The Job Changed Overnight — Did Your Leadership?

I remember sitting in my office one morning, years ago during the time of the Ferguson riots and attacks on police that followed, listening to a group of patrol officers talking in the hallway just after they’d come off shift. The conversation started ordinary enough — what happened on their calls, what they had planned for their days off. Then it shifted, and what I overheard stopped me.

They were talking about approaching citizens the same way they always had, except now their first instinct wasn’t hello — it was self-preservation. Someone just wanting to say hey or ask a question would trigger something different in them now: hearts racing, adrenaline spiking, scanning for intent before a word was even spoken. On the drive home, they were watching their mirrors, asking themselves if anyone was following. Some even chose to stop driving their marked patrol cars home due to them becoming targeted for attacks. Their awareness was running at a level I hadn’t heard them describe before.

I was a Major at the time, and I remember feeling something I wasn’t used to feeling as a commander: helpless. I could encourage them, thank them for the job they were doing, try to stay positive and supportive in front of them — but I couldn’t undo what they were carrying home with them. They weren’t overreacting. Something in the job itself, and in how the public saw them, had genuinely shifted, seemingly overnight.

That hallway conversation wasn’t an isolated moment. It was the first of many waves that kept coming, each one landing faster than the last. Ferguson. Baltimore. Dallas. The murder of George Floyd. A pandemic that emptied the streets and then filled them with a different kind of pressure. Political division that turned a uniform into a symbol before anyone even knew your name. Each wave asked something new of the people wearing the badge.

There was another layer to this that I haven’t talked about much, and it’s one I think doesn’t get named enough: the shifting political landscape, and what it did to officers’ sense of whether anyone above them would have their back. Elected officials across the country were openly speaking out in ways that seemed, to a lot of our people, like support for the anti-police sentiment of the moment. Our local elected officials never wavered — they stood by our department and our officers, and I’m grateful for that to this day. But local support didn’t erase the anxiety. Officers were watching the same national coverage everyone else was watching, and they were asking themselves a very specific, very personal question: if I’m the one in a high-profile incident tomorrow, will my leadership still be standing behind me next week? That kind of uncertainty doesn’t stay contained to the officer. It shows up at their kitchen table. Their spouses felt it. Their kids picked up on it. It was stress with no clean off switch.

You could see what that stress was doing at a system level, too. Police leaders everywhere started retiring or resigning in record numbers — not because they’d stopped caring about the work, but because the weight of it had changed faster than they could keep absorbing it. I watched an agency that bordered our city go through something that became known, informally, as the “blue flu” — a stretch of days when almost every patrol officer scheduled to work suddenly called out sick, all at once. Entire beats went unstaffed. Commanders who hadn’t answered a routine call in years were suddenly the ones filling the gaps, because there was no one else left to send.

I remember watching that unfold next door and asking myself a question I didn’t have a comfortable answer to: at what point do our own officers reach that same level of worry — the kind that makes people stop showing up? What was the actual distance between where my department stood and where that one stood? I didn’t know. That not-knowing sat with me.

I’ve spent close to three decades in this profession, long enough to have led through plenty of difficult stretches. Nothing fully prepared me for how much changed in the space of a few years. And here’s the part I want to be honest about: the leadership training most of us came up on didn’t change nearly as fast as the job did.

We were trained to manage incidents, enforce policy, and hold the line. Those things still matter. But somewhere in the middle of all that upheaval, it became clear that operational competence alone wasn’t going to be enough to lead people through it. Officers weren’t just dealing with more scrutiny and more pressure from the outside. They were absorbing it, carrying it home, and bringing it back the next shift — exactly what I’d heard in that hallway, and exactly what drove an entire shift next door to call out at once. Leading them through that required something command-and-control was never built to provide.

I want to be careful about how I frame this, because it would be easy to hear it as a complaint about how hard things got. That’s not the point. The point is readiness. The profession changed overnight, in real terms, and a lot of leadership models — mine included, at first — were still built for a version of the job that no longer existed. That gap between what changed and what our leadership approach accounted for is where a lot of the strain actually lived, and it’s the same gap that, left unaddressed, turns into empty beats and commanders answering patrol calls.

I don’t think this is unique to policing. Any leader running a team through rapid, external change is dealing with some version of this. The tools that worked when things were more stable often aren’t the tools that work when the ground keeps shifting under your people. Recognizing that gap is the first step. Closing it is the work I’ve spent a long time on since, and it’s most of what this newsletter will be about going forward.

Here’s something worth trying this week: sit down and name one assumption you’ve been operating on that hasn’t held up over the last five years. Maybe it’s an assumption about how much people can absorb before it affects performance. Maybe it’s an assumption about what motivates someone to stay versus leave. Maybe it’s simpler than that — an assumption that if you just hold the standard, people will meet it, without much thought to what it takes to help them get there.

You don’t have to solve it right away. Just naming it honestly is enough to start.

I’d genuinely like to know: what’s changed most about leading your people in the last five years? Drop a comment below — I read every one, and it shapes where this newsletter goes next.

— Brandon

This piece was originally published as Issue 1 of Leadership Under Pressure on LinkedIn. Subscribe there to get new issues as soon as they publish.