Why Ownership Drives Innovation 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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Jennifer (narrator) 00:02
Carol, welcome to Beyond the band aids, with Project pact, hosted by Dr Carol Engel Enright, Kristin Daley 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 00:19
Welcome to Beyond the band aids. And today, our episode is going to cover the sense of ownership that we have, both within a police department and within a community. So we’re going to start with just kind of a round table about what we think about ownership. Now, you know, ownership has two very, very distinct definitions. One is material. I own something. I have control of that, and I can do whatever I want with it. And most of us are used to that definition of ownership, but we’re going to talk about ownership in organizations today and and much more about ownership in institutional organizations. So a real, a big topic, and we hope you enjoy this. So Mike, I’m going to turn to you. What’s your definition of ownership within an organization?

Mike Butler 01:12
Well, ownership is when people believe in the possibility that their organizations is theirs to create and and so for me, that a lot of it comes down to that, that they are responsible for what this organization looks like, the outcomes that that organization produces, and the future of that organization. And it’s a different mindset than than not being those things. And so I that’s my quick definition.

Kristin Daley 01:41
I would say ownership is a responsibility to the cause, to the culture, to the people within an organization. And it’s not so much a sense of I’m the boss. I’m here to dictate, but a sense of collaboration and being open to all perspectives to make the organization stronger. And

Mike Butler 02:04
I will add one more thing, and I think that is that this the decision to be the author of your own decisions and your own freedom. And so one of the roles that leaders play is to confront people with their freedom and to say, here’s the freedom you have and so and the lack of ownership, I think, diminishes our sense of aliveness, our sense of we’re not as responsible as Kristin said,

Carol Engel-Enright 02:30
Okay, I want to, I want to compare ownership to entitlement, entitlements, a word we hear A lot of today and and just what the difference? What does it look like in an organization when you feel entitled versus when you feel like you’re an owner? And Mike, I’m going to go around again, and then I’m going to come from the educational

Mike Butler 02:55
for me. For me, there is kind of a correlation between ownership and entitlement as there is between cause and effect. Ownership is can is part of the cause and effect is, is entitlement. And sometimes effect can be kind of referred to as blame, that you’re going to blame others for how things are and you’re going to blame the organization, or you’re going to blame leaders. That’s entitlement. That’s it’s almost ownership that’s run aground, so to speak, is entitlement and that way. And so for me, entitlement is an effect, and ownership is the cause. And so, so that’s my way of seeing the difference. And one produces the future. One is kind of subject to the whims of others in terms of what that future looks like.

Carol Engel-Enright 03:46
Okay, good. That’s a good distinction. I think. How about you? Kristin,

Kristin Daley 03:51
I think entitlement is that it’s my way or it’s nothing, kind of mentality. Entitlement is not collaborative. It’s not putting trust in other people to be responsible in the areas where they have expertise. Entitlement is kind of a selfish way of looking at the organization, where ownership is a true responsibility to the organization.

Mike Butler 04:18
And let me just add one more thing, and sometimes you hear people say, it doesn’t matter to me, whatever you want is fine, is a is a phrase that’s attached to entitlement. And I will say that when I’ve heard that, I think that’s not true. Those are, those are kind of lies, I think, on the part of people and they want something more. It’s just that that’s what they say, because they’re afraid. Oftentimes, people are afraid of that very difficult discussion around ownership, becoming an owner.

Carol Engel-Enright 04:50
Yeah, we get stuck in our rigid, rigidness. I’m going to speak from my own experience of being in a university and and, and I always felt. Like an owner walking in there, that I could collaborate with students to create something but But I realized very fast that people were like, you don’t have the freedom to make those decisions, and then I would have to go about innovating solutions, whether it was fundraising from another source, or just getting on the phone and calling up people and, and we made change and, and I think, I think what happens with ownership is people are afraid of what the future might look like because they don’t know how to tackle the very thing that they’re they’re hoping could affect change in

Mike Butler 05:42
the just say one other thing about community ownership. And I’ve often heard, and I still very much hear, that, let’s blame the institutions. Let’s blame the leaders, and in the same breath, kind of declare our own innocence, as if we’re not responsible for the current reality, a big part of ownership is, is, is basically taking ownership for what currently exists. And if you don’t do that, you really can’t be part of creating the future. And so that innocence is is somewhat misplaced, and it is a form of entitlement. I’m blaming you for what what happened and why it happened, and I’m just going to sit back and kind of in the same breath to clear my own sense of innocence and naivete around what currently exists. That’s that’s a form of it’s a form of entitlement, and it’s misplaced.

