Dr. Terry Anderson - Crafting Exemplary Law Enforcement Leaders: Insights on Elevating Police Work Through Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Skills

Season 6 - Episode 128
Unlock the secrets to effective law enforcement leadership in our latest episode where I chat with Dr. Terry Anderson. Gain invaluable insight into the world of police work where emotional and interpersonal skills are as critical as the badge and gun. Dr. Anderson, with his extensive background in both Canada and the U.S., illuminates the often-neglected areas of self-management and team leadership that ripple through the lives of officers and those they protect. With an innovative field guide and book, we delve into the transformative journey of continuous skill development and its profound impact on community safety.

As you listen, discover why every officer is a leader, whether they're directing traffic or commanding a precinct. Our engaging conversation travels through the philosophy of leadership and the role of self-awareness in crafting an effective officer – one who can positively influence their team and community. We discuss the unique online course that equips officers with the tools to self-assess and strengthen twelve key competencies, all designed to enhance decision-making and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Learn how resources like Command College are shaping the future of law enforcement with practical applications that stretch far beyond the uniform.

Wrapping up, we explore how the same leadership skills that serve on duty can transform personal and community interactions. Hear about the success stories, like that of Sheriff Greg Champagne, whose commitment to leadership training has led to remarkable outcomes. 

Terry and I touch on the importance of grounding, centering, attending, and observing—core competencies that enable officers to lead with empathy and emotional intelligence. This episode is an eye-opener for anyone interested in the intersection of law enforcement and leadership, proving that the badge of a good officer is crafted through both skill and heart.

Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com

Website: www.copdocpodcast.com

If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com

Transcript

Intro - Outro: 0:02

Welcome to The Cop Doc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopD oc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia and other government agencies. And now please join Dr Steve Morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on The Cop Doc Podcast.

Steve Morreale: 0:32

Hello again everybody, Steve Morreale coming to you from Boston and you're listening to The Cop Doc Podcast. Another episode begins and we talked to Dr Terry Anderson. This is a strange one because he is a snowbird from Canada but staying in the LA area and a former professor and very active in police police training and author. I'll let you introduce yourself, but I want to say hello to you, Terry.

Terry Anderson: 0:54

Yeah, I'm actually a citizen of two countries. Part of the reason of my dual citizenship is I took a job teaching at a university for 38 years in British Columbia and I taught self-management, interpersonal communication, problem-solving, team leadership and organization and community development for 38 years in a criminal justice department. And so I see that there is a big problem on the horizon that's been there for a long, long time. It's affected my life and the lives of many maybe most, if not all, of the officers that I've graduated and seen go into their careers and get promoted, and it's the problem is a lack of skills training.

Terry Anderson: 1:31

Throughout our culture and I think back to the family that I grew up in and that my friends grew up in there were probably less than 20 feeling words that were used if you were in the average household. Feelings were just not something that were talked about that often. About 20% of the parents have basic communication and problem-solving skills to be able to equip their kids with those skills. And it's not their fault, it's not the fault of managers or supervisors in the justice and public safety system either if they don't have those skills, because those skills aren't taught in most schools and most universities or religious organizations. So mental and social health has an impact based on that lack of skills, competence, that the lack of skills are pandemic but unconscious.

Steve Morreale: 2:19

Yeah, let me ask you. I want to set the table. You are aware right now I'm talking to you where, Los Angeles, in Los Angeles area, okay, and you spend half the time there and the other half in the British Columbia. Is that correct? Yes, okay, how did you get involved in criminal justice in the first place?

Terry Anderson: 2:35

Well, that's a really interesting story. I originally started working at the university in the social services department and I had an opportunity to shift over to the criminology department and they wanted me to come because they saw a need for the kinds of skills that I was teaching to social workers to be taught to the justice and public safety sector. And so I just moved my course over into the crime department and, with great joy, taught that course, or the series of courses for the courses, for 38 years.

Steve Morreale: 3:06

That's great, and you were up at Fraser Valley. The University of the Fraser Valley I got you Great, great, and so you have become quite involved with writing, facilitating, with training, with coaching and the skills of this competency-based training regimen. But I also seem to know I have your book Every Officer is a Leader, and you are on your fourth edition, is that right?

Steve Morreale: 3:29

The fourth edition was just released, right Great, and I also saw and I have not seen it yet, but you also a field guide, and so talk about that and what's the importance and relevance of having the companion field guide Terry.

Terry Anderson: 3:41

Well, what we found in our decades of training officers is that they don't learn everything just because they take one course. They need to go out into the field and essentially what they told us is we work on two or three skills and developing those in our job and in our families, about two or three skills at a time. We can't learn all 60 skills just because we take one course. So the course is an introduction and it's a solid grounding, and the online course that we have is a solid grounding as well in those 60 skills. But during and after the course, people target specific skills to develop on the job and if they have a field training officer who's been trained in our program, that field training officer is coaching them in those specific skills that they're working on during that first six months of their employment. And that's where the real training hits the road.

