Leadership Ability Highlighted During Sessions
A cross section of this region's patrol officers, detectives and telecommunications dispatchers gathered Tuesday to hone one of their most important skills: leadership ability.
Law enforcement personnel constantly train to be team players and to take charge of situations. To take an already developed skill to the next level, the Jasper Police Department and the Southwest Indiana Law Enforcement Training Council brought Georgia-based speaker and author Stephen Gower to Vincennes University Jasper Campus.
Gower is the best-selling author of 21 books and has given more than 5,000 professional talks. Ninety-three percent of Gower's speeches on subjects such as leadership development, perception, and motivation are directed at law enforcement, although the homespun Southerner has no experience in the field.
Much of his advice suggests that area law enforcement personnel factor perception into their leadership equation. His session's title was borrowed from the title of one of his books: What Do They See When They See You Coming?
That's an important questions for law enforcement officers to ask themselves, Gower said, because officers are also trained to constantly search for errors and violations.
Talking about embarrassing moments that occurred when his speaker's microphone was on and he didn't know it, Gower told session attendees to act as if their microphones are always on. He also cautioned that what may seem like a trivial matter to one person can mean something big and altogether different to another.
Reliving a moment when he knocked a bottle of root beer from his refrigerator shelf, Gower said he had a split second before the bottle hit the floor to ask himself: Is that bottle plastic or glass? He later came to categorize miscues into plastic-bottle mistakes that can be learning experiences and glass-bottle mistakes, which are to be avoided at all costs.
Gower's morning and afternoon sessions were hands-on affairs where police officers and dispatchers were paired and tried their hands at coming up with similar analogies.
Jasper Police Chief Doug Tarvin and Tell City Police Chief Greg Hendershot did well enough to become finalists in one activity and each won one of Gower's books. Deputy Wade Pierce with the Dubois County Sheriff's Department stated that the interaction among the attendees was one of the best parts of what was an informative workshop.
Fifty-eight law enforcement personnel representing 15 departments and agencies across the southern Indiana participated. “The training council has really worked and worked to try to bring training to southwest Indiana,” Tarvin said. It is one of six in Indiana organized by police to educate and train officers, and meet state requirement's as economically as possible.
“This workshop benefits all these small agencies in southwest Indiana at a very reasonable fee,” Tarvin said.
- Bill Powell, Staff Writer
The Herald, Jasper, IN
