In an extended, 2-part feature, EMPAC raises some critical thoughts about the importance of driving a positive occupational working culture; which is perhaps the single most pressing challenge, and opportunity, for contemporary policing to regain public trust and confidence.
Policing needs a high performance culture and to enable this there is a wealth of global research that demonstrates how high performance teams, from all walks of life, achieve this. As policing is under financial pressures and feels it needs to take a reductionist approach (what to stop doing, how to manage by doing less of things) because it is in a sense overwhelmed by volume of demand it perhaps feels that it is counter intuitive to ‘think quality’ first.
‘Culture’, etymologically, comes from the Latin cultura, meaning to cultivate the land for growing crops – think ‘what you sow is what you reap’. In more social scientific terms, cultural anthropology examines how humans function within society, understood by their shared beliefs, social norms and behavioural practices, to help understanding how culture is a key to success in any team. The culture of a team or organisation is pretty much its personality (Evans-Pritchard, 2013).
There is more than one way to do things, meaning policy and practice is about choices and choice making is often underpinned by a belief system or view of the world, and its associated literature. In this sense we make our own culture through such choices, through what we do, and what we don’t do. For example, taking a managed decline approach through triaging rationed deployment is intrinsically Taylorite (Taylor, 1903) in the pursuit of mechanical productivity ‘efficiency’. The more aspirational alternative is to pursue a Demingian (Deming, 1986) focus on quality. It’s a choice in policing that will show results in overall performance outcomes: judged by the core performance enabler of confidence through relational trust.
Soft and fluffy?
You may think putting trust and confidence at the centre of things seems a little irrelevant. Yet think about the hard-nosed business world, who take a lot of time an effort to develop product for market and only survive through hard-won profit. If what they are supplying loses the confidence and relevance to the market they go under, no matter how hard they sweat on their production line (Phillips, 2011).
Remember Blockbuster, Woolworths, Thomas Cook, Nokia Blackberry and Kodak? Public services, just like the private sector, also need high performance in order to survive and thrive. Just because State funding underpins public services it doesn’t mean they can’t fail on the ground, even if funding continues (Van de Walle, 2016).
Kegan and Lahey (2016) point out that culture should be an explicit strategy, not a bolt on, because getting culture right increases profitability, retention, better communication and less wasted time through infighting. An aspect of culture that is perhaps particularly pertinent to policing, being a scrutinised and accountable organisation, is the cost of people hiding when the culture is toxic. What they mean by that is people managing image rather than leading performance: that costs time and money.
Pursue quality and performance will follow
A culture of high performance means refers to a working environment where teams consistently strive for excellence and continuous improvement, by paying attention to the conditions that make high performance sustainable (Bakke and Johansen, 2024).
Those conditions, identified through anthropological analysis, have common patterns, firstly by leading by example. Secondly, there should be an authentic ‘one team one goal’ focus on purpose. Thirdly, the focus is on outcomes, not just being busy on hum drum inputs and outputs, where teams are empowered to deliver quality on the shop floor. Fourthly, a high performance culture is about a learning culture where dynamic continuous improvement is reflexive, not about blame and control (Katzenbach and Smith, 1992; Lunenburg, 2015).
Communication is key where constructive relations are based on mutual trust, based upon psychological safety. Trust and respect are enabled through listening to the team, where success is celebrated, and there is a common desire to creatively seek better ways of working (Stein, 2021).
It’s easy to see if the culture is there or not
Where cultural dysfunction exists it’s easy to see (Lencioni, 2002). Team members are unwilling to be vulnerable within the group, so they hide their mistakes or weaknesses, and hesitate to ask for help. Without trust, productive work and growth are nearly impossible, as individuals are more focused on protecting themselves than on team success.
