Why leadership initiatives fade
The pattern is familiar: a motivating workshop, good intentions, then the next crisis. Nothing in the daily routine, the promotion process or the reporting line changes, so neither does leadership. Implementation research and our own experience in policing point to the same lesson: sustainable change needs repetition, structure and leaders who carry it, not just information.
This is where our third position comes in: leadership is why good strategies stick or die. The same applies to leadership development itself.
How we work: five steps
Diagnose
Where does the agency stand? PERMA-Lead profiles and conversations with leaders and officers show strengths and gaps, by unit and level.
Align the leadership team
Command staff agree on what good leadership should look like in their agency and on their own role as models. Without this step, everything else stays optional.
Pilot
Start with a group of first-line supervisors or one district. Train them, support them in practice and learn what works in your context.
Scale
Roll out to further groups, building internal capacity so that the agency's own trainers and leaders can carry the approach forward.
Embed and measure
Anchor positive leadership in onboarding of new supervisors, promotion criteria and regular reviews, and repeat the measurement to make progress visible.
What makes it last
- A common language: the five PERMA-Lead levers give everyone, from recruit to chief, the same simple vocabulary for good leadership.
- Visible progress: repeated measurement turns leadership from an opinion into something the agency can track.
- Structures, not appeals: leadership becomes part of how the agency selects, trains and evaluates its supervisors.
- Leading change positively: Bernd's PERMA-Change approach applies the same five levers to the change process itself, so that the introduction of positive leadership is led the way it is meant to be practiced.
Research meets practice
We combine two perspectives that rarely come together: more than 20 years of police command and leadership training in Germany, and a career in crime science spent turning research into police practice in the United States. Where agencies want it, implementation can be accompanied by evaluation, so that you know what the investment achieved.