My Leadership Story

Being

            The primary driving force behind me becoming a leader was a natural calling endorsed by my parents. My mother and father divorced when I was one year old. My mother remarried when I was four and my dad remarried when I was six. With four parents during most of my formative years, there was considerable and consistent pressure to be highly involved in activities. There was also a consistent message from my parents that every organization had problems and inefficiencies, so why not be the person to fix them and lead the organization towards the future? Parents often give the first encouragement to become a leader (Hughes et al., 2014). These expectations positioned me to develop in the being lens wherein I have always thought of myself as a leader.

            One of the earliest memories I have of being a leader was in the Cub Scouts, an organization that I joined very young with my father. This organization was so important to us that their weekly meetings on Thursday nights actually drove the custody agreement to ensure that I could attend every week with my dad. When we joined, it was very obvious that there was a lack of communication which had led to a lack of participation. My dad is a career electrical engineer and project manager for a defense company that works closely with the Air Force. He is effective at conducting needs assessments, communicating deadlines, and holding people accountable. Very quickly my dad was nominated and elected as Scout Master with the expectation that he would lead the group to increased membership and involvement. Once he was installed as Scout Master, there were expectations from him and the general membership that I would be the Scout Leader, which is the youth leader of the group. Since dad had to be at every meeting and event anyways, it was easy for me to attend and be the Scout Leader, a position to which I was successfully elected. I remained in this position for several years, growing our membership, and leading several new trips, including an overnight trip to Battleship Cove where we slept on a WWII ship for the night. This experience gave me my first title as a leader, but I largely felt this leadership position and label were simply because of my dad’s involvement and leadership in the group. Many of my leadership decisions, like taking and distributing the minutes after each meeting, were just modeled after my dad. Being labeled a “leader” did not genuinely make me a leader (Hughes et al., 2014). I felt like a leader simply by virtue of being his son, not really on my own merits. I had a natural desire to lead and thought of myself as a leader but was just beginning my journey by following my father.

            During those same years, I became involved with the church choir in my mom’s town. Well, it was more accurately my stepdad’s hometown and church because this was the same town and church in which his parents got married and then attended for decades. They raised four kids in this church, including my stepdad who then married my mom in that church. My grandmother used to cook in the church’s kitchen for all of their receptions but died in the early 90s. My grandfather, however, lived into the 2000’s and remained very active in the church and town. He attended service every Sunday and sat on several committees. With a large family house in Andover, Maine, he also hosted various church groups for weekends throughout the summers and falls. These retreats involved “groups” in the conventional sense that they were collections of people interacting with each other with considerable influence among the participants (Hughes et al., 2014). Evidencing the significance of these groups to the individuals, one of these groups continues to meet together the first weekend in August every year, and recently celebrated their 45^th annual meeting! My grandfather was often called the cornerstone of the church and had a massive funeral upon his passing in 2005, with followers from all those groups attending.

            As I grew older, I learned that his church involvement was just one of my grandfather’s many leadership roles. He had a solid educational foundation graduating valedictorian from the University of Maine Orono, earned his master’s degree after his service in WWII, and then was awarded his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Grampie, as I referred to him, was a career economist and was appointed as the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in the early 1960s. Towards the end of that decade, he resigned to accept a position as President and CEO of Keystone Funds – Boston, a position he left only to become board Chairman of the Central Maine Power Company. Of course, all of these positions were before my time, but I grew up hearing countless stories surrounding his leadership.

            In 2005 Grampie had hip replacement surgery which resulted in a fatal infection. We moved him into our house for his last three months as the infection exacerbated his dementia and Alzheimer’s diseases. While he had lucid moments, most of his last three months was spent in detached hallucinations of meetings he led in the ‘60s and ‘70s at those various organizations. It was fascinating to sit with him and listen to how he presented ideas, handled interruptions, and gave action items to people who now likely only existed in his memory. I was holding his hand as he took his last breath just before midnight that cold November night. His inspiring leadership of well-known organizations, as well as within his own family, would forever inspire my leadership journey by teaching me to remain calm during chaos, genuinely treat employees or followers as people first, and fundamentally find commonalities to resolve conflicts whenever possible.   