A fear of conflict, rising from a lack of trust, means you often end with group think, rather than thinking as a group where constructive disruptive debate is valued (Edmondson, 1999). Without team buy in, a culture can become top down, resulting in ambiguity, inconsistency of action and accountability. At worst this can also manifest through perverse metrics becoming optics and keeping up appearances as tokenism, as a race to the bottom.
Toxic cultures can occur where team members abandon ‘one team one goal’ and focus on their own status or career development, where the collective success of the team is secondary to the pursuit of individual interests.
Leading by example?
Leaders model desired behaviours and there is a clear focus on what good looks like, in every role, and everyone feels like they are contributing to something meaningful (Dannenberg, 2015). Leadership is relational in that it’s about the connectivity with the team, just as the team needs a relational connection with whoever they are interacting with: toxic behaviours on the inside will show on the outside (Arifin, 2024).
EMPAC asked Paul Matthews, Police Federation (PFEW) National Board member, and Non-Executive Director at the College of Policing, about his views on police leadership, after he raised concerns at the PFEW Annual Conference in 2023.
Paul Matthews explained, “there are multiple reasons why leadership, overall, is poor. There’s a lack of support, causing a ‘them and us’ disconnect to the front line. The promotion process isn’t working and it rewards people staying quiet about, rather than challenging, poor behaviour. The culture we have is because far too many current leaders are not inspiring the reforms we need to improve: they’re part of the problem rather than part of the solution”.
“As for leading by example, I invite you to take a look at the open source exchange between the country’s most senior manager and the MP Lee Anderson in 2023, which shows, in graphic terms, the state we are in”.
Parliamentary Committee Hearing
Quoting from an edited transcript in April 2023 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/26/met-police-uk-mark-rowley-never-witnessed-sexism-racism/, after the Baroness Casey Review, but before the BBC Panorama documentary about Charing Cross Police Station (October, 2025), in a Parliamentary Committee Hearing, MP Lee Anderson asked the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, “can you give examples of racism, misogyny and sexism that you personally witnessed whilst serving as a police officer, and what did you do about it?”.
Sir Mark Rowley (the UK’s most senior police leader), replied “I can’t remember any”, to which MP Lee Anderson said “I find that pretty difficult to believe… you must have been walking around with your eyes closed…it would appear that you are in denial.. I don’t think you’ve been very honest at all”. Sir Mark then said, “People don’t behave that way in front of senior officers”, which was countered with “Have you always been a senior officer?”, but answered by the number of officers now being sacked.
What to do next: grow the positive
As policing, in principle, committed to a systems approach (following the College of Policing Leadership Review, 2015), we can pragmatically build on such principles in changing behaviours. There is an existing presumption that arresting current bad behaviour, from recruitment tests, vetting, professional standards and dismissal is the right way to ‘hot spot’ the problem, where it is identified.
However, McDowall (2015) identified that purely pursuing bad behaviour is less impactful than taking a more holistic approach. Adopting a solution oriented approach https://empac.org.uk/solution-oriented-policing/ means that the current systems approach can more focus on ‘what does good look’ like, rather than just ‘what does bad look like’. The current system presumption is favouring targeting what bad looks like (to erase it) rather than promoting more of what good looks like: yet that represents a containment, versus a growth, strategy
Some existing teams will have a prosocial and positive work ethos and by understanding these ‘cold zones’ better, best practice can be shared and replicated, rather than an organisational focus on worst practice amelioration tactics. As Edmondson (2019) points out, some of the best teams may not automatically be apparent, as work-based metrics may not recognise a learning and performance culture, and can even be susceptible to being ‘gamed’ by cynical ‘pseudo’ behaviours (Eterno and Silverman, 2017).
Internally, and externally, confidence levels in policing are worryingly low and that is despite considerable efforts made to ‘arrest’ its way out of bad behavior. But for a high performance culture there needs to be an explicit focus on being the best, not the worst. That means being clear on what quality looks like and promoting its regularised, continual growth.
A Final Word – from EMPAC Senior Research Fellow, Dave Hill
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”” David Foster-Wallace.
