I have spent nearly 35 years in the policing profession, with more than 21 years of that in the rank of sergeant.  During this time I have served in many roles and units, both as an officer and as a sergeant.  I have seen many examples of both good and bad ledaership and supervision.  I have tried to learn from these as a supervisor and a leader, but have made my share of mistakes.  I was fortunate to come out of the other side of the mistakes with a bit more knowledge and experience, but still intact and moving forward.  I was also very blessed to have many senior sergeants to serve as examples and several that took me under their wing and mentored me during my career.  Lucky I was.

What if you are from a small agency where there are only one or two senior sergeants and they are struggling just to find the time to keep things running.  Or maybe they are not very experienced as supervisor themselves?  Where do you go?  Where can you bounce ideas off of someone with experience or ask someone to guide you during a time when you are learning the ropes?  Certainly, there are a bunch of classes that will help, right?  Well, there really isn't.  I was always surprise with the lack of training for someone who just wanted to be an exceptional sergeant and really learn how to run a crew of officers.  There was plenty of choices if you wanted to become a Lieutenant and beyond.  The classes I saw were also frequently focused on the mechanics of things (management), and not how to get high performance out of people to accomplish a mission (leadership).  

This kept running around inside my head and I kept thinking, "Someone should come up with something" and I kept plugging along doing my thing and running my crews.  But then a few things occurred in my life that really made me take a look at what I was doing, what I wanted to do, and what I could leave to others to make the profession better.  One of these occurrences was moving from mid-sized agency of almost 250 sworn to agency of less then 50 sworn.  I knew then that all the things my mentors had given to me were meant to be passed on to others.  My love of teaching and coaching was the vehicle to pass this on, and my belief that leadership is an art that individuals can learn was something to share.  This brought me here to this place and this time, a time with much chaos in policing, a time that is calling for change in policing supervision.  I like to think of it as a renaissance to bring back the art and humanity to police leadership, the Renaissance Sergeant.

The Renaissance Sergeant idea will unfold in the near future and will be training, coaching, and resources that are focused towards Professional Police Sergeants, particularly those from smaller agencies that don't have the resources and circumstances that help build quality experiences.  We will be building an interactive community where Professional Police Sergeants can share ideas and experiences.  Please stay with us as we go on this journey to create this Renaissance Sergeant community and build the police leadership for the future.