The Art of Stewardship: Leading with Service and Collaboration

This episode of Beyond the Bandaids is brought to you by Project PACT (Police And Community Together).

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Connect with the co-hosts of Beyond the Bandaids:

Chief Mike Butler on LinkedIn
Dr. Carol Engel-Enright on LinkedIn
Kristin Daley on LinkedIn

The following three organizations—each committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity—joined forces to create Project PACT.

Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP)
New Blue
The School of Statesmanship, Stewardship & Service (SOSSAS)

Beyond the Bandaids is dedicated to exploring how police officers, public safety professionals, community leaders, and community members can reconnect with their sense of purpose and inspire positive change in their local community.

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[Narrator] (0:02 – 0:18)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT, hosted by Dr. Carol Engel Enright, Kristen Daly, and Chief Mike Butler, where we explore how police, public safety experts, city leaders, and dedicated community members can work together to drive meaningful change.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (0:19 – 1:20)
Hello and welcome back to Beyond the Band-Aids. I’m Carol and Mike and Kristen are here with me and today we’re going to talk about stewardship, an interesting word, one that we use within our school statesmanship, stewardship and service, and one that Mike has used as he came in to police chief over 30 years ago. And we’re going to dive right in to kind of what is the meaning of stewardship, why do we use it.

Last episode we talked about partnership, walking alongside other people, but stewardship takes on a little bit more in the organizational development arena in terms of how you do your business and and and how you work with people and how you actually manage to get things done. So Mike, I’m gonna just kind of go through a few questions with you of how you first came upon the word stewardship and and where did that take you and what does it mean to you?

[Mike Butler] (1:20 – 4:59)
Yeah sure, thank you. And it may be the driving kind of concept of how we should be running or how we should be leading our organizations and how our organization should be working in partnership with our communities. But the word stewardship is often kind of aligned with land management resources and being stewards of the land and honoring the land.

And the word stewardship in terms of organizations and community is honoring the people, honoring their perspective, seeing those folks as having a different kind of capacity, not being limited or error prone or weak, but having almost an infinite unlimited capacity and seeing people that way. And so the word stewardship and that framework came to me in a book that was written, I think it was published in 1993, by a friend mentor of mine named Peter Block. And so I first learned about stewardship and the principles of stewardship from Peter Block way back, it was 30-some years ago.

And when I became the police chief and public safety director in the city of Longmont, I wanted to apply those principles in terms of what practices might look like within a police department and the fire department. And it addresses so many different aspects of the organization, including the one we talked about last week, partnership. It addresses that sense of ownership, it addresses the culture of accountability or a culture of accepting the role that you have in this organization.

And by the way, it applies to more than leadership. Leaders have a role in the concept, it’s more than a word, but the large concept of stewardship. But the other people that have a role in all of this are the people who are, in essence, being led.

And that they have to make different choices about their own work experience, the quality of their work experience, their role in terms of accepting more responsibility for outcomes, their role in choosing accountability at a much higher level, their role in answering that how question more so on their own than saying, going to their bosses or their leaders and saying, how do I do this? And answering the where, and I need to know where, what, when, and how in terms of all those answers. And so it’s a large concept that applies to a model of servant leadership.

And, you know, Robert Greenleaf coined that phrase, servant leadership. But it’s that concept of choosing service over self-interest, choosing to be there for the good of the whole and not just your own agenda. It has all of that and is part of stewardship.

And so that’s what we utilized as we began working with the Long Island Police Department, and not only the police department, but also the community. We applied these principles in the community in terms of wanting people to accept more responsibility for their sense of well-being, their sense of safety, their sense of each other. This just isn’t about you.

This is about how everybody kind of works together. This really captures that ideal that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, that all of our parts and each of us are that part. It’s part of something much bigger.

And in the community, it was the community that was the whole, so to speak.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (5:00 – 5:54)
So I want to get to the timeline of this. You had become aware of the book, and you’d read the book a couple of times through an organizational development consultant that you knew. And then you brought it in, and I think you brought, you talked to Peter, you brought in the book and had a lot of your officers read the book together.