Steve Morreale: 4:31

So, when you've written this and you've written this not alone, you've got an awful lot of co-authors and other people who have played a role in the development of this and the skills, and certainly you refine them as a scholar and a researcher Tell us how you came to identify the skills.

Terry Anderson: 4:48

Basically, my work with police as a consultant and a coach started 40 years ago. As I started writing this book right after I did my PhD, I found certain police leaders who are also pro academics and they wanted to participate in summarizing this book and the knowledge that we had realized was effective in the field in such a way as it could become accessible. And so in the fourth edition of the book, which is written most of it's written by cops and coordinated by me and I've written some of it but those 60 skills are articulated and summarized in the field guide, and so the officer puts it into the briefcase or into the car and is targeting to practice specific skills during that particular time of working, whether it's night shift or day shift focused on developing.

Steve Morreale: 5:39

What you're encouraging is continuous improvement. I presume and you're looking at Terry you and I, as educators, know that we're still learning, isn't that true? And we don't know what we don't know.

Terry Anderson: 5:49

Right and we're still learning how to teach the skills and we have had the opportunity to build a workshop with the Department of Justice that was funded for a period of two, well, three years because of COVID and we validated that the officers who went through this week long workshop were able to bring those skills into the field in a practical way so that they verified the skills are real, they're effective and they take the skills home to their families because they didn't have those skills before.

Steve Morreale: 6:18

So is this more applied learning?

Terry Anderson: 6:19

It is.

Steve Morreale: 6:20

Okay, that's great. Let me just look at this, the second edition. I don't know the benefit of the most recent edition, but I want to get a look at that. But you talk about skills and personal mastery and interpersonal skills and conflict management. There are so many, I'm just looking through them. Skills of team and organization, development, skills for problem and opportunity management, versatility, style, role, skill shifting, applying ethics and transforming your leadership, coaching, leadership, community safety. There's just so many. And obviously you realize, and certainly I do, as a pro academic but a former practitioner, that it is not one dimensional. Policing is not one dimensional, and nor is I understand that you've been dipping your toe into fire service too.

Terry Anderson: 7:04

But if it's not one dimensional.

Steve Morreale: 7:06

How are the academies adapting or are they to this kind of competency based and skills training?

Terry Anderson: 7:12

Well, the academies are so busy and understaffed that it's difficult right now, at this time in history, for them to integrate a brand new program. So we are seeing some uptake, but the uptake is slower than we had hoped, not because people don't want it, but because they don't have the dollars or the time for it and they realize the need for it. There's no question about that, because our book is selling and our course is selling and the course that we have out there is one option is for people to sign up for the version where they get six units of university transfer credit at the undergraduate and then our advanced course is six units at the graduate level. So we've been able to 1,700 different universities been accredited by the American Academy of Education Right, so that's encouraged people to enroll as well, because a lot of folks in policing and fire are really trying to finish their degree or get an advanced degree.

Terry Anderson: 8:04

So these skills we ask people to ask themselves certain questions which skills have you mastered in the big five leadership skill sets? Which skills do you want to learn next? And what's your leadership development plan? Do you have one? We can offer you the opportunity to develop a plan based on specific skill assessments. You can plan your leadership development journey and connect it to your degree plan or your graduation plan that you have and then use that to plan your career to trajectory. So some people don't want to have promotions. Other people are seeking them actively from the moment they begin their job. We have a leadership skills inventory that is a part of the book itself in the fourth edition. That enables them to do a self-assessment of which skills they have and don't have and come up with that leadership development plan.

Steve Morreale: 8:54

You know, as I'm listening to you, one of the things that strikes me first of all. I know when I just finished a training with Sergeants a few days ago, and one of the things that a couple of executives have said to me, and I have begun to tout that, is that so many in policing raise their hand to be sworn and they will leave that job at the same rank. In other words, so few have an opportunity or have a desire, as you just said, to be promoted, to be responsible for others, and so that makes it and, by the way you say, every officer is a leader. I'd like to explain that. How so? How so, terry?

Terry Anderson: 9:27

The situations that officers find themselves in require them to have self-management skills, interpersonal communication skills, problem-solving skills and even team leadership skills. Even if they're a team member, they still have influence and they still have impact on their team, especially if the team leader is inclusive, is including them in the decision-making and planning process for various interventions that policing teams might be doing in the community. And because of a lack of staff, we're seeing community policing kind of wane right now because there's not a lot of opportunity to do the kind of problem-solving planning that's required for those kind of interventions because of short staffing. So if you could picture yourself, you know test driving our course. We're going to be releasing an opportunity for officers and aspiring officers to test drive three skills of their choice, to get an experience of the online course, just to sample it, to test drive it. So these five people skill sets fully equip leaders of all ranks, sworn professional staff and basically they get an opportunity to really self-examine the extent to which they have self-management skills and there are 12 of those skills.