Carol Engel-Enright 06:37
Yeah, I’m helpless. I’m helpless, and the status quo is what is so I do want to give this quote. I was just talking this over with Mike and Kristin that Henry Ford once said in terms of building organizations and building a factory based on control and efficiency and mass producing cars. He said, Why is it that every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a bringing attached? And I found that fascinating, because we we talk in in modern day about flattening organizations, and yet we don’t use the very we don’t use all the brain, all the possibilities of the people that we work with, we don’t allow those fresh ideas and those beautiful sense of ownership and sense of responsibility, which results in really good satisfaction. So I want you guys to talk about how leaders can inspire. You know, what can a leader do, whether you’re in a police department or you’re in a city office, or you’re in a community organization, and you have a leadership role, what can you do to bring about ownership with the people you don’t you know? Do you have to be the parent telling the child everything they have to do is that what a leader is, or how can a leader bring about ownership in an organization? Well,

Mike Butler 08:06
first of all, I think he hit on something Carol in terms of the status quo, the current, the current kind of sentiment, or the conditions of workplaces, and there is a patriarchal like can be a very much, especially in police departments, a very much patriarchal, top down Command and Control like way of doing business. And so if you are a new chief or a new sheriff, and you come into an organization, you have to honor where people are at and what their experiences have been. And one of the first things you need to do that if you want to produce an organization where people are choosing ownership, then there’s a lot of things that have to happen along the way, and one of those is your patience, because some people might jump in with both feet initially and say, Yeah, I want to take ownership for these things. I want to know more about how the organization operates. I want to show up at meetings. I want my voice to be heard. I want my thoughts to matter. They’re going to jump in. Then there’s people along the other part that that will say, you know, I’m not sure about this because I’ve been burned in the past. I thought I was an owner. I thought I could make decisions. I thought of my voice really meant something. It turns out that wasn’t the case. So they have that kind of rub from the past that says I’m not sure about that. I’m almost, I’m almost. I have some fear about doing what you’re asking me to do, leader, and so you have to be patient with that, and you have to give people that sense of that it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be safe. And the other part of this is we talked about before we went on the air, is, is, what do you do with mistakes, people who make mistakes, people who make errors. And you have to make a distinction between people who intentionally make those mistakes and people who, by good faith, made a mistake, thought they were doing the right thing and weren’t. And what we did in our own organization in Longmont was, if you made a good faith mistake, then. Count it as a learning experience. I counted it as a educational episode that wasn’t something that you got punished for like you did in the past, that if you made a mistake, you were going to go to internal affairs and you were going to get a punitive consequence, a day off, or a letter of reprimand or something like that, and so you had to change the way that you treated mistakes in organizations. They had to be here’s a learning experience, here’s an educational episode, here’s a way of now, I learned from doing that, and I’m not gonna do it again. Now, if there are people who are making many same mistakes over and over again, there may be more training that’s necessary, or there may be have to be supervisory intervention or something like that. But even then, you kind of worked your way into a disciplinary mode down the road, not right away, but you had to treat mistakes as something that were good for the organization, in terms of what that looked like. And so that was a big part of that. But you also had to make opportunities available for people to take ownership and to kind of work into that, especially the people who are kind of baby stepping or tiptoeing into this. I’m going to go from someone who’s been highly dependent on leadership to now they want me to be more independent and be maybe even be interdependent. And so how do I combine my sense of independence with others in terms of their independence was a maturation process that people had to have time to kind of grow into, and you had to give that time to grow into. And so, and then you and then one of the things that we did was if someone took ownership and made a great decision or a good decision that really added value to the organization, or added value to how we serve the community, we rewarded that. So our awards reward system kind of shifted as well in terms of just giving certain rewards for doing the right thing, because you ordered to to rewarding people for taking ownership for complex circumstances and coming up with something and made making decisions that were of great value. So our reward recognition system shifted and changed. Another part of that was shifting and changing. The director system. We went from 30 pounds of policies to a policy manual that was a few pages long, because we didn’t want people to stay well, you know, we weren’t going to legislate. We weren’t going to try to bring about accountability by legislation so that that, in of itself, lend itself to the atmosphere and culture of people making choices. Because policing is complex, and everything that we encounter, you know, we, we were running across these circumstances all the time, and so the old way was to create a policy or procedure for every brand new thing we we encounter, and sometimes you have to do that. But you we, we lean very much towards allowing those decisions to be made without necessarily saying we need to create another policy or procedure. So those are just some and then giving people the opportunities, as we’ve talked about before, of being involved in meetings, being involved in decisions, and that they could have an impact on the future of this organization, of creating our organization into the future.

