Looking For A Few Good Men Or Women – Part II
March 9, 2012 – 8:05 am
In The Art of War, a Chinese military treatise that was written during the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu points out the importance of knowing yourself and your enemy.
So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will fight without danger in battles.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
When it comes to the recruitment of the best qualified young officers and deputies, law enforcement agencies need to be prepared to do battle to recruit the best of the best. In order to do so, police recruiters need to understand the wants and needs of the potential new hires (know your enemies) and whether your law enforcement agency is structured in a manner that can address those wants and needs (know yourself).
Bob Dylan, the American singer-songwriter, author and poet, might have been talking about the employment environment of today when sang, “If your time to you Is worth savin’, then you better start swimmin’, or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’. Modern police managers need to understand the attitudes of the young people if they hope to attract and retain the best personnel possible.
I will not attempt to explain why the upcoming generation of young people have that attitudes that they do. I will leave that to the psychology professionals. Fortunately, the “why” is not nearly as important to criminal justice managers as the “what.” What is important to the young people that hope to become officers or deputies – the people who are the future of your agency.
Criminal justice executives from the “baby boomer” generation may have difficulty accepting that younger workers feel much less loyalty to institutions. As a demographic, their first question tends to be, “What’s in it for me?” Even the U.S. Army acknowledged this shift in attitude with its “Army of One” advertising campaign. This generation of employees will not hesitate to challenge the wisdom of cumbersome policies and procedures. The operative word here is innovation – doing things the way we do simply because we have always done them that way will not cut it. If your agency has a “love it or leave it” mentality – they will not hesitate to leave it. This is very problematic for the law enforcement recruiter since they have to contend with a very shallow labor pool.
With the exception of top executive positions, criminal justice agencies have shown a reluctance to reach outside of the agency to fill supervisory positions, so a systematic leadership grooming program is a necessity. Fortunately, in most agencies, there are normally a sufficient number of willing and capable people in the pipeline to fill the supervisory positions that are vacated by retirements or career changers. However, executives need to consider what would happen if the people they are counting on to step up in the future are not there when they are needed. What may be even more frustrating is, even if they stick around, they may not even want the roles for which they are being groomed.
So what is a law enforcement executive to do? You can start by taking advantage of your well educated young workforce. If your agency fosters a participative management style, your younger workers will fit right in. Unlike your older workers who expected to have to earn their stripes, this new generation of workers want responsibility, expect to have input right away and they are not afraid to make decisions. Agency administrators should strive to involve younger workers in committees and teams that are charged with meaningful tasks in order get the most out of them. Again, whether you like it or not, there is a good chance that your younger employees may not stay with your agency so you need to get the most out of them while you have them.
Your new employees are tech savvy and they grew up using online social networks and working in groups. If you can create a strong social network at work, you can leverage their network-centric tendencies. The agency needs to capitalize on the “work family” relationship that younger workers develop with their immediate supervisors. Remember, people generally do not quit jobs, they quit people. Employee retention should be one of the primary job tasks and a performance evaluation rating point for sergeants and lieutenants.
Finally, agency administrators may need to rethink their attitudes about re-hiring former employees. Younger workers are much more likely to leave a job to seek out other opportunities including education, travel, or even another job. If the employee was a good worker, it makes good economic and management sense to make it easy for them to return, particularly when we consider the time and expense of training a new employee.
These are just a few of the issues that polices executive must address if they hope to attract and retain the best officers and deputies. There are volumes of demographic data available online under such labels as Generation Y, Nexters or younger workers. Remember, Google is your friend so spend some time learning about the people you will be hiring or promoting.
Unfortunately, knowing both sides does not guarantee that you will win since you may encounter an opponent who knows both sides better than you do?
In the next article in this series, we will examine some recruiting techniques and procedures that can help law enforcement agencies get the best applicants in the door.
Other articles in this series:
Looking For A Few Good Men Or Women – Part I
Looking For A Few Good Men Or Women – Part III