A Leader's Philosophy Matters

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You're building a leadership philosophy right now whether you decided to or not. Every scene you run, every subordinate you back or hang out to dry, every call that goes in the report and every one that doesn't, you're setting a pattern. The only question is whether you built it on purpose. Officers who never decide what they believe about leading people end up leading by reflex. Reflex under pressure defaults to self-protection, and self-protection is not leadership.

Leadership is responsibility. That doesn't mean grinding yourself down so everyone else comes out ahead. The standard you hold your people to, do the work right, protect the community, keep faith with the constitution you swore to, is good for you too. You live in the community you protect. You answer to the same law you enforce. Where it goes wrong is the private exception: the moment a call serves your comfort, your record, or your standing with the chief at the cost of the mission and the people under you. That's when it stops being leadership and becomes something else wearing the rank. You're not in charge of people. You're responsible for them. Those sound similar and they run in opposite directions.

Two men mark out the range of what you can choose. One wrote the most honest book about power ever put on paper. The other got handed more raw power than anyone on the continent and spent his life handing it back. Read together, they tell you when to fight like your worst enemy expects and when to lead like the people under you deserve.

The cold read, and where it belongs

Niccolò Machiavelli finished The Prince in 1513, not long after the Medici tortured him with a rope and threw him out of the government he'd served for fourteen years. He wrote from the losing end of power, which is part of why the book is so clear-eyed. His read on human nature is cold and, in the situations cops actually face on the street, frequently correct. People act in their own interest. Gratitude is thin. He argued it's safer to be feared than loved, if you can't manage both, because love holds only as long as it's convenient and fear holds only as long as you stay present and keep the authority. He said a leader has to be the fox and the lion at once, cunning enough to see the trap and strong enough to scare off the wolves.

I don't treat Machiavelli as the villain here, and I'd warn you off anyone who does. On a barricaded subject, across the table from someone sizing you up for a weapon, working a scene where somebody's actively trying to beat you, the Machiavellian read is the right tool. Assume self-interest. Project strength. Let them fear the consequence more than they want their selfish outcome. It works. It buys you the next five minutes.

That's its range. The immediate adversarial encounter, and nothing past it. The failure, and it's the failure that ends careers and rots agencies, is bleeding that mindset across the line into how you treat the people you serve with and the community and constitution you're sworn to serve.

The long game

George Washington commanded the Continental Army for eight years and won a war he had no business winning, with an army that was rarely paid, often starving, and held together mostly by him. By 1783 he was the most powerful man in America and everyone knew it, including him. What he did with that power, twice, is the whole lesson.

In March 1783 his officers were done waiting. Congress owed them years of back pay and pensions and kept not delivering. An anonymous letter went around the camp at Newburgh, New York, floating the options out loud: if the war dragged on, abandon Congress and let the country fend for itself; if peace came, march on Congress and take what they were owed at gunpoint. It was the moment a lesser commander seizes. The army was loyal to Washington, not to the broke civilian government. He could have ridden that anger straight into running the country.

He did the opposite. He called the officers together and told them plainly that turning the army on its own government would foul everything they'd bled for. Then, stumbling over the opening of his letter, he pulled out a pair of spectacles almost none of them had ever seen him wear and said, by the account of men who were in the room, that they'd have to pardon him, he'd grown gray in their service and was now going blind in it. Officers who'd been ready to mutiny an hour earlier wept. The rebellion died in that room. He'd beaten it with character, not rank, and he spent that character keeping the army under the civilian authority it was supposed to answer to.

Nine months later he made the point permanent. On December 23, 1783, at Annapolis, Washington walked into Congress and handed back his commission. The war was won, no rival stood who could have stopped him, and he gave the power up and went home to his farm. It was so far outside how power normally behaves that Washington’s enemy in the war, King George III, when told by his advisers that Washington meant to resign and go home, reportedly said that if Washington actually did it he'd be the greatest man in the world. He did it.

That's the return on character. Six years later the country made him its first president by unanimous vote, because the one man who had proven he would give power back was the one man they trusted to hold it. Then he did it again, stepping down after two terms when he could have kept the office for life; and he set a precedent of behavior that outlasted him by a century and a half. Washington's authority was never positional. Men followed him, and a new nation handed itself to him, because of what he had shown he would and wouldn't do with power across a lifetime. He showed through his actions that his decisions didn't change depending on who was in the room or what he could personally gain.

There's the line. Machiavelli for the adversary, in the moment. Washington for the people you lead, command, and protect, across a career. A commander who runs his squad on fear and favor gets Machiavelli's short-term compliance and, over time, Washington's opposite: a culture that quietly rots until the good people leave and only the cynical ones stay.

