Development for executive leaders

The absolute focus throughout the executive leadership programme is delivering better policing for our communities. That's why we exist as policing. 

So right from day one on the course, where we start looking at our own personal leadership style, all the time we're coming back to delivering better service to our communities. And we know trust and confidence in policing has been impacted, which for me is why police leadership is so critical. 

I think the programme itself is so comprehensive. It's quite a journey of different things throughout the year. There's a lot around personal growth. You spend a lot of time thinking about what you bring to policing and why is that important? 

What is it about you and your values and your leadership style that would make you successful in taking on really difficult challenges? 

Now coming into module three, I have a sense of readiness to take on a big challenge, like the new job that I've just been successful in. 

A police leader of the future has got a really good understanding of themselves, you know, understands their values and what makes them tick, but they've got to be able to be seen as honest, open, fair, able to communicate. They've got to be approachable. They've also got to have really good business acumen, which is probably something that is different compared to police leadership in the past. 

So the knowledge that we've had gives us, you know, a baseline, gives us something to go with because the really kind of nuanced and niche areas of executive leadership that the programme has delivered for us as a cohort have been really tremendous. 

But I think being in a room with fifty colleagues from across policing, across the UK and beyond, has provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, because I've been told that you'll never do anything like this again. So take as much as you can from this opportunity, and I've got to say that that's got to be my biggest takeaway. 

You know, the friendships that I have made over the past few months while being on this programme, I know will stand the test of time and have already proved their worth when we've been back in force. 

What our delegates get exposed to is the very best police leaders, the very best leaders across the public sector, across government, across academia, and internationally renowned private sector leaders as well.

It's about taking what you hear here and how do you operationalise that? How do you make the difference within your own organisation? 

Everything that we've done has been around getting us ready for leading across forces at a really strategic level and understanding the complexities and the sort of cogs that make policing work. 

The opportunities that I've had to reach out into other people has meant that I've been able to go back to force and really question is the way that we're doing this really the most efficient and effective? And are there practices from other colleagues across the country and internationally that means we can be doing this better? 

I think the course stretches you. So I think however much you think you know and how much experience you have in the role that you have, you never know everything.

 So I think coming on this course gives you the opportunity to listen to lots of experts, lots of professionals who've got a really broad range of experiences and it also give you a chance to meet loads and loads of people from all over the country and internationally where you can learn so much. That then gives you the ability to go back to your own force and actually be a better version of yourself.