And you actually had, and I think this is really interesting too, you kind of had a book club within your department on kind of discussing new areas. Now from the academic research point of view, if you look up stewardship in the databases, a lot of what happens is Peter Block. And then you went back to Peter, or you saw him again, and you said, hey, would you ever be interested in talking to a community or working with a community?

And what did he say to that?

[Mike Butler] (5:55 – 8:34)
Absolutely. I mean, it’s a larger story. Let me just go back, and I won’t recapture all of it, but it’s a, I ended up buying, purchasing, most likely several hundred copies of the book Stewardship and passed them out like candy to everybody and anybody, people in the community, certainly our staff, and had many books of stewardship books on, in my library in terms of, hey, here’s, people come in and say, where’d you come up with these concepts? And I would give them the book Stewardship and say, if you’re open to reading it, let’s read it.

If you’re, you have questions, I’m there to answer. But I did meet Peter when he came to a conference in Denver. He had just scheduled a conference to come and speak on the principles of stewardship, and I invited our entire staff to go.

We could, not all of us could go, but around 30 to 40 of our staff went, and I met Peter, and I asked him to go to lunch that day with me, and so we had a group of people that were there from the department, and Peter graciously joined us, and I asked Peter if he’d be willing to come to Longmont, Colorado, and speak to a conference that we were entitling the Our Town Conference. It was a conference designed for people that couldn’t go to conferences. It was that first part of getting the community to understand that they could be part of something bigger, and kind of spreading that community literacy that, and believing that, you know, if we could enhance the knowledge of people in our community, that that knowledge would lead to a different level of power that each person might have, and that that power could eventually result in more choices for people. And so there were a lot of people that attended.

We ran three Our Town Conferences, and Peter Block was a keynote at each of those, and so and then began to spread that information, that knowledge, that sense that people did have more power than perhaps what they realized, and could become more responsible in their own families, their own neighborhoods, and in the community. Several, by the way, several nonprofits grew out of those Our Town, they started, or like six or seven nonprofits that grew, in terms of trying to figure out how we could engage our community. We call it a community engagement, but, you know, it was a much deeper thing than just engaging the community.

It was, it was the act, it was the idea and the ideal that people in our community could become kind of authors of their own destiny, authors of their own wellness.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (8:35 – 9:21)
Idea and ideals, and I’m gonna move over to Kristen, and I know she does this with New Blue as well, with the cohort, you come together, and you, and I’m just gonna say, education is super important, and we kind of forget about it. We get through college, and maybe some graduate studies, and then we get into workplaces, and people forget to grow, and learn, and discover, and explore, and bring new things about. So Kristen, you know, you’re educating some of the officers in New Blue, and you’ve, you’ve traveled around the country in conferences, educating people as well.

How do you get people into this kind of new idea, this, this stewardship model of bringing people along, you know, together?

[Kristin Daley] (9:22 – 11:45)
Hmm, so two things. Thinking about the different definitions of stewardship, one definition would be to entrust someone to care for something, and that really speaks to what police officers get into this role to do. They want to care for their communities, they want to be of service, and that’s a really, really important thing to remember when we’re thinking about this job.

So the officers that come into New Blue are already very geared toward thinking about how they can serve their communities, how can they create better connection with community members, but our curriculum does really prioritize thinking about the different ways that you can serve, the ways that you can become more connected, a true people-centered approach to policing, and, you know, elements of leadership, and, and how to partner with community members, but I think some of the most impactful projects that have come out of these cohorts do focus on prioritizing community voices, and really working together to find out what the community needs. So, for example, one agency a couple of years ago took a look at their department’s mission statement and really wanted it to reflect the needs of the community, have the community better understand what the agency was doing, and also have the officers working in the department buy into the mission statement and know that they were there to serve. So looking at the internal culture and applying it externally.

Another great example would be a recent project from this past cohort that just graduated in Waco, Texas. The chief and assistant chief were fellows in our program, and they created this really incredible project around kind of literacy about their community. So incoming officers will go through a training program that gets them really familiarized with different groups within the community, different cultural groups, different resources, really getting to know the people that they’re serving, and ultimately really participating in those different ways to serve.

So not just looking at the community as, you know, individuals that they need to police or that they need to enforce the law, but how can we really become one collective group of people working toward a shared goal?