Terry Anderson: 10:38

An opportunity to examine the extent to which they have interpersonal communication, which includes empathy, training and coaching of others. So they really need to know the extent to which they have and don't have those skills, because savvy personnel people are actually promoting competency-based people, people who have demonstrated the capability to lead a team. Then the team leadership for continuous improvement. Once a person gains team leadership skills, they can actually run a continuous improvement team that has an impact on the entire organization and the community. I've tested this with about 40 different organizations and it's worked every time to some extent, until a new chief comes in and says stop doing continuous improvement because it's not my way of making decisions. This continuous improvement team is building it as one of the skills and how to lead a continuous improvement team for problem solving and for targeted impact on community issues.

Steve Morreale: 11:34

So a couple of things come to mind. As a retired professor, you know that one of the things that we have to do is to document a philosophy of teaching. Right, you sit down, you think about what do I want to do? How am I approaching it? How am I looking at students? How am I looking at student learning? How am I facilitating in the classroom? How am I assessing? You have to document this. This causes a need for self-reflection.

Steve Morreale: 11:55

What I'm beginning to do and I spoke to you that I'm working on a book on leadership recipes what are some of the ingredients of leadership, and so I've started to talk about asking people to understand what their philosophy of leadership is, which is a takeoff on what we have to do in order to earn promotion. You know that You've had that experience right, and there's also a thing that I work on which sounds quite similar. It's executive core qualifications OPM. Does it the Office of Personnel Management, if you're going to move into the senior executive services and when you look at those the same approach that you seem to be taking when you're looking at a list of skills and you're doing a self-assessment and you're saying I feel like I have these skills or I need work on these skills. So it's the same sort of thing. I think it's important.

Steve Morreale: 12:41

But let's explore that a little bit. Self-awareness is very, very important as somebody who wants to move through the organization into the organization, no longer be responsible only for the street, but for others who are entrusted to them. What steps should they be taking? What thoughts should be going through their mind? What sort of reflection should be going on to say how can I be a better leader? Where are my weaknesses, where are my strengths? Talk about that.

Terry Anderson: 13:06

Well, it's difficult for them to assess because most of the training they would have had would have been theory-based and not competency-based. So they don't know what skills they haven't don't have yet. And that's what our program offers is that it helps officers to identify and verify the extent to which they actually have skills. When we did the Department of Justice training, we had six days of training in a row. The first two days were with executives, the second two days were with trainers and the third two days were with frontline staffs where we were watching the trainers deliver the program. And then we certified the trainers so they can go back into their agency and deliver the program with free manuals from the Department of Justice that we designed and have been certified by 35 posts across the United States and certified by the Department of Justice.

Terry Anderson: 13:57

And people don't know about it. That's partly why I'm here talking about it as the chief leadership officer of Command College. People, if they want more information, can go to commandcollegeorg and really take a scan and take a look at particularly the Magnus program that is now turned into an app so they can access skills and practice sessions on their phone while they're having a break on their job or while they're engaged in a training program where they can focus on developing how to do a particular leadership intervention rather than understand it. So that's the distinctive feature of our program is that we want to help people learn how to do leadership.

Steve Morreale: 14:36

Learn by doing right.

Terry Anderson: 14:38

Think about leadership and the leadership theories. So translating theories into action has been our primary goal throughout the entire history of basically 35, 40 years now.

Steve Morreale: 14:48

Well, that's interesting because certainly talking off a lot on the podcast about translating the dense material that comes out of so many scientific and social science research that is so difficult to read and understand for the lined officer and it sounds like that's what you're doing You're distilling it into bite-size, understandable pieces.

Terry Anderson: 15:10

Right, and I'm not doing it alone. I'm doing it with a team of cops who've been in the field as leaders and in the front line for 20 and 30 years. Yeah, that's terrific. I had to have them, otherwise I couldn't really take the work that I did in my PhD on leadership. I couldn't take that work and translate it into actionable leadership behaviors for police.

Steve Morreale: 15:31

What sort of approaches are you taking to identifying, or to have identified, these skills and building upon them and continually growing them and changing them and getting feedback from people who have tried them? And it's true, how do you capture that?

