You're three minutes late- go home
When I trained as a police officer I had the pleasure of attending the training centre at Hendon. Most of the training was in your individual borough but you went to Hendon for 'conflict training'.This involved handcuff techniques,CS Gas (really not to be recommended) and a host of other techniques.
We were told to report to the centre at 0900 sharp on Sunday morning. A group of around forty people sat in a room waiting for our first session on 'dynamic risk assessment'.It was 0900 and we were ready to go.
A group of maybe four or five people turned up at 0903 and were promptly told to go home.We sat astounded.These people may have travelled up to an hour to get there and were turned around and told to report to borough to re-book their training.I could not believe how petty the instructors were being and it completely went against my ideas of fairness.
Or did it ? As my training progressed I wanted it to get harder,I wanted it to challenge me.I wanted people to drop out if they didn't make the grade.
It wasn't that I had an overdeveloped sense of competition, but that I wanted it to all to have meaning.I wanted to feel as though I had really achieved something when I received my Warrant card.
Imagine if you went for a job at Mckinsey and it was a breeze? Imagine if you could pass SAS selection with some ease? Would it be worth having?
Top companies in my opinion create a culture where simply 'getting in' has value.It is your job then to live up to those expectations.
So maybe the three minutes late sent out a clear message.If you do this job there will be a level of expectation,you need to understand that at the outset.Once the guidelines are clear and agreed then poor behaviour will be deemed unacceptable.
Although I have to admit I wouldn't send my P.A home for being two minutes late.I also wouldn't expect her to confront an armed man.
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9 年Thanks for sharIng, Steve. Was it setting clear expectations, holding people to account against those clear expectations or a failure to be curious enough to explore why a group would arrive together and late? Did it make anyone in the room or subsequently excluded from the room a better police officer? Where there other ways to achieve that? Your drive for challenge or mastery is great to read about. I think we have all flourished "in the zone" at times in our lives and careers and recognise it sometimes only after the fact. But how do you create that sense and still make it safe enough to fail and thus learn? I love to pull illustrations from the movies. Your story made me think of the much more extreme behaviour demonstrated by the conductor in 'Whiplash'. A fascinating study of one view of what it takes to succeed. A great companion piece to Rasmus Ankersen's Gold Mine Effect on how certain geographies and 'systems' create world beating performance.
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9 年It is easier to be physically courageous than morally so. This seems to me to have been as much a lesson in moral courage. The alternative is performance infraction action - sadly, this has been lacking too frequently as people often choose the easy way out: in the police this has manifested itself in 'passing the parcel' to PSDs to deal with under conduct regulations.