In an era of increasing operational demands, staffing pressures, and heightened public scrutiny, law enforcement agencies can no longer afford to treat leadership development as secondary to operational preparedness. The two are inextricably linked. As Lexipol launches its inaugural Readiness Week from September 21 – 25, 2026, public safety leaders must confront a fundamental truth: Operational readiness begins with leadership readiness. The concept of readiness has evolved beyond equipment checks, action plans, and policy updates. True readiness requires leaders who can navigate complexity, build resilient organizations, and develop the next generation of professionals who will carry the mission forward. This is where principle-based leadership becomes not just a philosophical ideal, but a practical necessity for agencies seeking to close preparedness gaps and build sustainable operational capability. Drawing from extensive research and the collective wisdom of law enforcement leaders who have commanded agencies from fewer than 20 officers to more than 50,000, 10 core traits emerge as essential: selflessness, mentorship, education, decision-making, the strength to challenge, embracing change, presence, fairness, interpersonal skills, and team building. These traits form the foundation upon which agencies can build the continuous readiness capabilities that modern policing demands.
“Readiness is no longer a one-time effort. It is a continuous capability that must be strengthened and sustained through leadership that does the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.”
1. Selflessness: The Foundation of Service
Selflessness serves as the backbone of principle-based leadership. As one retired chief once told me, “It’s no longer about you, it’s about what you can do for others.” In the context of preparedness, selfless leaders place the welfare of their personnel and community above their own interests, recognizing that readiness is not about personal glory but collective capability. Selfless leaders make personal sacrifices to further the good of the whole. They take responsibility for agency missteps while praising others for successes. During critical incidents, they demonstrate this trait by ensuring their people have the resources, training, and support needed to succeed, sometimes at the expense of their own comfort or even career advancement.2. Mentorship: Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Today
Perhaps the greatest responsibility a law enforcement leader has is developing the next generation of leaders for their department and the profession. In the context of preparedness, mentorship ensures continuity of operations and the transfer of institutional knowledge. Effective mentorship corrects weaknesses while building upon strengths, and it starts at the first supervisory level rather than at the command staff table. It requires leaders to look past optics and personal preferences to select the best people and develop them into well-rounded professionals. Agencies that prioritize mentorship create resilient organizations where knowledge, skills, and values persist regardless of personnel changes.3. Education: The Readiness Multiplier
Proper education is crucial to leadership success and organizational preparedness. Education serves to open the leaders’ minds, exposing them to different philosophies and ways of thinking and allowing them to learn from the experiences of others. Educated leaders become lifelong learners who can apply their knowledge to real-world issues. They develop the critical thinking skills necessary to analyze complex situations and make informed decisions. This means leaders who can anticipate challenges, understand historical precedents, and develop innovative solutions to emerging threats.4. Decision-Making: The Essence of Leadership
Decision-making has been called the essence of leadership. Nothing distinguishes a leader more than their willingness to make sound decisions in a timely manner based upon available information and facts. Preparedness requires leaders who can make tough calls under pressure, whether deploying resources during emergencies, implementing new policies, or addressing personnel issues. Effective decision-makers also recognize that they will not be present for most of the decisions their agency makes. They push authority down to the lowest effective level, empowering subordinates to develop their own decision-making capabilities and accepting that a good decision made quickly by a front-line supervisor on scene usually beats a better one made an hour later at headquarters.5. Strength to Challenge: Questioning for Improvement