Terry Anderson: 15:47

Well, we know the skills have validity from the fields of social work and counseling and those are the basic foundational skills of self-management and interpersonal communication and problem solving. That literature is solid and the training is solid and it's competency-based. And if you get a master's degree in social worker counseling, you have to perform a video assessment that demonstrates you actually have the capability to facilitate someone through a problem-solving sequence and you have the skills to do that. Otherwise you don't graduate. That's the way we ran our program at the University of the Fraser Valley is we had a video assessment at the end of each course and then they had to go out into the field with one of our graduates and spend 480 hours in the field in an agency demonstrating they had those skills and they had to pass their field practice or they didn't get a degree.

Steve Morreale: 16:39

The field practical that you see in school counseling and in social work, some of the things that you're talking about. That's very fascinating to me because the counseling aspect that I know you do an awful lot of coaching. The counseling aspect is pretty important and yet police officers do counseling without the certification in many cases.

Terry Anderson: 17:00

Right. They're faced with situations that they aren't really fully equipped to deal with and that causes them to have a terrible amount of stress. I mean, they see so much negativity, more than most people see in the first two years of their adult life. Cops see a whole lifetime in two years, a lifetime of stress and a lifetime of tragedy in two years, and then the years are packed with the small micro traumas that can end up causing them to be traumatized in the long run.

Steve Morreale: 17:28

Well, we're talking to Terry Anderson and he is in Los Angeles today. He is retired from a life of education at the university level and now as the chief leadership officer at Command College. Where is the Command College?

Terry Anderson: 17:42

It's in Raleigh, north Carolina, and it was started about 12 years ago by Dr Mitch Javidi, who has developed the organization and has attracted the key leaders in the United States and Canada to be on the board and to be as their advisors and to be faculty to teach various courses that we offer to the justice and public safety system, including now fire and rescue. We just finished the first edition of the fire and rescue book, which is Every Fire and Rescue Professional is a Leader. It's based upon the police edition and the fire people are telling us thank you so much because there isn't anything out there like this that we've seen and they're actually being able to use it right away.

Steve Morreale: 18:25

Yeah, we talked about that as we prepared for this, and I think that's a fascinating and an underserved population, so I'm glad you're able to do that. Terry, take me into a more current class, where you're talking to a group of people, whether online or in person. How do you set the stage? How do you set the table? Tell me what's in it for me, tell me why I should be here. Tell me why I should listen.

Terry Anderson: 18:51

Well, I guess the most relevant thing to everybody who comes into my class is their own personal life, and so we start with that. We just say look, all the skills you can learn here are applicable to your personal life as well as to your career. You're going to take these skills home, and we actually ask people to practice the skills at home first and practice the skills in their community groups and practice their skills then at work, so they have an opportunity to verify and get feedback and feed forward from people they're working with. We invite people who take our course to coach someone on their team and then to get them taken the course so they co-coach one another. So that's a really powerful way to extend the learning from the classroom into the field, and we're seeing that just happen spontaneously, so it's not a hard sell. People are hungry to know how to do leadership behaviors and how to practice them so they become proficient and skilled. They become unconsciously competent.

Steve Morreale: 19:49

Right. I remember many years ago going to a training and I was the only law enforcement officer in that training. It happened to be in Philadelphia, it was called train the trainer, and one of the things that struck me and it's exactly what I'm hearing you say tell me what's in it for me. And that sounds like you're saying exactly right, let me talk about your lived experience. Let's talk about some of the impediments to learning, some of the impediments, some of the shortcomings that you may find yourself, that you really don't want to talk about, but that could be valuable, both what I'm hearing you say, both to you at work and you at home. So that's pretty fascinating. Go ahead.

Terry Anderson: 20:22

Officers have told us that it's so important that they get that at the beginning of learning a skill that we have now put it at the front end of every skill. What's in it for you to learn this skill? All 60 skills have that right at the front end, both in the book and the field guide.

Steve Morreale: 20:37

Yeah, good, so that's good, so you're getting it, you're getting it. I'm not trying to say you don't, but I can see the value of that. Go ahead.

Terry Anderson: 20:43

It's coming back to us that that causes them to want to dig into it deeper and learn more, and learn faster, yeah.

Steve Morreale: 20:50

I mean you got to get buy in and you got to make it count for them, which is good, and hopefully, with all of the noise that's been going on with policing, you know, as this continues, I think it could be very valuable. Terry, I know that you're very familiar with what goes on up in our northern for me, our northern neighbor, canada, and I've also spent some time in Europe and I know we talked a little bit about that beforehand. What strikes me is that when I've been working with the guard and even with police agencies in the UK, that they do things a bit different. It's problem based learning. It requires them to come back from the field after some experience, much like you said that social workers will do that learn, apply and come back and assess and reflect. And that happens. It doesn't happen in the United States. How do we try to encourage reflection on? Okay, everybody, you were out there, you tried it, what worked and what didn't, what would you do differently?