Carol Engel-Enright 13:18
Let’s talk about Kristin. I want you to talk about what you’ve seen in in terms of creating safety and and trust as as people go through, you know, bringing, bringing a new project or or developing some new idea within a department or an organization, and then, and then what it what it takes to grow that person into being able to take a risk and heading into the unknown. You know, like, like, I think that’s what holds most organizations back, is just creating that culture, that environment, that nurtures,

Kristin Daley 13:58
I think, someone bringing a new idea in and presenting it to leadership requires a leader to do three things. I think they need to be invested in people and invested in helping their people grow. They need to recognize people’s potential and give them the opportunities to cultivate that, and they have to be good listeners. And when someone brings them a new idea, be open to it, Be open to talking it through, you know, not writing an idea off right off the bat, because it seems, you know, outside of the realm of possibility. They have to give people, as Mike said, the space to make mistakes and kind of be that safety net, because I think the fear of making a mistake and being punished or having your ownership kind of taken away is a real barrier to new, fresh ideas coming in, and then organizations get stagnant and can’t evolve. So I think I. Having someone bring in a good idea, and just having a leader who is open to listening is huge, yeah,

Carol Engel-Enright 15:06
beautiful, in terms of thinking about kind of Upper, upper staff and chiefs and deputies and commanders and and how are they and I’m talking to you out on the podcast, how are you working to to grow that openness, to nurturing your people, or to growing your organization so that it’s a dynamic place?

Kristin Daley 15:28
Leaders have the potential to shut people right down or like, crack their potential wide

Carol Engel-Enright 15:34
open. One of the things I came upon in some of the the the literature was that traditional organizations, organizational structures, often crush the sense of ownership. And so, you know, I often think about, you know, children raising up in a home that’s very high discipline, and you know, the children come up with these ideas, and they’re squashed every time. How does that? And maybe, maybe we’re a whole society of people who’ve been squashed a little bit, and it just takes, you know, how do we get some courage? How do we enter into curiosity and discovery, and who’s going to support us as we do that? And and I think maybe in a police department and maybe in a community that feels like a very alone path to walk. So Mike, talk about your experience, your practical experience in the in the department. How did people, how did they rise up and and kind of take on did they pair up? Did they gather a group with them? Or did they? Did they go on their own discovery and educational journey? Did they? What did you see as