            Given my grandfather’s involvement in the church, suffice it to say that my family had a legacy in the church, and we were very well known in the church of 1,000+ people. That was probably the first experience when I recognized my social identities beginning to affect my life. Being a white male in an upper-class affluent Boston suburb, our church funded many opportunities including choirs, youth groups, both domestic and international service trips, and other programs. Because of that funding, I was able to join and lead a number of these groups within the church, and the youth choir was one of the first.

            As luck would have it, when I joined the choir the volunteer “choir mom” resigned since her son had grown out of the group. Needing this role filled, none other than my mother volunteered to fill that spot. With my mom as the choir mom, I found myself helping her set up and clean up every weekly rehearsal and monthly performance. I also helped mom with the process of previewing and selecting music and managing the costumes for the annual Christmas Eve pageant. With this level of involvement, it was only natural for me to assume the youth leadership role in the choir. As it was with the cub scouts, I was stepping into a leadership role as a new organizational member. So, I again based my leadership style on my mom’s leadership style. I was personable with all the youth members, took detailed notes of what we needed to practice, and made sure that everyone liked the weekly snacks. In both groups, I prioritized feedback from more tenured members and made sure that the groups’ future plans included those members. Mom and dad both taught me that process is critically important for garnering the support of the group members who are currently holding the foundation of the group (Bennis, 2009). If the group will remain stable in perpetuity, it’s important to acknowledge the past, present, and future members.

            This role as youth choir leader unintentionally transformed into progressive leadership roles in the church. As a Christian, that church was my second (or third) home founded on shared internalized values. I was comfortable there and of course my family had introduced me to everyone over the years. I was routinely called upon to give a reflection or message during services and became more involved in the choir and youth groups. Over the years, many of my classmates became less involved in the church because of sports and school activities. Given my lack of physical ability or desire to play sports, I didn’t have that same problem.  I was an outdoorsy, musical, academically focused kid, so, instead of sports, my social identity supported my interests in the church and allowed me to dedicate the time to become a leader. As I entered my high school years, I joined the high school youth group, was a youth leader for the middle school youth group, served as a youth deacon, helped lead the confirmation class as one of their advisors, and lead a week-long service trip to Ecuador. The church proved to be a luscious garden in which I grew my roots as a consistently value-based leader within all these sub-organizations of the church (Sankar, 2003).

            In high school, I found myself with significant free time, but it was mostly an hour or two here and there because of the church activities and having parents in two different towns 45 minutes apart. Finding a typical high school job at places like grocery stores proved very difficult each time I presented my schedule. So, I created Mike’s Mind and Muscle which was a catch-all company that I advertised in the church as being able to do yard work, make small home repairs like painting and caulking, or fix minor to moderate computer issues. With the network in the church, this business was pretty successful with many repeat and long-term customers. Being an entrepreneur allowed me to reinforce leadership values of honesty and integrity with every decision (Hughes et al., 2014). For years, I regarded MMM (because 3M was already taken) as my first solo leadership opportunity. Now looking back, I recognize that this business really wasn’t about leadership, but more about perseverance, innovation, and creativity. As I’ve learned in this course, you can have high direction and high drive, but if you don’t have any followers, you’re simply not a leader (Hughes et al., 2014). However, MMM did allow me to explore my sense of self which is critical for leadership (Bennis, 2009). I found that I enjoyed challenges, learning new skills, and working with people from very diverse backgrounds. Through this experience I met wonderful folks, grew as a person, and was very fortunate to have the revenue when I had to pay $1,200 for a speeding ticket my senior year of high school!

            My confidence and optimism grew as I began my college career in North Carolina. I parlayed my leadership experience from an Ecuador service trip with the church into leading two service trips to New Orleans, LA to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Because of those prior experiences, I was comfortable and confident in planning the logistics for those trips and guiding the groups when we got there. These groups were highly successful in cleaning up debris, forming connections with local residents, and building houses with the local Habitat for Humanity chapter.

