Fred Leland is a retired lieutenant with the Walpole, Massachusetts, Police Department and a former Marine. He has taught law enforcement and security for more than 30 years and founded LESC in 2006. We asked him how to build adaptive leaders.
Tactical decision games
Fred traces the rise of tactical decision games. Adaptability moves the focus from what to do to how to think. Instructors shape the training environment and set the stage for experiential learning. The student owns the learning, and the theory comes later.
Adaptive policing
Centralized command and control dominated in the 1980s. Fred shows how decision games work in corporations too. Leaders need to see a problem from several perspectives and keep assessing. He explains how to build an adaptive police force and move officers from doing to thinking.
Intuition and the moral side
Developing leaders means developing intuition and implicit guidance and control. Adaptive leadership needs buy-in from the top. Fred applies Sun Tzu to law enforcement, describes the community policing model, and talks about fear and the moral side of policing.
Adaptive leaders orient well under stress, and Fred has trained officers to do exactly that.
What decision game would prepare your team for its next hard call?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.