What does police leadership development need next?

Senior police leaders are asked to operate across a vast operational range while also running complex modern organisations. Most of their development happens inside policing, which limits the breadth of perspective they can bring to strategic decisions. Closing that gap requires deliberate exposure to learning, methods, and people from outside the service.

Police leadership development professionalises operational skills well. The national ELP (Executive Leadership Programme), the College of Policing's various structured pathways, and the long tradition of moving high-potential officers through challenging operational roles all produce credible operational leaders. The question is whether the same system equips those leaders for the parts of the job that aren't operational.

What we ask senior police leaders to do

The salary for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is close to £300,000. The job carries scrutiny and criticism most other public sector roles don't approach. But the operational demand is only part of what the Commissioner, and chief officers across the country, are asked to do.

We expect them to demonstrate credible operational leadership across safeguarding, covert policing, serious crime, cyber, and the complex needs of diverse communities. We also expect them to provide the leadership required across any complex modern organisation: running change programmes, and leading commercial procurement - not to mention managing on a public stage in relation to often the most impactful policy questions facing society. Police forces are particularly complex organisations. They perform multiple functions, can't opt out of activity, and can't choose not to serve a particular group of 'customers' the way a private sector business can.

This is a real ask, and it's one that the standard preparation route under-serves.

Where the preparation gap is

The bulk of preparation that future chief officers receive is geared towards operational leadership rather than the broader organisational responsibilities, and it usually takes place inside one sector: policing.

Policing produces strong operational leaders by design. But stepping up to lead an entire complex organisation takes anyone beyond what served them well at the operational level. The service has carefully professionalised how technical skills are developed. It hasn't yet built an equivalent place where future strategic leaders can learn safely about things they haven't encountered before.

Access to the ELP occurs at an already very senior level, post-assessment. By the time someone is on it, they're being prepared for the specific role they applied for, rather than for the wider organisational range chief officers are expected to bring once in post. Too often, people with future potential are thrown into complex strategic roles and expected to pick up the basics as they go. Investment in development too often goes to selection support, rather than to thriving in the role that follows.

What insularity costs

C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian historian, wrote in his preface to Beyond a Boundary (1963): 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' The risk of insularity grows in proportion to an organisation's 'locked down' nature. The police have legitimate reasons to be careful about who they employ, what data they hold, what information they release, and how they preserve operational tactics by maintaining security.

That makes insularity understandable, but it doesn't make it excusable. Even chief constables can feel out of their depth when dealing with ministers and operating in the corridors of Whitehall. Part of the answer is to relearn the value of looking outward with a curious and open mind. Outside the top ranks of policing it is now entirely normal to have worked in numerous different organisations and sectors across a professional career - often to reach the top of policing, you need to have joined relatively young, worked your way up, and then be in certain roles at certain times when forces are able to run promotion processes - to reach the very top, it is really quite unlikely that you will have had a career before or outside policing - and this means you are unlikely to have an real, embodied sense of what work, teams and organisations really feel like and how they really work outside of policing. And that can make an already very, very difficult job harder - given the breadth of expectations on people in those roles.

What good development looks like at this level

I've experienced both sides of this. I went through the police High Potential Development Scheme over a decade before moving into the private sector and seeing different approaches to senior development. Most of what I've learnt about leading outside policing was not in a classroom. It was through project work, relationship-based learning, and being asked to lead in contexts that wouldn't have been familiar to a serving officer.

Senior police leadership development could draw more deliberately on what the private sector has worked out about leading complex organisations: practical experience-based learning, exposure to outside-sector practitioners, applied work over a meaningful period, and methods that allow learners to translate insight back into their own setting.

The College of Policing has the leadership role here. Private sector partners and current police leaders can support that by stepping up, moving faster, and offering programmes that bring genuine outside perspective into the development of future strategic leaders.

What this could look like in practice

A leadership learning experience that is outward-focused, collaborative, inclusive, and accessible. One that reduces the practice of taking people away for weeks at a time, and uses mixed and self-driven daily short formats to bring impactful content to learners over a meaningful period, guided by senior expert practitioners with genuine strategic credentials and intimate knowledge of policing.

Policing has a strong culture of learning by doing. That can be the base on which a refreshed approach to senior leadership development is built.

At its best, leadership development takes learners out of comfort zones into places where they engage with others, expect to be challenged, and are invited to reassess views. Great L&D puts people back in touch with why they joined policing as a vocation. It enables a shift of perspective: a mature, thoughtful, and self-critical understanding of the learner as a leader, and really getting involved in how to learn, relearn and unlearn as a leader.