Mike Butler 16:49
all the all the things above that you just talked about? You know, where there were, there were often times where we paired people up, where we put them in teams or small little subcommittees to kind of come up with ideas or perspectives. Often, what we did, anytime a decision that needed to be made impacted police officers. We made it very clear that police officers were going to lead these subcommittees, or police officers were going to be the ones who came up with the ideas that we needed to implement that impacted them, personally and so and so they they were given a series of of kind of guardrails and series of criteria to work with, with budgets and kind of other policies and procedures at some level. But oftentimes it was almost every time, police officers were responsible for that, and I don’t recall one time where, when we did that, that police officers didn’t come up with really outstanding ideas and perspectives about what we could do as we move forward with a particular set of decisions I’ll require. I’ll recite one example. We We remodeled our and we talked about before the program, we remodeled our master police officer program, from being a paper chase, from being, well, you have a degree, you have X number of years of experience, you have certain kinds of training, you you’re eligible to become a master police officer? Well, we said what? We said, the criteria we gave the group that were police officers, including current master police officers and non master police officers, was, we want this now to our master police officer process to be demonstrable. In other words, what impact or what influence or what difference did you make in the community and in order to become a national police officer? Was it a paper chase that degrees and trainings and years of experience? It was your performance and your demonstrated performance in the community that made a difference? Well, these police officers, you came back six months later to our staff and presented something that was just absolutely remarkable in terms of, here’s what we believe, and they came at it from their own experiences. And so much of what they provided was based on their own life experiences as a police officer, and we ended up implementing almost everything that they suggested, it was several pages long in terms of what they came up with. Some might have even said now, becoming a master police officers is five times more difficult than it was before, and maybe it should be, because it was, it was a demonstrable kind of way of having criteria. It wasn’t just a paper chase, but these were police officers that did that, and so they actually became and so, and I go on about that master police officer program, how it saved us a number of having to hire a number of more police officers because police officers took ownership. And by the way, for the police chiefs and sheriffs and high level ranking officials. Is, if your organization can produce a culture of ownership within your organization, I can virtually guarantee you you will need less staff along the way to get the job done, that you need to get job and and that the quality of the work that your officers and staff are doing will be significantly higher and greater as a result of that culture of ownership versus being told what to do, when to do it, how to do it, where to do it. And a culture of patriarchy, or a culture of command and control, or culture of top down, I know it’s And so part of what I also want to say is project pact can instruct and teach people how leaders, especially, what steps you need to take. The sequence of those steps, the conversations you need to have, the questions you need to ask. We teach those things very specifically in terms of changing from an organization that’s the opposite of ownership to an organizational culture that is imbued by ownership.

Carol Engel-Enright 21:01
Yeah, I want to talk about we’re having with school statesmanship. We’re having community conversations bi weekly as we lead up to elections and and a lot of citizens are coming in. We’re talking about topics related to the community and and last week, somebody came up and said, Well, we have all these great ideas over the kitchen table, and then we don’t know what to then we don’t know what to do next. And and I think the ownership, you know, in a in a community, if you’re a citizen, you know, you do have ownership in your community. You know, invite someone to come along with you and go on that discovery tour, or attend a planning meeting or a board meeting or a council meeting and and get involved with the the conversations don’t feel like you’re always that outsider. Let’s talk about the benefits of ownership.

Mike Butler 22:03
And I want to give you one more example, too, of somebody that did something that made a difference from the community. We opened up our meetings to citizens in the community, and two citizens who were married came in and said, we’d like to start a citizen volunteer patrol process within our community. We’d like to see citizens part of the patrolling process that we do in this, and be the ears and eyes and ears of our community. They came in, and they presented this incredible array of of ideas and proposals around how citizens could do this. And initially there was, well, we can’t do that. Only police officers can do the patrolling. Well, we ended up, we ended up having close to a 50 person citizen volunteer patrol when it was all said and done, based on what two citizens came in and said, they took ownership and they showed up at a high level police command staff meeting with like 80 people in the room, and got up and said, Here’s what we think is possible. And so they believed in that kind of possibility that our organization and community could create that was different than now. And so anyway, that was just another example of the citizen that came in and it improved the community, improved the safety in our very various neighborhoods along the way.

Carol Engel-Enright 23:24
But they had to know they could walk into that room. They also had to know that they weren’t going to get an immediate No, I think that’s what most people are used to like. I don’t have a chance.

Mike Butler 23:38
So there was some work done prior to that there in terms of preparation for their discussion, but and, but we also had a ongoing kind of criteria in these meetings is that all ideas will be heard and then discussed, and no ideas are not there’s no bad idea. And if it turns out that’s an idea we’re not going to budget and implement, then so be it. Not every idea got ID budgeted and implemented, but the vast majority did

Kristin Daley 24:03
think that initial invitation is a really important point too, because, because the justice system has operated in such a patriarchal way for decades and decades, communities are used to police and other officials within the system telling them what to do and, you know, enforcing the rules, doling out punishment. So the first step is really to have people who’ve served in those leadership roles extend the opportunity to their communities, communicate this shift in vision, this shared dynamic, and then community members need to step forward and get involved. Yeah, and