[Carol Engel-Enright] (11:46 – 14:04)
Yeah, you know, I looked up the definition of stewardship. It means to the ethical value and the responsibility of overseeing and protecting of something worth caring for. Now, think about that in terms of citizenship, and I’m going to speak from the citizen.

You know, I thought about it today. As we approach this subject course, we do a lot of work with civic engagement and bringing people to education about communities and bringing people together and getting to know each other instead of all these polarizing views and taking positions and fighting it out. What can we do as we come together?

But this shepherding, and you know, I think it’s sometimes vast, and Mike, I’m going to come back to you as Peter came in and what happened with the city. It’s sometimes vast to think about a whole city, a hundred thousand people or a million people, or how do I, how do I steward that many people? And you know, as, as the citizen, I start with, I start with the houses around me.

I start with the families around me. I start with the neighborhood of 99 homes and four people in each home that makes 400 people. And I think we break this into units.

And Mike, I know you did so much of that. But I just, I want you to talk about, as you, as you worked with, with this kind of material and this kind of mindset and this kind of understanding of organization and stewardship versus leadership management control. And I, and I want people to understand the difference, this shared vision, shared trust, mutually responsible, people taking on something.

Most people are afraid to just try something new. And that’s what, that’s why we all hold back. And we want somebody who else, somebody who has power.

We want them to take over like a parent, you know, they, they need to be the parent and I’m going to be the child and I’m going to sit back because they could do it better. But, but you had a, you had a response in the whole city that led to three years later, talk about the time and then what happened with your city management.

[Mike Butler] (14:04 – 18:05)
Yeah. Okay. There’s a lot there.

But on the other hand, it’s a, there were so many things that did occur around that. But one of the things that I made really clear was that I was no one’s parent. I have five daughters.

I parent enough people on this planet and I didn’t need to parent anybody else. And that was a difficult thing for a lot of people to accept. And the same thing with community because community would initially say, well, I pay my taxes.

This is what I pay you to do. Well, we weren’t going to get anywhere with that kind of, of perspective in terms of them sitting back and not having any responsibility, but it was a piece by piece, person by person, room by room, opportunity by opportunity process. There’s no magic answers in terms of, of, of, of formulas or templates or blueprints that are going to say, here’s how you do it.

You do it one person at a time. You do it one small group at a time. You do it one room at a time.

You do it one opportunity at a time. You just keep your eyes on the prize in terms of what is it you’re trying to do in terms of, am I going to be their caretaker or am I going to be somebody who just cares for them? And by the way, I, I want to go back to a phrase.

I would never steward anybody that has that patriarchal field too. I would just create the environment through conversations and actions that suggested strongly that they were responsible for their own stewarding. They were responsible for their own care.

They were responsible for their own experiences, whether that was work experiences or community experiences. And therein lied that shift from being overly dependent that we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast to being more independent. And then the next conversation was, well, how can we all do this together?

What’s that look like from a neighborhood perspective? What’s that look like from a school perspective? What’s that look like from a business perspective or a larger community perspective?

And so there was that continuum of going from dependency of always being dependent on the parent, as you talked about Carol, to independence. I can do this on my own to that sense of interdependence. And not only can I do it on my own, but I can integrate my own gifts and strengths with other people’s gifts and strengths.

And we can do a lot of things together so that it’s for the good of the whole. Therein lied quite a bit of work. And by the way, I’m not going to, I’m not going to sugarcoat this and say going from dependency to interdependency was an easy transition, but it did take around three years for us to kind of reach that critical mass.

But that ended up being thousands of conversations that ended up being thousands, tens of thousands of conversations, three steps forward, two steps back. But ultimately every chief, every chief that I’m aware of, anybody who leads an organization, I think Eat Down would love to see more people in their organization, or if they’re a chief in the community, take more responsibility for what needs to happen for the outcomes. And so that’s what this stewardship gets you there, patriarchy won’t.

