Arresting lessons in management
Sunday, 30 September 2007
John Murray Brown
MOST police officers would probably say the best training they receive is on the job, in live crime situations, in what might be called the management school of hard knocks. In Ireland, the Garda Síochána police service - in English "the guardians of the peace" - is seeking to do things a little differently.
At a time when the organisation has been widely castigated for its management of a bungled siege and where in one part of the country local officers have been found guilty of widescale corruption after a public inquiry, the Garda is sending its senior officers back to the classroom to undertake a course specially prepared by the Michael Smurfit School of Management at University College Dublin.
It is a more intensive programme than a typical MBA, running for nine months, starting each week on a Thursday and running through to Sunday morning. It comprises nine teaching modules, including one outsourced to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
The class size is limited, but last year there were 12 participants, all of chief superintendent rank, including two officers invited from UK police forces - one from Northern Ireland and one from Scotland.
The first intake has just graduated, so it is perhaps too early to judge its success. But the Irish government has agreed funding for another year. Catherine Clancy, assistant commissioner in charge of human resources and training, says: "It wouldn't just be a hope, it would be an absolute expectation that this course will continue and even expand." She adds it is possible that if the course proves popular it might offer places to overseas candidates on a fee-paying basis.
It is a bold step for a hierarchical organisation where length of service was traditionally the only consideration for promotion. Police work by its nature involves teamwork at an operational level but, given the dispersed nature of the Garda, in the past there would have been limited opportunities to meet for the sort of team building at a strategic level found in a private sector company.
The other factor which perhaps makes the Garda different, not only from a private sector corporate but from other public bodies, is the number of so-called stakeholders, all with an interest in its performance.
These range from the minister of justice, deputies in parliament, the courts, the prison and probation services and ultimately the local community and the ordinary citizen. "Today we face the sort of oversight that just wasn't there 20 years ago," says the assistant commissioner.
Challenge
The organisation is keen to stress it is not diluting its public service ethos. The Garda is still a non-profit organisation. Competition is not an issue, nor is marketing, although they are conscious of a Garda brand.
On the face of it you might think such a proud public service, which sees itself as one of the building blocks in the foundation of the Irish state in the 1920s, would be reluctant to acknowledge it could learn anything from a private sector management school.
But Tom Begley, the American dean of the Smurfit school, says: "They lapped it up." The command and control structure of an organisation such as a police service means at many levels of management it is not their role to think strategically. He believes the real challenge is to get senior officers to think like the board of directors of a company. He says they are too used to thinking functionally and within silos, in their regions and their areas.
Prof Begley worked in the US on programmes for the public service where he says there was always a cautious, not to say narrow, mindset. By contrast he says he found the Garda course members refreshingly candid and ready to engage.
"The ideal for a professor or lecturer is to provoke the discussion and then sit back and watch. When we talked about the Abbeylara siege, I opened with a question or two, and then I just sat on the desk for next two hours, listening to them going back and forth. I interjected about five times, to steer the discussion. It was terrific. They just carried the ball the entire way."
Chief superintendent Mick Feelan is perhaps typical of the intake. He is based in one of Dublin's toughest inner city neighbourhoods. But like many fellow officers, he is no stranger to further education. He holds a masters in business studies from Smurfit and is at present completing a PhD on governance at Belfast's Queen's University.
"From a personal development perspective I was quite confident there were things I could learn," he says of the UCD course.
Mr Feelan says he can see an immediate application for many of the modules, such as the one on negotiation strategy. "Every day, people at my level, at chief superintendent level, are in negotiation, whether it's a local authority that we're working on a joint policing committee with or the elected politicians on those committees. The course has been a huge assistance in preparing us for those types of engagement."
Until now the Garda might have sent such officers on courses with the British police at their police staff college at Bram's Hill. But they were not happy with the results - another reason to develop their own programme.
Change Vehicle
"We were constantly on the go, taking courses, going to conferences, sending people to Bram's Hill, to Boston. Gleaning insights. But that can lead to diffusion and to fragmentation with everyone coming with so-called best practice from here, there and everywhere," says Pat Murphy, chief superintendent for the Waterford region in Ireland's south-east, and a fellow course member.
Perhaps the most measurable benefit of the programme has been the opportunity to meet in small groups, something that is difficult to arrange in such a disparate organisation. Many officers would have worked together for 30 years but would not know each others' strengths and weaknesses.
Prof Begley says the Garda leadership is looking at the UCD course rather as a big corporation would a conventional "change vehicle" programme. "Perhaps it's overambitious to think that 10 or 12 officers can change a whole organisation. But I don't believe they were just thinking of one cohort, they were thinking of a series of cohorts, to achieve a kind of critical mass of Garda officers that would have the thought processes and mindsets that would enable them to filter those kinds of attitudes further down the line."