Terry Anderson: 21:44

Well, it is happening in some places, and I'm thinking of Sheriff Craig Champagne, for example, who is now the president of the National Sheriff's Association. He ran our program with all of his staffs, born and civilian, for a period of five years. He kept tracking the outcomes and he actually made a two minute video to summarize what the impact of our program was, after all of his staff took it for five years.

Steve Morreale: 22:11

Well, let's see if it works. If it doesn't work, I'll just put a link on it, but give it a try. So we're back with Terry Anderson, dr Terry Anderson, in Los Angeles. I'm Steve Moriali here in Boston and we've been talking about every officer, a leader in the work that he in command college are doing to try to expand the idea of skills-based learning and competency-based learning. And there is a sheriff in Louisiana, greg Champagne, who has courted. I will try to include it and, if not, leave a link in it. But in short order, what's your take on what the sheriff said?

Terry Anderson: 22:42

Well, basically, that leadership skills training results in internal and public legitimacy and credibility. That it reduced liabilities, reduced lawsuits, payouts, created a better place to work for people retire healthily and happily compared to the way it was before the course. Create a better place to work that attracts new hires. They have people wanting to work for them because the reputation is hey, this is the best place to work. Engage in continuous improvement, teaming that collaboratively crafts and executes strategy that gets results with confidence, both inside of the organization and in the community, and then gain a higher level of respect and trust from the community. So those are the outcomes that he measured continuously for five years. He's not the only one. He's the only one who happens to be the president of the National Sheriffs Association who make the video.

Steve Morreale: 23:35

So you don't seem to be a guy who likes to rest on his laurels. What's going on now that this book is done? How are you continuing to be curious and explore and help public safety?

Terry Anderson: 23:47

Well, in Canada they have adopted our course and Canadianized the course with some of their own videos I'm laughing at Canadianized.

Steve Morreale: 23:56

I didn't know there was such a term, Terry.

Terry Anderson: 23:59

Yeah, they Canadianized the course that we developed, essentially on 360 videos at one of the largest police departments in California and I can't mention any police agency's names just because without their permission they don't want me to, but I can tell you it's one of the very largest police agencies that the deputy chief, I met him and I was on a committee with him, interoperability committee between the sheriff's department and a police department and fire departments.

Terry Anderson: 24:28

He read our book finally, after I sat on this committee for a year and he said we have to do this at our agency. And so he said I have a videography team and I have a group of 30 handpicked people. Let's shoot all the videos for each of the skills. So for every one of the skills we shot an introduction to the skill and why it's important to you and relevant to you. A second video was a demonstration or a story about how the skill is needed and how it's been used in the past. And the third video is actually modeling of the skill performance. So people can see how the skill works in real time, talking with a real officer with a real problem, and they can see how the problem solving system actually can be achieved and can be enjoyed.

Steve Morreale: 25:12

That's terrific. So what's next on your list of things?

Terry Anderson: 25:15

Well, we're looking at moving this into smaller units of training on the Magnus Works app that we've just developed. So if anybody goes to commandcollegeorg, they can download the Magnus Works app and their whole agency can download the app, and if they want to get data about officer morale, officer performance, officer mental health, the organization can sign up and they can get organization-wide data about these issues and about leadership competence, which is coming next. That's what we're adding to the mix, and so this Magnus Works is a way for officers to enhance their mental health and their resilience, while they also pick up skills that they need to function more effectively, not only at home, but on the job. So it's really a life skills training program for leaders.

Steve Morreale: 26:10

That's great. So how do people reach you?

Terry Anderson: 26:17

They typically go to my consultingcoachcom website and I have a series of eight different coaching packages that they can take a look at. They can self assess which one they might be relevant to them, and I spend a few days a week coaching people who really are motivated. You say are motivated. They are motivated Because they've already kind of looked into it and they've already bought into it and they want to accelerate their leadership development and their promotability. Usually that's one of the major things that I end up doing is promotional coaching or career planning, career path planning. That's how basically they find out about me through the International Academy of Public Safety's Command College, then contact me and I'm also certified by the state of California to do the executive team building workshop. So I've been doing several of those a year with various sheriff's departments and police agencies in the state of California.

Steve Morreale: 27:18

What do you want your legacy to be, Terry Anderson?

Terry Anderson: 27:21

That my vision that I had sitting by the creek at Chico State in 1967 would become a reality, and that's that leaders would become capable of developing other leaders for enhanced public safety. That's it in a nutshell Leaders would become more capable of developing other leaders so that enhanced public safety happens. And it's all about leadership, competence and the confidence that you have when you know you're competent. That's really, really freeing and really important, and it causes the team to trust you. It causes them to get excited, particularly since you know how to do collaborative decision making and problem solving instead of command and control decision making. Everybody on the team appreciates being included and having their intelligence be woven into the fabric of a solution to a community problem or to an organizational problem, of course.

