Earlier today, I finished watching 5 seasons of the TV Series – “The Rookie” on Netflix and learnt a lot about leadership from the series.
For those of you, who have not heard about the series, here is how it is described on Wikipedia:
The Rookie is an American police procedural television series created by Alexi Hawley for ABC. It follows John Nolan, a man in his forties, who becomes the oldest rookie at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). It is based on real-life LAPD officer William Norcross, who moved to Los Angeles in 2015 and joined the department in his mid-40s.
Lesson 1: You can do whatever you want, whenever you want to
There will be people all around us who take it upon themselves to tell us what can be done and what can’t be, with more focus on what can’t be done and why you can’t be the one to do it.
Nothing can be further from the truth. Just like John Nolan, if you apply your mind, body and soul to do something, nothing is impossible. Age is just a number.
As a leader, one of the things that we need to pride ourselves is to be the biggest cheerleaders for our teams. There is scientific evidence that people usually perform at the level that is expected from them. So, let’s encourage our people to go for what inspires them.
Lesson 2: Pairing a Rookie with a Training Officer
One of the standard practice in the police force is to pair a rookie (new to the police department) with a training officer, who is responsible to train the rookie in the nuances of how to do the job for a period of time.
The training officers are a special breed of people who are trained to become training officers. They are also required to reflect on the conduct of the rookie everyday and report on the same.
As leaders, we can do well to adopt something similar in our teams. We can identify and train someone to become a mentor / TO (training officer), who then becomes responsible for taking any new employee into their wings and teach them how the team functions and the nuances of what makes employees successful.
This is different from the buddy program because the relationship is different. It is not a friend but a teacher, who is personally invested in the success of the Rookie after the training is over (as this is how the TO is evaluated).
Lesson 3: Learning on the job is the best kind of learning
The entire Rookie program allows them to be safe at the job and learn the nuances that they specifically need to learn (uniquely crafted to what the rookie needs to learn individually), which equips them to become the best cop that they can be.
So, the training is personalised for each Rookie based on their unique skills, attitude and the skills gap that is identified by the TO.
During the training period, the rookie would face most of the situations that they would face in the job on their own and they can learn how to respond to that themselves, while having the security of knowing that their TO has their back, in case they do something wrong.
This is over and above the class room training that the Rookie needs to go through and pass, which allows them the basic skills that they need on the job. In the business world, this means that the rookie program needs to be done after the onboarding and any primary training is completed by them.
Lesson 4: Micro-culture is your responsibility
It is known that, whenever more than 2 people come together, culture forms. As Seth Godin says, Culture is all about – “People like us do things like this”. Every layer of the organisation has its own micro culture in addition to the larger macro culture.
As leaders, we have the ability to nurture a micro culture within our teams that can be very different from the larger macro culture. So, we need to take this task of nurturing the culture seriously and need to be intentional about the kind of culture that we want.
Once we have nurtured the culture we want, those who have been trained as a TO, can help us maintain the culture and help the new recruits or rookie to be included in the culture.
Lesson 5: You need some stability to deal well with complexity
The job of a police officer has a lot of flux and they come face to face with different challenges and are expected to respond to emergent situations as they unfold.
This is true in most business context as well. Things are changing all around us, so much so, that “Change Fatigue” is a thing. In this scenario, we need something stable in our lives, which can balance out all the flux we come to face.
The TO’s in the series have a fixed set of routines that they teach their rookies, which are sacrosanct in nature. It is these routines that give the rookies a stable platform standing on which they can respond to all the emergent situation.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to provide some sort of stability in the form of routines or structures or systems standing on which, our teams can handle all the change that they come to face in their work.
Conclusion:
I would like to conclude by saying that we spend a lot of time, money, effort and energy recruiting new people for our team. Why not spend some more effort and energy to ensure that those we hire are able to not only become productive right away but also learn the nuances of their jobs from the more experienced TO’s. This helps TO’s grow, the rookies grow and everyone else benefits from the entire exercise.
Have you watched this series? Is there anything else that I am missing that you learnt from it? Share it with me.