Mike Butler 24:38
believe me, it was. It ended up being okay. We had an organization of 400 now we have a community of 100,000 people who are trying to figure out what’s next and be part of that. That can all be facilitated. Maybe another podcast. But what Kristin said is very important in terms of that, that sense of invitation,

Carol Engel-Enright 24:57
okay, benefits of ownership. Then. And let’s talk about why. Why would you do that? Why would you step outside of your norm? Why would you go beyond? You know, I in faculty meetings, I remember one person that the standard response to a new idea was that’s not in my job description. They weren’t going to go above and beyond, they weren’t going to expand. So what would you gain if you, if you take ownership? And I just want ideas from all of us in terms of, why would we do it? Why be an owner and not just being, not be entitled to a paycheck and just do the bare minimum for our jobs. Well,

Kristin Daley 25:46
I think the most obvious answer is that if you’re willing to step forward, you can start to change the things that you don’t like, that you don’t think are going well if you have, if you take issue with some of the way that things are being run in your community, taking ownership gives you the opportunity to fix that. It also gets you more interconnected with other members of the community, including your police department and city officials. It empowers you to speak out and change the things that you think need changing. And I think going back to Mike’s earlier comment, it’s a really important point that officers of any rank are empowered to lead, and community members of any walk of life are empowered to lead. And I think that’s a really critical piece of our training, is that we equip leaders of any shape, size, walk of life, but I think what people gain is a real sense of satisfaction, feeling safer within their community, feeling like they’re actually doing something to create change.

Mike Butler 26:55
So all that was so well said, Kristin, and I just want to add that here’s what, here’s what skyrocketed in our organization, in our community, when we began to really see it sense that that culture of ownership, curiosity went up. Resourcefulness went way up. Creativity went way up. Our capacity to do a lot more things went way up. People’s sense of aliveness about their own jobs and about their own communities and neighborhoods went way up. In terms of I’m part of I can make something work, people’s sense of belonging went way up. So people just began all those things kind of skyrocketed with that culture of ownership. And yeah, I’m not saying that there’s not going to be mistakes made. And some people, I’ve heard a lot of people in government, say, boy, when you start involving so many more people, it can get messy. Well, it does get messy, but on the other hand, it’s just a wonderful messiness, and you have to kind of be patient and live with it and learn from it, and know that there’s a lot of things that as a police chief or as a police official high level, you don’t know 90% of what happens anyway, most of the time. There’s a lot of things happening on the streets and neighbors in the communities by police officers that even in a command and control environment, you have no idea what’s going on. You still don’t have a great idea, but part of what you end up with are people who want to make, who want to make the right decisions for the right reasons, because they’re taking ownership for the outcomes. And so those those outcomes become significantly greater, and we saw great things occur within our community and our organization in terms of that aliveness and that sense of being and sense of job satisfaction, and by the way we talk about police officer wellness and that intellectual, emotional, psychological aspect, it’s amazing how much of an antidote that sense of ownership can provide for the things that police officers have to experience, because now they’re a Big part of coming up with solutions and creating something that didn’t exist before that they’re seeing happen. There is something very healthy and very healing about that aspect of living your life, that if you’re always constantly being told what to do, when to do and where to do, that alive, this sense of robustness, isn’t there

Carol Engel-Enright 29:21
beautiful? I And I think, you know, I we’re kind of getting to our time here, and I just want to say, I think it builds something that lasts. The one thing that we hear in community conversations around the school statesmanship in Longmont is that it is a safe community. Mike started working on a lot of this, creating the environment, creating the trust, creating the shared mission and vision with the community, over 30 years ago, and that it still holds today and is being built on today, that we have this chance in terms of evolving and growing structures. Then our next generation can come in and create beautiful things that there is goodness in community, there is goodness in police, and we just invite you to subscribe to the podcast. If you’re listening today, please give us five stars and comment or send us a question. I also want to invite anyone who’s listening that knows of good things happening within police and community, to send us your story, to let us put that on a blog post, on our website, and start to spread this word. I think it’s a movement that is that is beyond the theory of how to how to create really good, satisfactory work environments and how to create public safety and mutual trust. So thank you for listening to beyond the band aids, and we’ll see you next time.

Speaker 1 30:53
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@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. You.