Steve Morreale: 28:15

Of course. I mean I think in a lot of ways police officers do not. I mean they feel they're overworked. I understand that, but sometimes they don't feel appreciated even by their own agency, because decisions very much are made in a vacuum and they do not engage people. And yet we hire people for their intellect and we tell them to do what they're told. You know, just react to that.

Terry Anderson: 28:44

Well, what we found is that the average chief who comes in and applies to be chief does not have these skills. It's actually one in 10, maybe has many of the skills. But the board who's selecting the chief doesn't know how to determine whether or not these applicants have leadership skills. They know how to determine what their degrees are, what their past experience is, and even personnel head hunting agencies don't know how to assess the extent to which applicants for police chief or leadership positions have competence. They don't know how to do it, and it's not their fault, it's nobody's fault. It's that our educational system could teach people these skills from elementary school through high school and everybody could have the skills. But it's not part of our curriculum anywhere that we know of in the world.

Steve Morreale: 29:40

No, it's not so. And which troubling me too, and I know you as a student and scholar of leadership. So many people misunderstand the distinct and the subtle differences between management and leadership.

Terry Anderson: 29:57

Yes, and they believe typically, unless they've had a competency-based leadership course, they believe that the better managers they are, more they're likely to get recognized, appreciated and promoted, and so they try to manage their way to the top, and unfortunately, that works two thirds of the time. Yeah, you understand. And so what we have are and particularly as the organization becomes larger, we have increasing ivory towers manifesting, where the communication links between those people at the top and those people in the middle and the people on the front is typically lacking and sorrowfully lacking.

Steve Morreale: 30:43

Wow, I'm gonna stop from it. I'm gonna take a quick break and I'm gonna keep talking, because I wanna talk about listening, communicating those skills which are very important, so I'll be right back, okay.

Terry Anderson: 30:54

Wow, hmm, mmhm.

Steve Morreale: 31:53

Okay, I'll leave. Thank you, I'll leave a another gap just before we get started. I'll introduce you again and I'll ask some of those questions. Okay, anything else you want to cover before I continue? I?

Terry Anderson: 32:06

think we're good. Okay, great, thank you Okay.

Steve Morreale: 32:15

So we continue with our chat with Terry Anderson. Dr Terry Anderson, and he is the author of Every Officer is a Leader and the field guide that goes along with it. Terry, we've been talking about skills. We just talked about management versus leadership, and I'd like you to take the listeners down a rough list. You can't go through all 60 skills, but in your mind, what are the basic elements and skills needed for leadership? Name four or five important ones.

Terry Anderson: 32:56

Well, grounding is the most fundamental skill and that means the capacity to have enough internal self-control to stay in the present and to stay focused. If I'm asked to stand watch somewhere anywhere in the system, if I'm asked to stand watch, I have to have the capacity of inner self-control. I have to be grounded enough to maintain a focus. And that takes muscle, mental muscle development. And I just got certified in positive intelligence, which is a coach training program.

Steve Morreale: 33:28

Did you not have it before this?

Terry Anderson: 33:31

No, I didn't. I was good, but I didn't know how to execute it at command. I understood Possible. Intelligence course gave me more mental muscle than what I had, and I'm able now to pass that muscle development along to other people who decide to take the course.

Steve Morreale: 33:48

Great, what else besides grounding? We talked a little bit. I was wondering about listening and communication skills and coaching skills.

Terry Anderson: 33:58

There are 12 self-management skills and 12 interpersonal communication and problem-solving skills. Gotcha Good. So we start out with grounding and then centering, which means I understand my values, my beliefs and how that affects my job. So I'm in touch and clear about where I stand, with my beliefs and assumptions about the nature of people, about the nature of life, about my belief system. I have some clarity and I have the foundation of my inner life established. That gives me a perspective on where I stand in the use of force. If I believe that people aren't worth anything, I'm not going to hesitate when it comes time to make a decision about pulling a trigger, unless I'm self-protecting myself from risk.

Terry Anderson: 34:55

So there's grounding, there's centering, there's attending, giving undivided attention, which means leaning towards someone, facing them, squaring your shoulders, giving eye contact without staring in order to receive information from them. That's most of its nonverbal, and so that knowledge about how to turn and face someone and lean into the relationship is a mechanical skill. Almost it's just like pulling the bow back on the arrow and getting enough strength and stability to hit the target. And so focusing, using the attending and the observing skills, and particularly the suspending skill, is the most difficult one to develop, because what are we suspending? If we're suspending using that skill, is we're suspending judgment, emotions and premature advice. So the judge comes along whenever we're running into a stress situation and it judges how we're reacting, how we're evaluating that situation as to its threat.

