GMP therefore took the decision to develop a positive culture change around leadership that would have an impact on everyone not simply those in supervisory positions across all of its 10 divisions and seven supporting branches. A new leadership charter, part of a national leadership initiative, was developed to manage expectations, while coaching, mentoring and buddy schemes were introduced alongside leadership programmes such as Prospects, which is aimed at staff with high potential. “It’s an initiative that represents a radically new way of how police view and nurture leadership,” says Mileusnic. “Traditionally we have been a problem-focused culture, but we are trying to shift to a solutions-based way of doing things that gets results quickly.” GMP decided to work with the Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL) to achieve those aims, and CEL’s Leaders as Coaches programme was the most obvious solution.
Since February this year, two cohorts of 10 and 11 coaches have started working with the GMP, and CEL is currently training a third cohort of 15 people. Each person on the programme then goes on to coach three people at any one time. The idea is to bring about a fundamental culture change whereby coaching eventually becomes part of the ethos of the organisation and all police officers and indeed police staff feel confident in their leadership skills as a result. Like all providers of coaching training, CEL encourages coachees to state individual goals and suggests they rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how well they think are doing in reaching them. But while a more problem based approach might require the coach to focus on the gap between their rating and 10 in other words, what’s stopping them get there the Leaders as Coaches solutions based model says: “Wow, you’re at 4. Well done. Now, let’s look at what got you to 4 and find ways of helping you do more of it so you can reach 10.”
It is also significant that Leaders as Coaches is aimed specifically at shifting organisations from a command-and-control leadership style and focuses heavily on challenging individuals’ ingrained ways of thinking. It’s early days, admits Mileusnic, but the training is already producing impressive results that are grabbing the attention of other police forces nationwide. “We had West Yorkshire Police here a couple of months ago, and key people in the Metropolitan Police have also taken an interest,” he says. Little wonder when you consider that the Home Office is trying to upgrade how police forces develop and sustain leadership at all levels, and GMP has moved the furthest forward, using the coaching model to achieve this. Some employees already report feeling more competent, confident and in control of their own development, he explains. Meanwhile, the general public is happier because they feel GMP staff are more able to make the kind of decisions required to manage crime effectively.
Mileusnic stresses that leadership coaching is enabling GMP to implement the philosophy of “leadership for all” while staying clear of implying that “one size fits all”. “The kinds of situations police officers deal with range from public order to road accidents, from domestic incidents to terrorism threats, and each will require a different approach,” he says. “So we are not saying we want everyone to be like Richard Branson. Rather, we are looking for them to develop their own toolbox of styles and use them appropriately. In some ways that is quite complex to get across, but the way in which coaching focuses on individual development means it can help people to use their creativity and innovation to achieve it.
“In a perfect world, we’d like to have coaches professionally trained by CEL right across the organisation, but that’s impossible in terms of resources,” admits Mileusnic. “In fact, that was one of our earliest lessons not to be unrealistic about what we can do.” The aim is to have 36 professionally qualified coaches within the senior ranks, who will follow up their work with accreditation, and a smaller pool of internally trained coaches in each division and branch. “Not every individual will be a coach or coachee, but we hope that indirectly they will benefit from the coaching culture,” he says. Shaun Lincoln, CEL’s director of coaching, believes the programme is working well largely because leadership coaches within GMP aren’t necessarily line managers. “Sometimes it is actually better that coaches aren’t line managers because individuals can usually be open with their coach in a way that perhaps they couldn’t be with a line manager,” he says.
Coaching at GMP even cuts across ranks. “Like many organisations, GMP is quite hierarchical, yet you have people coaching people higher up the ranks than them,” he says. “The great thing about this is that to create a real coaching culture, you need to have coaching working in four ways the ability to coach each other and yourself, and to coach upwards and downwards.” Participants on the Leaders as Coaches programme spend an initial three days in training, with a gap between the second and third days for reflection. This is followed by a series of reviews and supervision sessions. Lincoln says this training has created some particular challenges for the police. “The police are very good at questioning, but we all realised early on that the type of questioning they are used to can be very different to the type required for coaching. So we needed to do quite a bit of work around that, and I’ve been impressed with how GMP participants have made that shift.” He admits that, despite all the positive feedback, there remains a degree of scepticism about the value of coaching within GMP. “But we need to remember that we’ve only trained 24 coaches so far and the change needs to reach 5,000 staff eventually,” he says, adding that he is confident that this attitude will disappear. “The power of Leaders as Coaches is that it works with the whole team, so as the benefits of coaching begin to show and the team starts sharing its successes, the resistance will fade.”
Terry Finn, an inspector with GMP, was a participant in the first cohort. Although not cynical about coaching, he admits he wasn’t aware that it existed. “But as I’ve become closer to it, I’m totally committed to the concept,” he says. “I thoroughly enjoy the one-to-ones and seeing the step up in performance with each of the coachees.” He finds that the “Oskar” model (objective, scaling, know-how, affirm and review) that CEL advocates is particularly useful. “You don’t have to follow them in any particular order, but you do aim to cover every one in each session,” he says. “The great thing about that is that it’s something to hang a principle on and I know where I should be going next. It keeps the coaching structured.”
Finn is also quick to praise the solutions based model. “It enables you to concentrate on positives. It’s easy to get stuck on a coachee saying: ‘My job is terrible.’ But with this approach you can turn it around, and ask what is going well in their job and what they would like to be doing more of. I spend a lot of time focusing the individual on self-reflection. They soon realise that if they take a small step in the same direction as they did when they got other things right, they can start achieving a lot.” For example, GMP deals with serious assaults very well, whereas common day to day incidents such as domestic burglaries often get less attention than they should. “There are so many of them that we don’t deal with them in quite the way we’d like. Coaching enables people to transfer some of the stuff they’re doing with the bigger crimes into more routine work.”
Police constable Alan Weeks, one of the first people from GMP to benefit from leadership coaching, is proof that the model is working. Having been selected for the Prospects programme, he has recently been seconded to a new and unfamiliar project. “The role involves looking at how we prepare our prosecution files for court and to evaluate if we are doing a good job and how we could do it better,” says Weeks, who has been working for GMP for two and a half years. “I found at the start of the project that I was struggling to be as focused as I could be, both because I had no background in it and because it was such a contrast to being out on the street. Through coaching, I’ve worked out how to motivate myself to do a good job.” Like all GMP coachees, Weeks has been guaranteed six sessions of coaching over a one year period. “In fact, I tend to see my coach on a monthly basis, with telephone and email contact in between,” he says. Weeks believes the chief benefit of leadership coaching at GMP is that it is not task oriented. “It’s not about the mechanics of doing things, but about looking at yourself as a whole and how you perform. Surely that is the most fundamental thing you can change, and that’s why I think it’s working.”