Principle-based leaders are not “yes” people. They possess the strength to challenge the status quo and address things they believe are unjust or wrong with their superiors. Challenging well is a discipline, not a temperament. It means raising the objection in the room where the decision is being made rather than in the parking lot afterward, and doing it in a way that keeps the focus on the mission instead of the messenger. For readiness, this trait prevents complacency and groupthink. Leaders who challenge outdated assumptions, inefficient processes, or inadequate resource allocations drive continuous improvement. They create cultures where critical thinking is valued and where “we’ve always done it this way” is recognized as the danger sign it truly is.6. Embraces Change: Adapting to Evolving Threats
It’s often been said that the two things people in law enforcement hate the most are (1) the way things are, and (2) change. Police agencies are notorious for resisting change, but principle-based leaders recognize that the world is constantly evolving, and policing must adapt accordingly. Readiness requires agility. Leaders who embrace change become agents for improvements that are smart, creative, and clearly thought out. They understand that culture often “eats policy for breakfast,” so they work to build organizational cultures that view intentional change as normal and necessary.7. Presence: Being There When It Matters
Presence is the natural ability of a leader to demonstrate command of their mental and physical faculties, emotions, and situations. Principle-based leaders are not only aware of what their officers are doing; they are actively seen by and available to those officers. Operational readiness requires leaders who are physically and emotionally present during critical incidents, not hiding behind desks or managing by email. Presence builds confidence and trust. When leaders demonstrate through their appearance, actions, and demeanor that they remain “cops at heart,” they earn the respect necessary to lead effectively during crises.8. Fairness: Consistency in Standards
Fairness is consistency in holding subordinates accountable to the same high standards while recognizing individual circumstances. It means giving people the same opportunities for assignments and tasks regardless of whatever personal feelings they may have toward them. When it comes to readiness, fairness ensures that standards are maintained equally across the organization. Personnel who trust they will be treated fairly are more likely to report problems, admit mistakes, and engage in activities that help them continuously improve. Fairness in disciplinary actions, assignment selections, and recognition programs creates an environment where personnel feel secure enough to take the calculated risks necessary for effective policing.9. Interpersonal Skills: Building Trust Networks
Interpersonal skills are essential for leaders to build relationships of trust and respect with subordinates, peers, superiors, other agencies, and members of the community. Operational readiness depends on relationships. Leaders with strong interpersonal skills develop the networks necessary for effective multi-agency response, community partnerships, and internal cohesion — networks that carry an agency through the moments when formal channels move too slowly or fail outright.10. Team Builder: Creating Collaborative Capability
Principle-based leaders embrace partnerships with personnel within their own organization and in other law enforcement agencies, government entities, private organizations, and community groups. Readiness is inherently collaborative. Effective leaders break down silos between divisions, agencies, and jurisdictions. They recognize that policy, training, wellness, compliance, and reporting are deeply connected, yet many agencies continue managing them separately. Leaders who are team builders create integrated approaches to readiness where personnel understand their roles in the larger mission and trust their colleagues to fulfill theirs.The Principles in Practice
Ten traits, listed together, can read like a wish list. But they really are necessary for principle-based leadership. None of the leaders mentioned below set out specifically to demonstrate a principle. Rather, each of them faced a situation in which the principled choice and the comfortable one pointed in different directions.Selflessness: In 2002, after Chicago Officer Benjamin Perez was struck and killed by a train, Superintendent Terry Hillard refused to assign the task of recovering his body to line personnel — young officers who were not only teammates but friends. He and his command staff did the work themselves, sparing their people a traumatic exposure and honoring a fallen officer with dignity.[1]
Mentorship: Washington, D.C., Chief of Police Charles Ramsey made a practice of pushing promising officers into assignments they had not asked for. Shortly after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, he placed Cathy Lanier in command of the department’s Special Operations Division, a post no woman had ever held. Lanier has since described that assignment as more valuable than anything she could have learned in a classroom, and she went on to become the city’s longest-serving police chief.
