The Ingredients of a "Leaderful" Organization: An Interview with Mac Tristan
by Kali Saposnick

from Leverage Points Issue 62

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Mac Tristan is the assistant chief of police for the Carrollton, Texas, Police Department. Using the tools of problem-oriented policing and servant-leadership, he has created an interdependent team of line-level patrol officers within his bureau. In a short period, this group has boosted police morale, reduced crime, and improved communication with citizens. Mac will be speaking with Ann McGee-Cooper, cofounder of Ann McGee-Cooper and Associates, a creative problem-solving consulting team, at the 2005 Pegasus Conference, "Embracing Interdependence: Effective and Responsible Action in Our Organizations and the World" (learn more). The tools he will share can apply to and help any organization become more effective, efficient, and interdependent. In the following interview, he gives some insights into creating a "leaderful" organization.

Imagine police officers who confidently deviate from official procedure without clearing their actions with their supervisor first. Not only do they successfully employ a new method for catching car thieves and burglars, but they convince their peers in the department to do so, too. While this situation may not sound radical to people in the private sector, for most traditional police departments, it is. Yet, today, this is how things often get done at the Carrollton, Texas, Police Department.

The seed for this transformation was planted more than a decade ago, when Carrollton's assistant police chief, Mac Tristan, was introduced to problem-oriented policing (POP) and servant-leadership. POP is a method for proactively solving problems in a law enforcement environment; it shares many characteristics with servant-leadership, a model for engaging the knowledge and wisdom of employees from throughout an organization.

In traditional command-and-control police departments, officers typically react to what their supervisors tell them to do, for example, write tickets and take reports. According to Mac, "This style doesn't work anymore, particularly when our department requires an associates' degree to even walk through the door, 85 percent of our employees have bachelor's degrees, and some have master's degrees. We hire the best and brightest and then treat them like robots. I wanted to create a different kind of environment, one that encourages the creative input from every member of the team."

Challenging the Silo Mentality
Part of Mac's challenge has been addressing the traditional silo mentality of police work. Each of the three bureaus in his agency—Operations (patrol), Management Services (internal affairs and administration), and Investigative Services (detectives)—is headed by an assistant chief; in the past, they rarely collaborated. Instead, to address problems, officers had to escalate them up the chain of command within their own bureau and wait for a response, sometimes months, before they could take action. What Mac did was to empower his officers to creatively solve problems, especially stubborn cases that none of the bureaus could close—and to do so in tandem with their peers from other bureaus and city departments, rather than waiting for input from their superiors.

"I compare the issues we're dealing with today to white-water rafting," Tristan explains. "If you're sculling the Charles River, your mission is fairly simple and straightforward. In white waters, though, problems come at you from every direction. You've got to have a team of people on your raft that are committed to their mission and working together to achieve it. If someone's not committed, that whole raft is going to flip over or sink. I can't run this entire operation by myself. I need support and decision-makers up and down the organization. In a traditional police department, decisions come from the top down. In problem-orienting policing or servant-leadership organizations, everyone takes turns leading, regardless of rank or position."

To implement his vision of an interdependent team, in May 2004 Mac put together a volunteer group of officers, representing each of the 10 patrol shifts in the Operations division, which he heads. He tasked them with breaking down the organization's silos by addressing issues such as communication among shifts, divisions, and bureaus and crime trends such as persistent burglary of motor vehicles. He gave them a six-question template to guide every decision they made, which evolved from a list his supervisor and mentor, Carrollton Police Chief David James, had created. As long as the officers could answer yes to each of the questions, they didn't have to seek Tristan's permission to implement the solutions they come up with.

An Interdependent Team at Work
Here's one example of what the team accomplished: For months the detective division worked undercover at a rundown hotel that regularly hosted prostitutes and drug dealers. Every weekend there were disturbances, fights, and arrests. Eventually, the detectives needed to move on to another case and asked Operations to deal with the situation. Mac charged two officers with putting the problem through the SARA model (Scan, Analyze, Respond, and Assess), a tool of POP. After identifying the real source of trouble as the hotel managers, who were renting rooms by the hour and failing to report crimes, the officers collaborated with code enforcement officials, fire marshals, and the attorney general's office to eventually shut down the hotel. Through significant time, hard work, and much effort, they eliminated hundreds of calls for service per year to that one location.

There are numerous other examples in which Carrollton officers reduced crime such as auto burglary by over 13 percent in 2004 (including a more than 90-percent reduction in the hardest hit area of town) and improved communication with its citizens. All of these efforts and initiatives are driven by the officers themselves, not the supervisors.

"In the servant-leadership philosophy, everyone takes turns leading," says Mac. "These officers do not have to go through me to take action. They can directly approach any other city department and ask for help to resolve the problem. Too often our employees have to jump through enormous bureaucratic hoops to get their job done. Chief James and I and all of the supervisors in our chain of command have worked hard at eliminating every one of those hurdles." True to servant-leadership, which emphasizes modeling and building shared trust, Tristan claims that his officers began to take serious action only when they were convinced that he really was going to empower them to make their own decisions.

Recently, some outside observers commented, "If we could get our line-level employees to do what you're doing, our problems would disappear. You can't buy that kind of commitment and loyalty." Tristan agrees. "Today, patrol officers from the bottom up are worried and concerned about the direction of our organization. They're actively working to steer the direction of the department as well as improve quality of life issues in the community. These officers are passionate, committed, and believe that they can have an impact on crime—and anything in our organization that they want to change."

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.