Confronting the Toxic Officer

Certification

This course is certified by the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board.

Training Mandates

This course meets state guidelines for the following mandated subject areas:

• Law Update  (annual)
• Civil Rights  (every 3 yrs.)
• Human Rights  (every 3 yrs.)
• Procedural Justice  (every 3 yrs.)

Description

Public safety professionals are recognizing a common problem in agencies throughout the country:  a small but distinct element in the workforce that generates the overwhelming majority of stress for fellow team members and supervisors.  These are an agency’s toxic employees — who can be such a distraction from the agency mission that supervisors and other employees seem to spend more time dealing with internal issues than they spend actually providing service to customers.  Toxic employees tend to be perpetual plaintiffs who file baseless grievances, complaints and lawsuits throughout their careers.  They work to intimidate supervisors while deflating the morale of their fellow employees due to management’s apparent inability to hold them accountable for their actions.

This is not a traditional leadership course.  This course will introduce public safety leaders to strategies for confronting this small but extremely damaging presence in the workforce in a way that both protects the integrity of the organization and is legally defensible.  Ensuring that these management techniques are legally defensible is particularly important in light of the fact that so many toxic employees demonstrate an obvious willingness to challenge agency efforts to hold them accountable.

This training is designed for all levels of law enforcement supervision and management.

Topics

• Recognizing the common character traits of toxic officers
• The unleadable, the unfixable, the unmotivatable
• The impact of the toxic few on the agency
• Identifying toxic individuals before they become your toxic employee!
• Background investigations — back to basics
• Using the new employee orientation process as a crucial part of the hiring process
• Recognizing the legal avenues that toxic individuals abuse
• Discrimination, retaliation and whistleblower protections
• Arbitration and personnel review boards
• Documentation:  if it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen
• Performance evaluation systems that reflect the realities of the workplace
• Utilizing reasonable progressive discipline
• Separation agreements and toxic employees

Instructor