Education: As a new NYPD captain, John Timoney started a reading group with fellow officers, working their way through the classics over beer and pizza. Arguing about ideas from outside the job, he later said, was what sharpened his thinking — the same thinking that would carry him to become a chief of department for the NYPD, commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, and chief of the Miami Police Department.[2]
Decision-making: At Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Gen. Stanley McChrystal concluded that centralized approval was costing more than it protected. In response, he created “Empowered Execution,” which authorized subordinate leaders to decide far above their normal authority, provided the decision was legal and served the mission. Decisions came faster, and the results were better.[3]
The strength to challenge: At the New York Transit Police in the early 1990s, William Bratton argued that officers carrying .38 caliber revolvers were both outgunned and undertrained to respond to rising levels of crime. The mayor, NYPD leadership, and the New York Times all disagreed with him. He made the case for 9mm semi-automatics anyway, and won it.[4]
Embracing change: A few years later, William Bratton took over an NYPD where the idea that “bigger is better” was seen as self-evident. Instead of relying purely on numbers, Commissioner Bratton deployed CompStat and rebuilt patrol and investigative schedules around actual crime patterns. His department’s mandate to police proactively produced a decline in crime that reset expectations for law enforcement nationwide.[4]
Presence: On the morning of September 11, 2001, Port Authority Police Capt. Anthony Whitaker was responsible for every officer the department had assigned to the World Trade Center. He directed a major share of the evacuation as the towers emptied, then narrowly escaped death himself when a jet-fuel fireball erupted from an elevator shaft nearby. He would later rise to assistant chief of the department.
Fairness: NYPD Commissioner Lewis Valentine gave 42 years to the department and 11 of them to its top job. He was known for being feared by corrupt officers and trusted by honest ones in equal measure. He dismissed members who took bribes, yet also restored the ranks of officers who had been demoted for crossing politicians while simply doing their jobs. He set an open-door policy, set aside time each week for personnel who believed they had been treated unfairly by a supervisor, and handled every dismissal personally so no one lost a career without one last appeal.[5]
Interpersonal skills: When husband-and-wife terrorists staged an attack on the County Department of Public Health in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015, San Bernardino Chief Jarrod Burguan had to blend his own officers with personnel from the county sheriff’s office, the California Highway Patrol, the FBI, the ATF, and neighboring agencies into a single tactical response within hours. That coordination was possible only because the relationships behind it had been built long before that morning.
Team building: No small department investigates a major crime alone. That’s a truth my father, Chief William D. Fraass, and his fellow Marin County police chiefs recognized in the late 1970s. In response, they set up the Marin County Major Crimes Task Force, which pooled investigators from departments that could not have individually carried narcotics, homicide, and sexual assault caseloads. The task force continued until it was finally dissolved in 2020.
What all these leaders share is not temperament, rank, or era. Several ran enormous agencies; one ran a department of a few dozen. What they share is that each had built the capacity for the decision before the moment arrived. Hillard’s command staff did not decide on the tracks that night what kind of leaders they were. Burguan did not begin building relationships with the FBI on the morning of the terror attack. That is the practical argument for principle-based leadership: It’s not a philosophy applied during crises, but rather a capability assembled long before them.How prepared is your agency for its next big challenge? Take Lexipol’s TOTAL READINESS ASSESSMENT.
From Principles to Preparedness
As agencies participate in Lexipol’s Readiness Week and the Total Readiness Challenge, they must recognize that sustainable readiness cannot be achieved through checklists alone. It requires leaders who embody these 10 principles: leaders who are selfless, committed to mentorship, continuously educated, decisive, willing to challenge, open to change, present, fair, skilled interpersonally, and dedicated to team building. The current leadership crisis in law enforcement — marked by declining morale, increased attrition, and toxic command climates — demands a return to these fundamentals. Agencies that develop leaders to equip them with these traits will find themselves not only better prepared for emergencies but also better positioned to retain talent, build community trust, and fulfill their missions effectively. Readiness is a continuous capability that must be strengthened and sustained through leadership that does the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason. Operational readiness begins with leadership readiness, and leadership readiness begins with sound, teachable principles.Resources
- Jurkanin T J & Hillard T G. “Chicago Police: An Inside View — The Story of Superintendent Terry G. Hillard.” Charles C Thomas, 2005.
- Timoney, J F. “Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities.” University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
- McChrystal S. “My Share of the Task: A Memoir.” Portfolio/Penguin, 2014.
- Bratton, W J & Knobler P. “Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.” Random House, 1998.
- Valentine L J. “Night Stick: The Autobiography of Lewis J. Valentine.” Dial Press, 1947.
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