Terry Anderson: 36:12

And if we're caught up and stuck in the judge mode, then we also start reacting from the left side of the brain. And that reactivity is what causes a lot of officers to get into trouble because they're not basing what they're doing on what's really happening in front of them. And experienced officers know how to do this very well. They're grounded, they're centered, they attend, they observe, they listen interactively and they check for what other people mean by what they say. And then they even go into understanding some people's feelings by having a feeling word list developed in their vocabulary. The average person only has about 20 words feeling words that they use in their families, with their friends. But the more precise the feeling word is, the more accurate the understanding is than the more. That encourages two way communication and then problem solving.

Steve Morreale: 37:14

Is this a little similar, and I don't mean to label it, but a bit of emotional intelligence.

Terry Anderson: 37:24

These are the skills that enable emotional intelligence to manage.

Steve Morreale: 37:28

Yeah, exactly, I didn't mean to cut you off like that, but you know I'm hearing exactly what you're saying, but I'm so. So this is like peeling back the onion to see what leads to understanding your emotional intelligence and other people reading other people, that kind of stuff. So that's fascinating to me.

Terry Anderson: 37:47

It really is, and it's not only fascinating conceptually, but it is a freeing, a release to be able to acquire these skills and practice them. And most people who have taken my courses over 8,000 people have gone through my courses they come back to class every week and they say, wow, I just practiced this at home. I didn't take it back to work yet, but or some people do. But they say I need these skills at home. I can't believe I haven't had. How have I made it this far without these skills, literally. So I've had people come back and say I was able to rescue a marriage that was going sideways. I was able to establish two-way communication with my teenager that I wasn't able to establish before, and I'm a more understanding, more patient, more kind person who's more likely to intervene appropriately instead of giving premature advice or pulling the trigger too soon.

Steve Morreale: 38:54

Interesting. I hear sometimes in my own from my own spouse that I really didn't want you to solve my problem. I just wanted you to listen and that you understand what I'm saying and sometimes that we need to understand that I've learned the hard way. Sometimes they say because cops have a tendency to want to solve problems and move on to the next problem instead of just listening.

Terry Anderson: 39:20

It's not their fault and they are pressured for time, terribly pressured for time, so I give them a lot of grace and I've been on 1400 hours of ride-alongs with them, so I understand what the street looks like. I've seen some things I wish I hadn't seen and, just like they do, so I know the skills. Work on the street with someone who is afraid of cops. All the cop has to do is observe them and respond with understanding to the state that they're in, and then two-way communication starts.

Steve Morreale: 39:58

No question, I do an awful lot of work and have been assisting some agencies based on the work of co-response, and so you would understand that it's a clinician in the police vehicle with, and very often, if the police officer can begin to trust that clinician and allow them to do their thing on the scene, as soon as things have settled and there's no threat, what you begin to see is the police officer very often learns from the approach of the clinician, the social worker, on how to de-escalate a situation, how to address somebody who is in a state of difficulty, even by just saying not I'm Officer Morielli, but I'm Steve and I'm here because you seem to be. So I'm seeing a shake your head.

Terry Anderson: 40:54

I have the benefit of watching you, but clearly you understand that Well an officer's understand it too, and when they have the opportunity to go through the training they say that when they go back on shift their perspective has changed to one of assessment first and then intervention. So they do a more luxurious, thorough assessment of what's going on in front of them before they react.

Steve Morreale: 41:25

They're slowing things down to take two so they can assess and understand.

Terry Anderson: 41:29

It's also more time for assessment, more time for two-way communication to happen, and that gives them far more information about what's going to be appropriate that they might do next. Great, that's great. So in the agencies that have the two person social worker and cop going out to the domestic dispute situation, the officers who have that social worker with them are actually getting training and those skills.

Steve Morreale: 42:01

I understand they're watching it. They're watching what works and what didn't. I, as we went down, I'll tell you a story about a colleague of mine who started doing this in Massachusetts 25, 30 years ago and, forced upon a sergeant he didn't like it at first watches her act, watches her calm things down, has to handle a situation because it may be more dangerous than most, and so she has to stay back and she listens. And afterwards he comes back and she says to him Greg, I can't believe the way you handled it. And he said what do you mean? And she said you sounded like you were with me. And he said what the F? Don't you think I'm listening to you so clearly? He's learning, right, I'm just an amazing transformation.

Terry Anderson: 42:54

Right, and the cops who've gone out with the social workers have come and they've taken our course, have told me that their colleagues want to take our course because they want the skills that that officer has because he just got promoted or he's the leader of a team now and it's skill envy.

Steve Morreale: 43:19

I love that skill envy.