You can check yourself against that line without much effort. When you make a decision, ask what it serves. If it serves the mission, the people under you, and the standard you all answer to, you're on the right side of the line even when the call is hard, and you're inside that standard too, not exempt from it. If it serves only your comfort, your record, or your standing with the chief, you've dragged the adversary's tool inside your own house and turned it on the people who trust you. Do that often enough and you don't have a squad anymore. You have a group of individuals who've learned to watch their backs around you.

Who you answer to

Two orientations, and they aren't about temperament or how warm you are with people. They're about who or what you answer to.

The first answers to something above and outside himself. Call it the mission, the community, the constitution he swore to, the plain standard of doing right by the people in his charge. The founders had a name for what that standard rests on. They called it the laws of nature and nature's God, and they meant something that sits over the leader and the led alike, that nobody gets to rewrite for his own convenience. When this leader makes a call, the question underneath it is what that standard requires: what's best for the constitution, the community, and his people. He'll take the hit with his own boss to do right by them, and he'll hold those same people to a hard line because the work demands it, not because correcting anyone feels good. His authority points outward, at something bigger than he is, and he holds himself to it first.

The second answers only to himself. Every decision gets scored by one question, what's best for me, and that runs both directions. Downward, he manages his people through favor and grievance, rewarding the ones who flatter him and freezing out the ones who don't. Upward, he tells the boss whatever keeps him comfortable and pushes blame down the chain when it lands on him. From the outside it can look like a philosophy. It isn't. It's narcissism in a uniform, a self that serves only itself and calls that leadership.

None of this asks you to erase yourself. The oldest rule for treating others has the self built in: love your neighbor as yourself. You're the measure, not the thing you cut out. The leader who serves the standard isn't putting everyone else ahead of himself. He holds to a principle that's good for him and his people at once, and holds them to it too. That's what keeps a squad together. The self-serving leader isn't guilty of caring about himself. He's guilty of making himself and those who he likes personally the exception to the standard everybody else has to live by.

This is the real fork, and it sits directly under the Machiavelli line from earlier. The Machiavellian read is a tool you point at an adversary and then set down when the encounter's over. The self-serving leader has picked that tool up and turned it inward, permanently, on everyone around him. He runs his own squad the way you'd work a hostile subject, and he never puts it down, because serving himself is the only move he's got.

Your people feel which one you are, and they sort it fast. They follow the leader who's holding to the standard because they trust where his decisions point. The self-serving one gets compliance, only as far as people have to give it, and the good ones start counting the days until they can transfer out from under him. You can't fake the difference for long. Pressure strips it bare, and pressure is the job.

Two everyday behaviors give the self-serving supervisor away, and both are contagious. Complaining and gossip. A supervisor who complains hands every subordinate permission to complain, and it runs down the chain until nobody's fixing anything and everybody's narrating how unfair it all is. Gossip does worse. It teaches the squad that loyalty is conditional and that you'll talk about them the way you're talking about the guy who just walked out. Both are the tell of a man serving himself. Complaining offloads his discomfort onto the room. Gossip buys him a cheap hit of status at someone else's expense. We wreck our own culture from the inside, and no budget cut or bad press does the damage a self-serving supervisor does over a year.

So don't. Never complain in front of your people. Never trade in gossip. If something's broken, fix it or carry it quietly up the chain. That's not about image. It's about keeping your decisions pointed at the standard you answer to instead of at yourself, which is the whole difference.

Master yourself first

Here's the part that's hardest and matters most. Be strict with yourself and patient with everyone else. Not soft. Patient, and always teaching. Discipline exists to serve the purpose, not to grind people down or prove you can. The officer you correct should come out of it better and know you were in his corner while you did it.

You can't lead people to that standard from a self you haven't mastered. An unmastered self defaults to serving itself. That pull is automatic, so it takes deliberate work to keep your decisions aimed at anything past your own comfort. If your own conduct is loose, your discipline reads as hypocrisy and your people feel it before they can name it, and they'll follow you from fear or convenience instead of respect. Master yourself first. Then the following comes from the right place, the kind that holds when you're not in the room.

Who do you answer to? You don't get to answer that with words. Your people already know, and they figured it out from your decisions and your focus, from where your attention goes when the pressure's on. They watched whether the hard call went the way that protected the constitution, their community, and them, and held you to the same standard you hold them, or the way that carved you a private exception. Pick your philosophy on purpose, because you're teaching it either way, every day, to everyone who works with you.

About the Author

John Chapman, known widely as Chappy, is a law enforcement professional with over 34 years of experience in operational, leadership, doctrinal development, applications engineering, and training roles. He is a published author and has specialized in the development and delivery of patrol and tactical law enforcement curriculums for over 28 years. Chappy is the Executive Director of the Task Force 70 Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on training, mentoring, and educating underserved rural and small-town law enforcement officers and agencies across the United States. Information and contact info can be found at TF70.org.