Now imagine the same scenario but at the end of the interaction the older fish goes into a meeting with some senior executive fish and tells the story of his interaction with the younger fish. One of the very senior fish says, “Everyone seems to be so preoccupied talking about water, I can’t see it, and I don’t believe it exists, we should stop focusing on it”!
This is reminiscent of some conversations that I have been having recently about organisational culture. Cultural change and the need for cultural change is writ large across policing in the UK. It seems that every report, inquiry and response to undercover TV documentaries calls for culture change within policing. When I listen to the many conversations or read much of what is being written about culture and culture change in policing I hear everything from “this is the only and most important focus for policing” to “yes, culture change is important so we need to really focus on changing people’s behaviour” to “there is no such thing as culture, we just need to get leaders on the same page and it’ll all be OK”.
Cultural behaviour
Culture has been a formal focus of study since the 19th century, anthropologist, sociologists, psychologists, have been studying culture and how it drives interaction, relationships and behaviour for many years and there is a huge literature focused on this. Each discipline that turns its attention to the study of culture does so through its own lens and therefore each offers insights as to what culture is, how it forms and what it does.
I have been studying culture for quite a few years now and because my focus has always been practice based, I have found myself crossing all the many fields of study to attempt to gain deeper understanding of it. Whilst, like the fish in the water, you can’t see culture, you can feel it, and you can see the artifacts that arise from the culture, and this applies to any area where people come together or are brought together for a purpose. So, this applies to a nation, a region, a city, a community, an organisation, a team, all are cultures within cultures.
From this perspective, culture is an emergent property of interacting parts of an open system that is then impacted by and impacts upon the systems in which it is embedded and the systems which it interacts with. So, the question then is, in such a complex context can you change a culture? Well, history shows us that cultures do change, sometimes over a long period of time and sometimes in shorter time frames due to changes in context. So, from the organisational perspective we need to try to understand how culture changes or adapts to changes in context and then learn from this.
Thankfully, there are some very clever people who have spent their lifetime studying these processes and writing their insights and research into books and papers. However, generally, all of what they have learned is counter to what is currently seen as culturally acceptable in the field of change and change management.
What is good leadership?
I don’t have the space in an article such as this to discuss all the fundamental or cultural constraints that currently exist across organisations when it comes to cultural change, however, let’s look at one. In policing now there is a strong focus on leadership reform, but we need to start by asking what is currently culturally accepted as “good” leadership. A lot of work has been done in relation to this, policing has tried hard to develop “good” leadership, but it seems to have failed.
I contend that this is because the cultural constraints keep pulling the focus of leadership back to the individual, it’s a person or a role, in other words, it’s a hero! The alternative suggested by those who have spent their lives studying culture change would say that leadership is an energy within the system that needs to be “enabled” to emerge where adaptation is needed in order for the system to survive and thrive and where there are positive indicators of change in the desired direction then this should be given energy and resource, where there are indicators that show we are moving in the wrong direction then energy and resource should be redirected (taken away). However, this takes away the “hero leader”, so how do promotion processes need to be adapted to promote this different way of leading?
A fish in water
So, like the water and the fish, you may not see, or even feel the culture, but it is there and it is influencing how you and the organisation operate. If we were to pollute the water, then the fish suffer and/or die, because we have changed their environment or context and they will need to adapt. The context or environment of policing has and is changing radically due to changes in social norms, reactions to these changes from other parts of the social system, technological change and changes in values.
The water in which police officers exist has been polluted by new ways and ideologies and to survive we need to adapt, the culture we have was suited to a previous environment a previous time. Senior leadership can take the view that there is no such thing as culture, they can also believe that they can change the culture by changing processes or demanding certain behaviours or ways or working. If you don’t follow the leadership dictates, then you will face punishment and you will be evicted. The message from the research is, take this approach, and the Grimm Reaper will appear and do it for you and you will not survive!
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