Terry Anderson: 43:22

The ideal training scenario, in my personal opinion, is that officers would get exposed to all the skills and introduce to them and start practicing them during recruit training. Then their field training officer for six months would have already been trained and the field training officer, in responding to calls and going through those motions, would be solidifying those skills and verifying that that officer is ready to go on the street on their own. But without those skills they're just jumping into a pool of confusion and complexity that's actually difficult for anybody to manage and with the skills it's easier because you have a rudder, you have some sense of what you could do next. That could make a positive difference.

Steve Morreale: 44:06

We've got to wind down, terri, but I have a couple of questions for you. We're talking to Terri Anderson, dr Terri Anderson. He is sitting in Los Angeles today and we're here in Boston. I'm sure that your weather is much better than our weather here. But what are you reading, as busy as you are writing and all this stuff, what do you do to continually learn and understand and grow your ideas and grow your concepts? What do you read? Magazines, books.

Terry Anderson: 44:33

I read books, I listen to podcasts and I think probably the work that I do in researching what I'm going to write next is probably where I do the most learning. What I'm writing next is my autobiography. I had my son pass two months ago, oh, so sorry. So I'm dealing with grief and processing grief and understanding grief like I've never understood it before. My parents passed, you know, a decade ago, and I knew they were going and I was doing pretty well with that, but this was totally unexpected. He just didn't wake up one morning and we don't know why.

Terry Anderson: 45:08

I'm trying to learn about grief, how to process grief and how. That's related to PTSD, because I have PTSD. I have been traumatized by the six months delay that the Sheriff's Department has in the coroner's office to be able to do a toxicology report. That's really frustrating for me because I don't know why my son died and it's sorrowful. So I'm studying grief and the processing of grief and I'm learning better how to grief and I think this is what everybody goes through when they see a tragic incident and all the cops I know and all the right alongside Ben on they have to process a certain amount of grief, sometimes after every shift when they see a lot of stuff happen. I understand, and so I'm looking at positive intelligence in this program as a way to help people process this really quickly, and I'm getting better at it.

Steve Morreale: 45:59

So you're using your own pain to try to understand it and then to use that to help others. That's what it sounds like Absolutely Good for you. I'm so sorry about your loss. One more question, though. I'm going to throw a curveball at you If you had a chance to sit down with anybody who has passed, who has written or has inspired you about their work, a public figure who might?

Terry Anderson: 46:20

that be. I would like to spend some time with Gerard Egan, who said on my PhD committee. He's not passed yet. As far as I know, I think he's still alive, but he's one person that just comes to mind right now. He was the head of the CORD program, the Community and Organization Development Program, at Loyola University. I didn't attend there, but he was on my committee as a chair my PhD committee so I studied under him and learned everything and taught using his textbook called the Skilled Helper for 25 years. He's kind of my conceptual hero, as well as Dr Alan Ivy, who also sat on my PhD committee and he was at the University of Massachusetts before he retired. So these are kind of the living heroes. I guess if I could study with anybody who's passed, I'd like to spend some time with Gandhi. I'd like to learn how he was able to maintain grounding and centering and composure and peace in the midst of conflict and chaos and promote that to others. I think that's a pretty cool achievement.

Steve Morreale: 47:18

Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you very much. I wish you good luck in your work in the future. I hope that listeners have gained much from what you have talked about, what you have done. We've been talking with Dr Terry Anderson and he wrote Every Officer is a Leader. He's on his fourth version of that book with others, and also that comes along with a field guide that you may find valuable. So, terry, you have the last word. What do you say to police officers who have a difficult job, but how to work towards improving their abilities and their capabilities?

Terry Anderson: 47:52

Well, I guess, first of all, my colleagues and I deeply care, and most of the people who worked with me on writing the fourth edition of the book are cops or retired cops, and I think as you read the book you're going to find there's a heart for you. I have a heart for you and that's why I do all this. I could retire easily right now and not do anything, but it just wouldn't be part of my line of purpose.

Steve Morreale: 48:14

That's great. It's a great purpose, isn't it? Yes, thank you Enjoy. Enjoy your time in your snowbird location, and when will you head back up north?

Terry Anderson: 48:22

Every six months, so next April we go back.

Steve Morreale: 48:26

That's great.

Terry Anderson: 48:27

And we just go back and forth. We're dual citizens and enables us to have that freedom Terrific.

Steve Morreale: 48:31

Thanks so much for spending the time. I really do appreciate it. This is Steve Morielli, and you've been listening to the Cop Doc podcast, so that is another episode on the books. Terry, thank you so much.

Terry Anderson: 48:42

Appreciate how you did this. It's wonderful.

Intro - Outro: 48:46

Thanks for listening to The Cop Doc Podcast with Dr Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager, turned academic and scholar from Worcester State University. Please tune into The Cop Doc Podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.