            One of the trips challenged me as a leader when a female student on the trip became close with one of the local male Habitat site coordinators. He had a motorcycle and she wanted to go off riding with him one night. I felt like it would be irresponsible for us to let her go since we didn’t know him, his riding ability, his intentions, or the area, and her parents had certainly not agreed to that prospect when they signed the release of liability for the university. I met with the faculty advisors on the trip, shared my concerns, and was ultimately overruled because she was “over 18 years old and could make her own decisions.” I left that meeting and documented my apprehension and the conversation that had just happened. As a leader not wanting to engage in destructive leadership, I didn’t agree with their decision, but I knew that I couldn’t share my disagreement with anyone else on the trip because it would undermine the authority of the faculty advisors and ultimately create tension among us (Hughes et al., 2014). I documented everything because I didn’t want to suffer liability should something terrible happen to her. This experience built on my leadership philosophy to praise publicly and criticize privately, by expanding my thinking to include handling conflicts privately which allows all parties to save face in front of the larger group.

            While attending Elon University, I also joined the local volunteer fire department. I knew nothing about the fire service at the time but had always been interested in law enforcement. I couldn’t work in law enforcement until after college, so my best friend convinced me that the fire service was a similar atmosphere. I joined the department with six other people, and we were each given a notebook of knowledge tests and skills checkoffs that had to be completed within 90 days. I gathered everyone’s phone number, started a group text, and coordinated times for all six of us to be at the fire department together so we could complete the skills checkoffs as a group. We sought ongoing feedback and routinely reviewed our progress which promoted accountability that led me to finish my notebook in 19 days, a far cry from the 90-day maximum (Hughes et al., 2014). My personal motivation was founded in a desire to both learn and to fulfill my potential, which are highly influential motivators on my leadership journey (Bennis, 2009).

            Through this process, I also formed bonds and earned the respect of the people in our small group. Within the general fire department, however, I was still considered part of the out-group because college student volunteers rarely stayed on the department past their 4-year academic career. Additionally, my social identity as a college student, and later a graduate, pushed me further into the out-group because very few of the fulltime firefighters had a degree or valued formal education. So, there was a sense from most of the other members that it wasn’t worth investing their time in us for such a small return.

            By the time I graduated from Elon University, I was dating the assistant fire chief’s daughter who would later become my wife. I bought a house outside of town and stayed on the fire department which definitely made me the anomaly in staying past graduation. Now having a much longer return on investment (Hughes et al., 2014), I became part of the in-group and became much more involved. I quickly leaned on my prior church experiences and became an explorer advisor, helping to lead our chapter of 14- to 18-year-olds towards careers in the fire service. I was also promoted to lieutenant which allowed me to start supervising a few firefighters on scene. Several years later I was promoted to Captain which gave me command of scenes in lieu of a chief on scene, which included a house fire that my team successfully extinguished and investigated. Through those experiences, I learned the strengths of autocratic leadership on scene and transformational leadership in the fire house within the bureaucratic leadership of the department as a whole (Hughes et al, 2014).

            Once I graduated college, I pursued my dream of law enforcement with a municipal police department. Through my 11-year career, my leadership progressed through field training officer (one-on-one long term), instructor (one to 30 ratio short term), patrol supervisor (one to eight ratio for a year), and culminated in department training supervisor when I designed, implemented, and evaluated basic, intermediate, advanced, and remedial training to the department’s 140 sworn staff and 60 professional staff. This leadership progression felt very natural given my history, confidence, and optimism, which are all characteristic of the being lens (Meister et al, 2020).

            I have now started a new remote career with the National Safety Council in which I am not a formal leader. In other words, I don’t have any subordinate employees, and no one indirectly reports to me on any committees or other work groups. However, I am culling from my past experiences and influences to be a highly effective follower and establish myself as an informal leader who genuinely cares about others, can effectively reduce conflict, and builds a supportive culture.

