Personal Statement : Leadership And Leadership

1120 Words3 Pages

1. Leadership is the ability to bring people together while motivating and inspiring them to work as a team to achieve a common goal. There have been several leadership influences in my life. From a very young age, I watched my father lead his troops while serving as a senior enlisted member of the U.S. Army. I saw how he held them accountable for doing their jobs on one hand while mentoring them and giving them the direction they needed, sometimes almost like a father figure on the other. Working for four different law enforcement agencies over the last twenty-seven years, I have been exposed to several supervisors, some good and some not so good. Looking back on it, I believe my leadership philosophy has been influenced more by the bad supervisors than the good ones. The first thing they showed me was the difference in a supervisor or manager and a leader. Very few of them cared for their members at all. They seemed to be more interested in their next promotion and gave little to no attention to mentoring their members and helping them achieve anything they wanted to achieve. Because of this, there always seemed to be a morale problem. The members never seemed motivated to do anything other than the bare minimum to get by.

2. I have seen supervisors that held no one accountable for anything. I have seen some that would not deal with any problems between members in their unit and were commonly referred to as the “ostrich” because they kept their head in the sand and pretended there were no issues. I have seen first hand how that type of leadership also damaged morale and unit cohesion. One interesting thing that I have noticed over the years is that almost every true leader I have encountered in law enforcement was consequent...

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... from equipment and vehicles to time off and I can tell they notice and appreciate things like that. I believe in acting as a buffer between them and my boss I can temper things that are passed down that don’t always make sense. I have had former members come to me and tell me that they had no idea how much I was keeping the bosses out of their investigations until they had a different supervisor that didn’t care. That is the way it should be. A leader doesn’t look for accolades from his members, he takes care of them behind the scenes, often without them even knowing. I have conversations with them to learn what they want to do with their careers and what their goals are. I believe in trying to help them achieve success at our agency no matter what their definition of success is, because I have found out the meaning of success is very different for different people.

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