Under syndication arrangement with the FT
MOST police officers would probably say the best training they receive is on the job, in live crime situations, in what might be called the management school of hard knocks. In Ireland, the Garda Síochána police service - in English "the guardians of the peace" - is seeking to do things a little differently.
At a time when the organisation has been widely castigated for its management of a bungled siege and where in one part of the country local officers have been found guilty of widescale corruption after a public inquiry, the Garda is sending its senior officers back to the classroom to undertake a course specially prepared by the Michael Smurfit School of Management at University College Dublin.
It is a more intensive programme than a typical MBA, running for nine months, starting each week on a Thursday and running through to Sunday morning. It comprises nine teaching modules, including one outsourced to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
The class size is limited, but last year there were 12 participants, all of chief superintendent rank, including two officers invited from UK police forces - one from Northern Ireland and one from Scotland.
The first intake has just graduated, so it is perhaps too early to judge its success. But the Irish government has agreed funding for another year. Catherine Clancy, assistant commissioner in charge of human resources and training, says: "It wouldn't just be a hope, it would be an absolute expectation that this course will continue and even expand." She adds it is possible that if the course proves popular it might offer places to overseas candidates on a fee-paying basis.
It is a bold step for a hierarchical organisation where length of service was traditionally the only consideration for promotion. Police work by its nature involves teamwork at an operational level but, given the dispersed nature of the Garda, in the past there would have been limited opportunities to meet for the sort of team building at a strategic level found in a private sector company.
The other factor which perhaps makes the Garda different, not only from a private sector corporate but from other public bodies, is the number of so-called stakeholders, all with an interest in its performance.
These range from the minister of justice, deputies in parliament, the courts, the prison and probation services and ultimately the local community and the ordinary citizen. "Today we face the sort of oversight that just wasn't there 20 years ago," says the assistant commissioner.
Challenge
The organisation is keen to stress it is not diluting its public service ethos. The Garda is still a non-profit organisation. Competition is not an issue, nor is marketing, although they are conscious of a Garda brand.
On the face of it you might think such a proud public service, which sees itself as one of the building blocks in the foundation of the Irish state in the 1920s, would be reluctant to acknowledge it could learn anything from a private sector management school.
But Tom Begley, the American dean of the Smurfit school, says: "They lapped it up." The command and control structure of an organisation such as a police service means at many levels of management it is not their role to think strategically. He believes the real challenge is to get senior officers to think like the board of directors of a company. He says they are too used to thinking functionally and within silos, in their regions and their areas.
Prof Begley worked in the US on programmes for the public service where he says there was always a cautious, not to say narrow, mindset. By contrast he says he found the Garda course members refreshingly candid and ready to engage.
"The ideal for a professor or lecturer is to provoke the discussion and then sit back and watch. When we talked about the Abbeylara siege, I opened with a question or two, and then I just sat on the desk for next two hours, listening to them going back and forth. I interjected about five times, to steer the discussion. It was terrific. They just carried the ball the entire way."
Chief superintendent Mick Feelan is perhaps typical of the intake. He is based in one of Dublin's toughest inner city neighbourhoods. But like many fellow officers, he is no stranger to further education. He holds a masters in business studies from Smurfit and is at present completing a PhD on governance at Belfast's Queen's University.
"From a personal development perspective I was quite confident there were things I could learn," he says of the UCD course.
Mr Feelan says he can see an immediate application for many of the modules, such as the one on negotiation strategy. "Every day, people at my level, at chief superintendent level, are in negotiation, whether it's a local authority that we're working on a joint policing committee with or the elected politicians on those committees. The course has been a huge assistance in preparing us for those types of engagement."
Until now the Garda might have sent such officers on courses with the British police at their police staff college at Bram's Hill. But they were not happy with the results - another reason to develop their own programme.
Change Vehicle
"We were constantly on the go, taking courses, going to conferences, sending people to Bram's Hill, to Boston. Gleaning insights. But that can lead to diffusion and to fragmentation with everyone coming with so-called best practice from here, there and everywhere," says Pat Murphy, chief superintendent for the Waterford region in Ireland's south-east, and a fellow course member.
Perhaps the most measurable benefit of the programme has been the opportunity to meet in small groups, something that is difficult to arrange in such a disparate organisation. Many officers would have worked together for 30 years but would not know each others' strengths and weaknesses.
Prof Begley says the Garda leadership is looking at the UCD course rather as a big corporation would a conventional "change vehicle" programme. "Perhaps it's overambitious to think that 10 or 12 officers can change a whole organisation. But I don't believe they were just thinking of one cohort, they were thinking of a series of cohorts, to achieve a kind of critical mass of Garda officers that would have the thought processes and mindsets that would enable them to filter those kinds of attitudes further down the line."
Under syndication arrangement with the FT