What is Collaborative Leadership in Law Enforcement?
Collaborative leadership is a forward-thinking management style in which team members work together across sectors to make decisions and keep their organization advancing. In law enforcement, this means that leadership can openly communicate within their agency and neighboring agencies. This communication starts at the top with executive-enabled chat rooms and encourages an open forum for all squad members.
A collaborative police leader regularly seeks out opinions and ideas among their squad to build strategies and solve crimes. This forward-thinking collaborative leadership style enables officers to be more engaged, feel more trusted, and be more likely to take ownership.
Collaborative leadership empowers chiefs and captains to energize teams and diversify leadership across the ranks. This promotes a work culture that is more upbeat and enjoyable. Fortunately, promoting collaborative leadership has never been easier with an open communications tool like Genasys Protect CONNECT, which offers chat rooms, online collaboration tools, and instantaneous intel sharing.
How Does CONNECT Support Collaborative Leadership?
Aligning Goals
The first step in any collaborative leadership practice is creating a vision or goal and uniting your team behind it. Without a compelling vision, your team is sure to flounder. CONNECT empowers leadership to collaborate in real-time across agencies, bringing criminals to justice faster. Furthermore, entire squads are empowered to use collaborative task management tools to share intelligence in real-time, keeping goals aligned and teams up to date.
Open Communication
Open communication is essential to foster a collaborative work environment. Experts suggest that gone are the days when a hierarchical chain of command prevented members from communicating with other team members because of their level or rank. For true communication and collaboration to thrive in the police force, squad members must cooperate with any rank in an open forum. CONNECT is able to deliver just that-an open forum for free intelligence exchange despite rank or station. When we freely collaborate under a unified vision, rest assured justice can be swiftly served.
Building Partnerships
Despite best intentions, collaborative practice often fails because there is a lack of partnership skills. If a police chief wants to work in partnership with the patrol officers, he or she cannot use positional power to make the patrol officer’s experience difficult. True partnership means acknowledging that while work experiences are different, they are also all valid. The squad must be a place of open communication, and CONNECT’s virtual chat rooms make open and safe communication that much more accessible. When open and safe communication is accessible, relationships and collaboration thrive.
Value Time
Experts agree that implementing collaborative practices can be messy, drawn-out, and confusing. The best practice is to embrace collaborative tools that don’t add more to your squad’s already busy schedules. CONNECT seamlessly fits into the police force’s laundry list of tasks and empowers squad members from within the agency and neighboring agencies to freely collaborate without fear of it being one more item on an already busy schedule.
Encouraging Vulnerability
At its most basic level, the collaborative leader admits to not having all the answers and instead seeks his squad’s support. Ironically, this display of vulnerability is a sign of strength and confidence not only in himself but in his or her squad.
Let CONNECT Take Your Collaboration to the Next Level
CONNECT empowers your agency to work toward a collaborative future. To be the most effective at keeping your community safe, CONNECT empowers you to engage with your agency in new ways, thus inspiring advanced solutions in our ever-evolving world. Contact us to set up a demo to learn how CONNECT can help your agency attain a collaborative environment.