Engaging       

            In this leadership origin story, my leadership blossomed at the police department out of the need for mental health support. Less than a month into my career, we were sitting in our pre-shift briefing when a shooting was dispatched. My field training officer and I ran to our car, drove really fast with our lights and siren on, and pulled up to the apartment with several other officers. When we ran into the apartment, we found the 21-year-old female victim’s lifeless body on the living room floor. We tried to give her CPR, but it was futile. Once the time of death was called, I spent the next several hours until the end of our shift standing in the living room with her body, recording a crime scene log of everyone who entered and exited the apartment. Within several days our detectives had made an arrest for first degree murder in a drug deal robbery gone wrong and there was no other follow up with us.

            Just a few weeks later I responded in the middle of the night with several officers to a house to serve an arrest warrant for the guy stealing a car. We got there and discovered the house in complete disarray and the back door open. My field training officer and I met with the K9 officer, and we started a track from the back door into the open field behind the house. Suddenly, the K9 stopped dead in its tracks. The K9 officer and I raised up our flashlights to see the K9 staring at our suspect who was laying on his back in the knee-high grass. As our flashlights illuminated him, he sat up, pulled out a gun with his right hand, and pointed it towards us. Before we could react, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger, instantly killing himself.

            The next several hours were surreal as we assessed his injuries, interviewed neighbors, and got interviewed by detectives. Upon getting in the detective’s car, he counted all of my bullets to make sure that I hadn’t shot the guy, took my statement, and then released me back to my field training officer. I was expected to, and did, return back to my shift, and continue to answer calls the rest of the night as if nothing traumatic had happened. There was no follow up and no support from the department after this scene.

            As a result of these calls, and others, I discovered very early in my career that the department had significant operational support if we needed to replace equipment, but no tangible psychological or mental health support to manage occupational and organizational stress. As I had already discovered, stress is pervasive in law enforcement from the spontaneity and severity of physical demands and sudden life-threatening situations which can cause physical, mental, and emotional changes (Russell et al., 2014, Denhardt et al., 2016). With this identified need to manage and mitigate responder stress (Hughes et al., 2014), I began engaging with other officers and supervisors to create a vision for the future of emotional support within our department. In that vein, we created a peer support team and a critical incident stress debrief team. As an educated child of divorced parents raised in a Christian church, I was keenly aware of the importance of communication and emotional support, so I was naturally an early member of these teams. With my drive for support, I was selected as one of two Mental Health First Aid instructors. Mental Health First Aid is an evidence-based program that focuses on ways to mitigate, and rehabilitate from, occupational stress, organizational stress, and poor coping skills like substance and alcohol abuse (National, 2017). The other instructor and I taught this course to every officer in the department which established us as emotional support leaders across the organization.

            As a leader within the engaging lens, these experiences at the police department would orient me toward a follower-focused leadership style. I would have frequent conversations with my followers to gauge their thoughts on important issues and reach a collective understanding. My social identity as an educated male would likely help others organically turn to me for guidance in difficult situations.

Performing

            Within the performing lens, my leadership story began at the fire department as I was promoted to lieutenant and then captain. It was a difficult transition to go from “doing” to “supervising.” When I was first promoted, the fire department responded to a car crash. When we got there, one of the firemen turned to me and said, “what do you need, boss?” That’s when it hit me that, by giving direction and support, I was responsible for the firemen on scene, as well as the patients who were injured in their vehicles (Wren, 1995). In that moment I knew that I couldn’t go hands on with patient care because I had to maintain an appropriate detachment from the scene in order to supervise the entire incident. In other words, I realized that I couldn’t effectively lead all of the on-scene firemen if I was narrowly focused on bandaging one of the patients in one of the vehicles.

            My orientation to the performing lens as a leader was never stronger than when we had a house fire, and I was the volunteer captain. As I pulled up to the house, I met the paid captain who was putting on all his gear and an air pack. He and I both knew that none of the three chiefs were in town that night, so we were on our own. As a result, I told him that one of us had to take command of that scene. He looked at me and said, “I’m going to fight fire. Good luck!” as he walked up the driveway towards the crackling glow. I grabbed my radio and notified everyone that I was in command.