If we want to create a future that’s different and better and has those qualities of aliveness and being that we want to live into and inhabit, we’re going to have to engage in a process that includes every voice, every perspective, and somehow we’re going to have to, you’re going to have to get good with these skill sets that require a different kind of facilitation, a different kind of conversation, a different way of being, not always being the answer person. We’re going to talk later about how we’re not always the answer person, but we get good at asking questions that help people see that they’re also responsible, that engages their level of accountability. There’s so many different skill sets that go into bringing a stewardship perspective into the organization and into the community that we’re eventually going to talk about over these podcasts in terms of what those practices look like.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (18:05 – 19:20)
Yeah, I just want to remind people that Project PAC, we bring that kind of training, our digital training is going to be coming online in a couple of months, and those skills, that organizational development, that understanding of, you know, how to ask better questions, how to transform through communication techniques, and how to really teach your whole staff how to, the emotional and social intelligence, it’s going to grow them as people. I think sometimes, you know, I theoretically, I talk about the it and the you, sometimes we’re so busy and we’re so task-oriented and the paperwork has to get done, and so we just look at things as it, and we forget that the potential, the human potential that is available all around us just needs to be developed a little bit and organized, and that is really the true sense of stewardship. Kristen, talk a little bit about what you’ve seen with training, the difference between when people come in and start to find the sense of self or the sense of their own personal power to work and affect change and shift, and what does it look like?

[Kristin Daley] (19:21 – 20:40)
That’s a great question. One of our very first courses at the beginning of our curriculum is called Articulating Your Why, and it gets the participants to talk about why they’re here, why they’re in this role, why they’re doing the job that they’re doing, and what they can bring to it that’s uniquely them, and I think, you know, thinking about asking questions, that’s a huge, huge piece of it, because you don’t know what other people need or what other people want or are thinking without asking them. It also inspires the person that you’re asking the question of to start thinking in terms of, what can I do, what can I create?

We don’t want people to just come to these meetings, the type of meetings that Mike’s talking about hosting, with complaints or problems. We want to start getting them thinking about developing solutions and what they can contribute to those solutions, so I think being curious about what other people need and what other people are thinking is a huge part of leadership, of collaboration, of partnership, of all of that. So yeah, I would say get really good at being curious, asking good questions, and being open to the answers, even if they’re not what you’re expecting to hear.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (20:40 – 22:42)
Yeah, and I just want to talk to, you know, a lot of times we feel like we’re talking to the patrolman out there, but I want to talk to the citizen in terms of, don’t feel helpless, don’t feel like you don’t have a voice, don’t feel like you have to, right now we’re running a series of sessions within the community, and it’s like, you have a voice, you don’t have to have an office or a title to have a voice, but the voice has to be constructive and creative and connecting all the C words that bring community together. So Mike, you know, I just want to go back to Peter Block. He started writing books on community after he came to Longmont and saw how it happens in institutions, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be on conversations with Peter and Mike and this friendship, and John McKnight, who also was an asset-based community development kind of expert around the world, as we talk about it, and they were able to see that institutionally, now, so I’m talking to all you citizens out there who say, there’s nothing I can do about the civic government, there’s nothing I can do about the national government, there’s nothing I can do about education or religion, it’s all institutionalized. Peter began to see, he began to shift, because he came into Longmont and he saw, he saw what was happening person-to-person as responsibility got shared and people were able to take their ideas and move, and so then, you know, talk a little bit about how that worked, and if you read any of Peter’s books after stewardship, you will see Mike Butler and Longmont will be talked about, because he was able to see the example of it in practice happening right in real time.

[Mike Butler] (22:43 – 25:23)
After about three years, my city manager, who hired me, was really reticent and skeptical about operating in a stewardship mindset philosophy perspective with police officers, who many believed that the chief needed to hold people accountable and needed to be the top person that said, you’re the one that makes accountability happen in your organization, and that’s what we need in our police departments across America, and I said there was a different way to bring about accountability, and so after about three years, he called me into his office and basically said, I’ve seen what happened.

