Police or Purpose

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Many moons ago I was a Youth Worker. I once saw a great act of policing. There was a group of young people from a country town visiting Freo. They had gathered in a car park drinking around a mate's ute. They were loud and dropping empty cans/bottles everywhere, but not causing any harm.

A couple of local cops turned up and the older of the 2 leant on the back of the ute and had a yarn to them about street drinking, noise and drink driving. He politely asked them to chuck all the empties into the back of the ute, identified a guy who hadn’t been drinking, eyeballed his licence and then said, “My partner and I are off on patrol, when we get back it would be great if you had cleaned up the cans, and moved you and the ute back to wherever you are staying. If we come back we might need to write some cautions”.

He could have technically thrown the book at them and been much more pushy in his approach. His explanations and requests made sense, and had the group immediately on side. If he’d taken another approach it could have easily escalated with undesirable outcomes for all.

Workplace policy and procedure is similar, I reckon. As a supervisor, employer, or business owner you know that they have their place. From there you have 2 choices:

  1. Use them to ‘police’ behaviour and productivity. This approach usually has lots of black and white compliance, criticism, right and wrong involved. The problem is that it rarely motivates people to do a great job. It’s more likely that they’ll adhere to the minimum standard, and/or hide stuff that will draw attention and heat.

  2. Tell people about the purpose of them. Involve them in discussions about why they exist and what ‘good’ work looks like in your context. Get people focussed on a good job, not just a compliant one. They’ll be more likely to follow your lead, get excited about doing great work, and evolving great procedures to do it.