            For the next four hours, I requested additional resources, directed crews to extinguish the fire, and requested a search of the entire house to locate any potential victims. As objectives were accomplished, the fire was extinguished, and we located the residents unharmed at a neighbor’s house, the breadth of the scene hit me. I was in charge of almost twenty firefighters and five fire trucks from three different fire departments. While leadership is certainly more than simple command and control of followers, this initially tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving scene was an appropriate time for autocratic leadership (Hughes et al., 2014). It really didn’t matter from which fire department they responded, because everyone on scene was “my people” (Meister et al., 2020, p. 2). Being a tall, fairly in shape male, my social identity bolstered my performing leadership lens because, even from my command post, I was able to help with small tasks like replacing air pack bottles and pulling fire hose out of the house. I was overwhelmed by the sense of duty in being ultimately responsible for everyone on that scene (Meister et al., 2020). This one scene was foundational for my leadership within the performing lens.

Accepting

            The focal point of the accepting lens is recognizing that you have followers. With this perspective, my leadership journey started when I completed Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) training and was successfully certified. To give context, of the more than 23,000 law enforcement officers in North Carolina (Reaves, 2011), at the time I was certified there were fewer than 170 DREs statewide. The DRE certification itself didn’t result in a leadership position, but it distinguished me as an expert in impairment investigations and driving behaviors. I started to notice other officers, and supervisors, calling me at all hours of the day and night asking me questions about drugs they had found, impairment they had noticed, or case law related to often unique and unusual circumstances.

            My social identity also aided my endeavors for DRE. My formal education prepared me for the rigorous exams throughout the certification process, including the six-hour final comprehensive exam. My physical ability also helped me complete the examinations of each subject and my nationality as an English-speaking American made it much easier for me to read and understand the material. These identities supported me in developing expert power within the realm of impaired driving investigations (Wren, 1995).

            Without intentionally making it an objective, my role as a DRE created followers and originated me as a leader within the accepting lens. One of the tangible contributions I made was recognizing that most officers balked at impaired driving investigations because of the length of the report required. As one of the most litigated charges across the country, officers are nervous and anxious about having to testify in court, sometimes two or three years later. As a subject matter expert, I created a report narrative template that included all the requisite language and cited relevant case studies. I saved this document to a shared drive so that the charging officer could copy and paste the narrative “shell” into their report and then add their observations, discoveries, and findings. This “mad libs” approach drastically reduced the amount of time officers had to spend repeatedly typing the same requisite information. If there’s a surefire way to adopt followers in law enforcement, it’s by saving cops from extra work.

            Reflecting back on my leadership journey thus far presents opportunities to view it in different lenses. From a very young age I was presented leadership opportunities through my parents and inspired by my grandfather. The being lens best fits with this view of early childhood leadership. Viewing my development through the engaging lens, I would consider my leadership story beginning during my quest for mental health support within the police department. Using the performing lens, my leadership began on the scenes of car crashes and a house fire. Finally using the accepting lens, I became a leader when I realized that I had followers developing through expert power. Each of these frames presents challenges and opportunities that affected my leadership growth and current place on my leadership journey. Being aware of these perspectives and how each framed past situations helps me align future decisions as I continue to explore leadership in a wide variety of contexts and situations.

References

Bennis, W. G. (2009). On becoming a leader. Basic Books.

Denhardt, R. B., Denhardt, J. V., Aristigueta, M. P., (2016). Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.

Hughes, R. L., Ginnett, R. C., & Curphy, G. J. (2014). Leadership: Enhancing the lessons of experience (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill Professional.

Meister, A., Zheng, W., and Barker Caza, B., What’s Your Leadership Origin Story? Leadership. August 10, 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/08/whats-your-leadership-origin-story.

National Council for Behavioral Health. (2017). Mental Health First Aid USA Public Safety: 8-Hour Teaching Notes.

Reaves, B. (2011). Census of state and local law enforcement agencies. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (NCJ 233982). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

Russell, L. M., Cole, B. M., & Jones III, R. J. (2014). High-risk occupations: How leadership, stress, and ability to cope influence burnout in law enforcement. Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 11(3), 49.

Sankar, Y. (2003). Character not charisma is the critical measure of leadership excellence. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 9(4), 45-55.

Wren, J. T. (1995). The leader’s companion: Insights on leadership through the ages. Free Press.