culture. These include the shared mission, goals and values, key best practices, important work processes, organizational sanctions, progress, course corrections, and changes. In addition, listening and accepting feedback are key to effective communication.

5. Live Values

Most police organizations have noble missions, goals, and core values that drive their organizations on paper, but that just isn’t good enough. When police departments are serious about building high-quality work environments, all members at all levels of the organization, including leaders, supervisors, line officers, and other stakeholders, must consistently support and actively live the core values in their everyday behaviors, choices, and decisions. The standard becomes, “Will what I am doing (or not doing) help or hurt the department build and sustain a quality work culture that contributes to our organizational success?”

Obviously, this has to be consistently modeled from the top down, communicated frequently and in a variety of formats, and cultivated continuously with fair and effective sanctions. Again, this starts with hiring employees who have the commitment, competence, and concern to be able to understand, support, and live these achievement culture values consistently.

6. Celebrate Diversity

Workforce diversity includes a creative mixture of differences in personalities, ages, ethnicities, skill sets, experience, work styles, spirituality, ideologies, sexual preferences, socio-economic status, and geography, among other differences. Any semblance of workforce homogeny is a thing of the past, and diversity offers a cooperative, win-win organizational mentality as opposed to the traditional win-lose competitive model.

Builders of an achievement culture know the power of such diversity in solving perplexing organizational problems that are currently confronting leaders who are starting to feel like they are treading into an unfamiliar territory without a map. By celebrating such workforce diversity, the organization promotes the appeal of the job, increases exposure to valuable learning, improves the organization’s reputation, resolves conflicts by building on similarities, and allows for mutual respect of team members’ performance.¹¹

7. Embrace Change

Because they live in a world where changes are blurring solutions and making it difficult to keep up, all leaders need help with embracing change in their organizations. The same is certainly true for police departments, where the very nature of crime and policing have been turned upside down, requiring law enforcement organizations to quickly adapt or fall behind. Departments are often caught between a rock and a hard place—knowing certain changes need to be made, but not having the authority or funding to make the necessary adaptations. Exacerbating the challenge is that some new challenges (e.g., protecting youth from extremist recruiters and combatting cybercrime) require more resources than past crimes may have.

The key to thriving through the fast pace of change in today’s world is to openly embrace change as a permanent and inevitable reality. However, there is one very important caveat to embracing change and that is to not be duped into getting rid of the good elements when changing the bad ones. Wisdom in today’s successful police departments involves sorting the gold from the dross—saving the tried and true principles that are known to work, and then figuring out how to reinvent them slightly to reapply to the changing workplace landscape. And, of course, leaders need to remain open to discovering new principles evolving from the volume and speed of change they are confronted with.

8. Work Hard

In high-quality work cultures, everyone in the organization, including all the internal and external stakeholders, is competent, committed, concerned, and diligent in contributing to the organization’s achievement of success. Most police officers are internally driven to perform well, but they enjoy external validation of their sense of making progress for the organization in regular, 360-degree, individual meetings with supervisors and managers.

When progress is made, it needs to be recognized and rewarded, and when organizational or team success is achieved, then everyone is entitled to recognition or rewards.

9. Practice Ethics

Good ethics in today’s organizations involve doing the right things in the right ways at the right times for the right reasons, requiring some short-term pains for long-range gains in practicing high ethics. This also requires leaders to effectively repair mistakes that are made from slips into lower ethics—settling for short-term fixes over long-term cures to problems and conflicts or, worse yet, giving into questionable morality or manipulative dishonesty.

Quality work cultures are most often made up by likeable, agreeable people. The lion’s share of success in any endeavor, and certainly relative to a police organization, has to do with being an interpersonal magnate, skilled at practicing positive interpersonal relations to diffuse explosive, dangerous situations. Most of that simply involves being a “likeable” person, and the number one perception contributing most to determining whether a person is likeable or not has to do with honesty.¹² Accordingly, a critical cornerstone of a quality work environment is complete organizational integrity, with unquestionable ethics, follow-through on promises, and consistent honesty practiced by everyone, from chief to community members.

10. Finish Right

There is no true finish line in building a quality work environment, as it is a perpetual journey of embracing change, making course corrections, and being open to continual learning and improvement. This is another cornerstone of a quality work environment—the organization is never satisfied with itself and knows it can always be better in relation to the ambitious dreams that started its improvement.

The 2015 movie, The Intern, starring Robert DeNiro, had a very similar, important lesson. As an experienced executive, Robert De Niro’s character stepped down and started working as an intern in a high-tech firm. He was open to learning how to be successful in his new and unfamiliar role without sacrificing important values he knew were related to a quality work culture anywhere—demonstrating a good work ethic; having a professional appearance; practicing likeable, kind, interpersonal relations; and giving sensitive feedback. These skills were just as important to the character’s success as an intern as they were when he was an executive.¹³

Building a quality work culture is an extremely difficult and demanding process, but sustaining success is even more difficult. The key employed by those organizations that succeed is to implement quality work processes that are sustainable over the long haul. When community policing first became popular in the early 1990s, one chief in Southern Illinois successfully argued that the accreditation process needed an overhaul to accommodate changes resulting from the new model of community policing. He had already built a healthy community policing culture in his department and this was one way to help sustain it—by being formally accredited for the department’s efforts.¹⁴

Fortunately, these 10 principles of building and sustaining a quality work culture are very much interrelated and help develop each other. Leaders interested in improving the quality of their organization’s current work culture can start with any one of these principles to begin the process, and the others will follow.♦

Notes:

¹John P. Kotter, and James L. Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance (New York: Free Press, 2011).
²Loizos Heracleous, “Spinning a Brand New Cultural Web,” People Management 1, no. 22 (November 1995): 24–27.
³Jerry N. Luftman, Competing In The Information Age, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
⁴Thurston L. Cosner and Greg M. Loftus, “Law Enforcement-Driven Action,” The Police Chief 77, no. 10 (October 2005), http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=727&issue_id=102005 (accessed December 2015).
⁵ Herb Gross (senior lecturer, MIT), personal communication, 1985.
⁶William S. Cottringer, “P” Point Management: Get Big Results by Doing Little Things (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2008).
⁷Brian Tracy, Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Power to Succeed (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011); Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007); Tony Robbins, Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement (New York: Free Press, 1997); Lou Tice and Joyce Quick, Personal Coaching for Results: How to Mentor and Inspire Others to Amazing Growth (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004).
⁸Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
⁹Peter A. Modafferi “The World is Flat: The 21st Century Reality and What It Means to Law Enforcement,” The Police Chief 74, no. 5 (May 2007), http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=1185&issue_id=52007 (accessed December 2015).
¹⁰Jack R. Gibb, “Defensive Communication” Journal of Communication 11, no. 3 (September 1961): 141–148.
¹¹Ruth Mayhew, “Why Is Diversity in the Workplace Important to Employees?” Houston Chronicle, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/diversity-workplace-important-employees-10812.html (accessed March 7, 2016).
¹²Van Sloan and William S. Cottringer, “A Comparison between the Likability Research of Bill Cottringer and Van Sloan’s Social Quotient,” 2001, http://www.sq.4mg.com/Cottringer_compare.htm (accessed March 7, 2015).
¹³The Intern (Warner Bros: 2015).
¹⁴William Cottringer, “True Community Policing: Break Down the Us vs. Them Barrier,” The Chief of Police 17, no. 1 (January/February 2003): 35.

Please cite as

Bill Cottringer, “Ten Best Ways to Build a Quality Achievement: Work Culture in Law Enforcement Agencies,” The Police Chief 83 (April 2016): web-only article.

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