Why I Brought In an Executive Coach
In 2021, I was preparing to transition from Deputy Chief to Chief. My city manager sat me down, and I expected the conversation to be about operational experience — call volume, staffing, the things that usually get scrutinized before a promotion like that. Instead, he asked what I was doing to develop myself as a leader. He pushed me to think beyond law enforcement for the answer, and then he suggested something I barely understood at the time: executive coaching.
Looking back, I'm grateful for how much he believed in my ability to grow into that expanded role. He didn't just point me toward an idea and leave me to figure it out. He helped me identify an executive coach who could support that growth — not only for me, but for the up-and-coming command staff who were about to step into larger roles alongside me.
That last part matters more than I understood at the time. I didn't roll coaching out to my sergeants and lieutenants first and stay above it myself. I started that work with myself and my command staff first. It was in the years that followed where we expanded that same kind of development downstream to the rest of our supervisors — the effort I wrote about in an earlier issue. The sequencing wasn't an accident, and I don't think it was optional either. Development imposed downward without being modeled upward loses credibility before it begins. People don't follow what you say about growth. They follow what they watch you do about it.
The coaching itself looked nothing like the training I was used to. Nobody handed me a binder of best practices or a checklist. It was somebody whose entire job was to ask better questions than I was asking myself, and to say things my rank made it hard for anyone else to say to my face — how I ran a meeting, how I handled conflict with my own command staff, where my ego was quietly doing the deciding instead of my judgment. That kind of readiness doesn't show up on a résumé, and nothing in nearly three decades of operational experience had prepared me for how uncomfortable, or how necessary, it would be.
That experience is a big part of why BRG Leadership exists now. I built the coaching side of it around the same relationship that changed how I led — one where a leader gets an honest mirror instead of a yes-man, at the level where it's hardest to find one. If you're leading people and no one above you has ever gone through that kind of development themselves, that's worth a look.
Here's what I'd ask you to sit with this week: the skills that got you promoted are rarely the exact skills that make you effective once you're there. Almost every leader I know has that gap, myself included. The real question is whether anyone above you has ever done the work to close theirs first, or whether you're the first one being asked to.
Where have you seen growth asked of the people at the bottom that nobody at the top ever modeled first?
#Leadership #LeadershipDevelopment #PoliceLeadership #LawEnforcementLeadership #ExecutiveCoaching
