The Art of ‘Flexing’: Translating a New Vision of Police Leadership from the Top

Recent cases of police officer misconduct, corruption, criminality and ineffective leadership have tarnished the reputation of the police service in England and Wales and polarised debate on leadership. The bulk of this discussion tends to gravitate between assessing the merits of transactional and transformational leadership styles, with the latter typically emerging as the superior model that offers the potential to enact reform and cultural change. In line with recent concern over the possible shortfalls of adopting a binary approach to exploring police leadership, this chapter explores the synergy between transformational and transactional leadership styles. It draws from a small-scale qualitative research project to illustrate the importance of effective leadership in a police organisation with a recent history of people-centred scandals. In doing so it highlights the complexities of leadership at the top of a police organisation, and the need for a balanced approach characterised by fluidity of movement between leadership styles if senior police leaders are to achieve meaningful reform and cultural change

Building Strategic Capacity and Collaborative Leadership in Blue Light Organisations

It is increasingly considered that an organisation’s ability to form and manage strategic partnerships significantly contributes in enhancing its overall performance. Coordination, communication and ability to develop interpersonal relationships (bonding) are considered as three critical components of collaborative capabilities. The collaborative capabilities develop over a period of time, and they enable the organisation to purposefully create, extend or modify existing organisational routines that underpin the activities pertaining to coordination, communication and relationship building. Development of collaborative capabilities necessitates exploring alternative approaches to leadership in organisations. Emergency services leadership has been characterised as ‘top-down’, hierarchical, ‘heroic’, with a command and control approach prevalent in the organisations. There has been reliance on historical and hierarchical models of ‘heroic’ and ‘top-down’ leadership and absence of a distributive and pluralist approach to leadership. Current thinking and models are often based around individual services without much joined-up approach. Greater collaboration entails an approach different from leadership development, which needs to be facilitated at multiple levels within the organisations. Development of collaborative culture in organisations will necessarily involve cultivating future leaders, who will encourage greater collaboration within and amongst the collaborating organisations