He says, basically, you’ve moved that dial big-time in terms of what’s happening with so many different ways of how to do business in your organization and how your police department now is relating to the community in a much different way. We went from a patriarchal to a partnership kind of way of doing business, where more people were taking ownership, and so he said to me, he said, I’d like to do that for the entire city, and he says, I’d like for you to invite Peter Block into our city and to provide the training that we need in order to understand how we can all become more partnership oriented, how we can all begin to use these stewardship principles in a way that it’s like what’s going on in the police and fire department right now, and so that was a big change from being skeptical and from being kind of, kind of, a little bit concerned around how that might play out in a police department to one of which, well, let’s use that police department as an example. So, you know, police department had maybe 50, 60 supervisors in it, and so I wanted to make sure they were all there and spread out across the room when we did that training with Peter, and so they were at every table and they began to speak about their own experiences of going from, I used to be the patriarch, I used to be the leader, I used to be the one that said, here’s what we’re gonna do, how to do it, and when to do it, and now everybody is engaged in those conversations, and not only that, but the community is engaged in those conversations, so the people in the rest of the city could see from real-life examples what that looked like, and so Peter came in, Peter graciously agreed to do that and spent quite a bit of time at the Long Line. In fact, Peter made several visits to the I was happy the fact that Peter, a thought leader in my opinion, was willing to do that, and we made great progress, we made great progress with that.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (25:24 – 25:52)
And we keep all of that going forward as we work with communities, we work with police departments, of course PACT means police and community together, we take that into consideration in our collaborative advising that’s available to you, just remember it’s free of charge, just contact us, and then keep listening to the podcast as we delve into these topics, I guarantee they’re not anywhere else out there.

[Mike Butler] (25:52 – 29:01)
I want to say one thing to the, I patrol officers, staffing, line level staff, sergeants, lieutenants, commanders, deputy chiefs need to hear this, but I want to talk to the CEOs of our police and sheriff’s departments and say that this, while this isn’t necessarily easy, it requires a mindset shift, it requires a heart set shift in terms of how you are with people that you’re leading. In my mind it had to be an honor to be a leader, had to be a privilege in my mind to be a leader, and that you had to see people differently, you couldn’t see people as being your children, you couldn’t see people as being error prone, or weak, or limited, or mistake kind of, they were mistake oriented, we had to see people not as problems to be solved, we had to see people and ultimately our community as possibilities, that is a required mindset to bring about stewardship, without that mindset I would have never been able to move forward to, in the length of time, the stamina required, the steadfastness it required, the kind of sometimes saboteuring and undermining that occurred, I had to stay with that mindset, that was the prize I had to keep my eyes on, and that is, people were possibilities, they may come with their humanness, we all do folks, but they also had all these incredible, this incredible potential, these incredible opportunities, and these incredible ways of being able to see, if they only knew and understood that they had that capacity, so we talk about a conversation called gifts, and everyone brings their gifts, we talk about the conversations of possibilities, the conversations of ownership, those are all things we need to talk about as we move forward, and those are the conversations you have to have with people, and so it was amazing to see people who were kind of tiptoeing around the organization, who didn’t believe they had a voice, all of a sudden discovering that they had a voice, and that their gifts meant something, and that they were valued and appreciated, the level of engagement, the level of integration, the level of just how they were within the organization, and ultimately in the community, began treating the community that way, people in the community, but I just want to make sure that the chiefs and the sheriffs and CEOs of our police and sheriff’s departments across America, whoever’s watching this and listening to this, know that that’s the mindset, and I’m happy to have a conversation with anyone, because that steadfastness and stamina, I needed every bit of it, there was nothing overly easy about any of this, but the rewards were absolutely incredible in terms of being able to see people kind of find themselves and realize their own gifts, and realize their own infinite capacity in ways that they never could under a patriarchal system.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (29:01 – 29:31)
The rewards for everyone, for every citizen in a community, the community becomes healthier, the community becomes a higher sense of wellness and satisfaction, and a can-do attitude, it’s the way we were designed to be. So thank you for tuning in, we hope you’ll go to the website projectpact.org, sign up for our newsletter, we’ll be reaching out to you, and thank you for listening.

[Narrator] (29:33 – 30:24)
Thank you for tuning in to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT. We hope today’s episode has inspired you to think differently about public service and community engagement. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review.

Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue bringing you valuable insights and stories. For more information and to stay connected, visit our website at projectpact.org, and follow us on social media. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so feel free to reach out.

Pioneered by Law Enforcement Action Partnership, New Blue, and the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, Project PACT is the culmination of three leading organizations committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity. Until next time, keep moving forward and stay engaged. Together, we can create a safer, more connected future.