In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about behavior-based leadership. Do you feel clear about what your boss or company expects of you? Much of our self-doubt comes from worrying about whether we’re doing it right. And the absence of clear leadership and guidance simply perpetuates that anxiety. My guest this week is Dr. Chris Fuzie, a former police officer who started college at the age of 40 studying organizational leadership and now has a Doctor of Education (Ed. D). Chris now owns his own leadership consulting business where he leverages a lot of his experience as a law enforcement officer. Here we talk about the importance of clearly defining the roles of both leader and follower through behaviors that reduce ambiguity and build trust.
About My Guest
Dr. Chris Fuzie is the owner of CMF Leadership Consulting and is currently the Business/HR Manager for a District Attorney’s office in California. Chris is a Leaderologist II and Vice President of the National Leaderology Association (NLA) who holds a Doctor of Education (Ed. D), M.A. and B.A. in Organizational Leadership, and has graduate certificates in Human Resources and Criminal Justice Education. Chris is a developer, trainer, consultant for leadership of public, private, profit, and non-profit organizations since 2010. Chris is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and a former National Instructor for the International Association of Chiefs of Police and California P.O.S.T. Courses. Chris is the author of "Because Why... Understanding Behavior in Exigencies." and of "S.C.O.R.E. Performance Counseling: Save the Relationship, Change the Behavior," and his latest book, “Liminal Space: Reshaping Leadership and Followership.” Chris is honorably retired from the Modesto Police Department after 28 years of public service leading such teams as the Homicide Team, the Hostage Negotiations Team, the Street-Level Drug Team and the School Police Officer Team.
~
Connect with Chris:
Websites:
~
Connect with Kim and The Impostor Syndrome Files:
Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge.
Learn more about the Leading Humans discussion group
Join the Slack channel to learn from, connect with and support other professionals.
Schedule time to speak with Kim Meninger directly about your questions/challenges.
Websites: https://kimmeninger.com
Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome Chris. It's great to have you here today, and I would love to start by inviting you to introduce yourself.
Chris Fuzie
Well, thank you. I'm very happy to be here. My name is Chris Fuzie. I'm a Doctor of Education and organizational leadership, and I wasn't always that. For about 30 years, I was a cop and worked as a, as a top in Modesto, promoted up in Modesto. I've been in Modesto almost my whole life, you know, since, since five years old. So, you know, it's been, been quite a while, 60 years of Modesto, but it's been a lot of fun. Because, you know, I just, I really grown up here, been involved in the community, worked in the police department, worked in different jobs around, you know, started out as a paper boy kind of thing, you know. And then I like to say I only had a PhD until age 40, public high school diploma, you know. So, yeah, so, but this is where this, this leadership, followership stuff starts coming in. Is as a police officer, you know, I was just having fun. I say just having fun, but, you know, it's dangerous, and there's a lot of stuff going on. But you know, when you're from age 22 to age 38 you know, it's like, it's, it's fun, you know, you go out and do what you do. But then I started thinking, wow, what if I get hurt, you know? And what if something bad happens, I know, I got a family, I got a wife and kids and I and so I decided I'd go back to school. And when I went back to school, I started I needed something other than criminal justice, because I was already involved in that. And so I went back to school for at age 40, I went back to school to get a degree in organizational leadership. You know? I thought, Oh, that'll help me if I promote, right? And then I finished the bachelor program. I finished the master's program, and they go, Hey, we got a master's program, and you can get a graduate certificate in human resources if you do that, sure, I'll do that. So I did that and, and then I started looking at in, in those two programs, I started looking at how these theories, these organizational leadership theories, fit with everything else, and that's, that's kind of where I got to today. Is that I just after, I say, graduated, but after I retired from the police department, you know, like, now what do I do? So I retire after 29 years, and so I was like, Well, start a consulting company and deal with this organizational leadership stuff, and started seeing how all of this fits together. And it was kind of cool because while I was at the police department, I could use it kind of the police department seemed like a little petri dish for me that I could try some of this stuff out, and then, and then, since, you know, I've been working with all sorts of different organizations. And so, I mean, yeah, I don't want to start with I was born as a baby, you know, and move on. But yeah, I just gave you the highlights of some of this stuff here.
Kim Meninger
Well, and I'm going to reveal some of my probably ignorance and preconceived notions about the working as a police officer too, but I would imagine there's obviously a leadership hierarchy to the Police Department. But what like in terms of the opportunity for either change when it comes to leadership, like, were people receptive to your ideas? What that culture is very, [yeah,] unique and very kind of specific and so…
Chris Fuzie
So yeah, you gotta understand that the, when I came into police work, we're at the end of one era and the beginning of another era of police work. And it's actually documented like that in in textbooks. You know, we're, we're kind of towards the end of the era, and so we're going from the more heavy-handed kind of do, as I say, kind of thing to more of a community policing, engaging in and becoming part of the community. And so that's the part that I grew up in, I say, grew up in, in the police department, is that as more community based, and so that was, there was a lot of change there. It was very hierarchical. It was, you know, it's a, what I call it, quasi-military, or, you know, arrangement or, and so it was very hierarchical, and, and positional power meant a lot. I. So when you come in with some of these ideas, like, you know, group think and, and, you know, some of that stuff, and I can tell you there was one, one particular night I was Lieutenant on duty, and we had a gang fight, big gang fight going on, and dispatch sent out the call about the gang fight. And we had a bunch of people, they were going to roll code three, you know, lights and siren, right? And so they're going to roll code three, but they're going to roll code three to a staging point, not to where the fight was, which didn't make sense to me, but everybody was doing it, and that, to me, seemed like a group thing, right? And so I brought it up the next day in briefing, and I, I'll just say we ended up dealing with the, the gang fight. I canceled the code three so people wouldn't crash into each other anyway. So the next day, I brought it up, kind of a debrief and feedback session in our, in our briefing, and I mentioned group thing. And it was, it was funny, because everybody kind of goes, Yes, why do you talk about this educated stuff? Again? I said because it matters, you know, it's important. It because that's what. And so I talked about how you know, just because you know, certain people rolling and then we had one person who will who, who didn't hear the message about going to the staging point, and they ended up showing up at the fight. So now they're rolling into this gang fight that has guns and shots fired and stuff like that, all by themselves. And then we all just had to rush in. And so it really was a good discussion to have. And those kind of things do, do impact police work. It's just like any other organization that deals, you know, leadership is about people, so you're talking about people and their behaviors and, and police are no different the people in the behaviors. And so you have to look at the behaviors, and what's influencing those behaviors. Well, in this one, the adrenaline, the focus on the gang stuff, the you know, we're going into this fight, it's got guns involved. It could be very dangerous. And so we needed to, we needed to be aware of that. And so hopefully this discussion about group think, does it doesn't put people in peril again, you know, but that's it. It's that kind of stuff. There's this, the, what do you call it? The, the positions that we find ourselves in, in police work, I can, I can attribute almost every, well, not almost every single Leadership Theory. I can give you a law enforcement example of how that occurs, because it's about people and, and it's just, it's a little more, you know, little more scary. It's a little more, you know, you have all that the danger and the and the unpredictableness, etc. As matter of fact, I put a couple of the, at least one, a couple of the incidents in my book about liminal space and how, and that one is about the transition of power. And so, you know some of these, I changed the names to protect the guilty. And, yeah, and, but there, you know, it's in there. And so you can see how this, this transition happens. So there's, there's in the law enforcement world, other than, you know, just catching criminals and, you know, that kind of stuff. It's a lot of service. It's a lot about people. And so the more you know about people, the better it is in law enforcement, but there is that hierarchical thing that you have to deal with, and it has changed. It's a little, little better now. I say a little better because it's still transitioning.
Kim Meninger
Well, you know, it's interesting, because you talk about leadership being about people, I think that's a really important point. And you're obviously in police work, dealing with a different level of stress and danger than the average corporate professional is right, right? So much of the workplace experience these days is under a lot of stress because there's a lot of change happening. There's, there's job insecurity there. You know, everything has to be done yesterday. So people are often operating at high levels of stress. And right? Operate at high levels of stress, it doesn't necessarily bring out the best in us, right? We're coming from a fight or flight where we're doing more reactive, rather than thoughtful types of things. So the ability to have the kinds of conversations that you're talking about when you're not in the heat of the moment is so important, right? Like when, when we're not, when the temperature isn't really high, when we can kind of connect as humans, when we can better understand each other. And so. So I think being able to have space for that is so critical.
Chris Fuzie
Yeah, that's, that's one of the good things about having a briefing like that and going over what happened the day before. How do we avoid this? A lot of our critical incident teams. I was a hostage negotiations commander, and I was also the homicide, homicide gangs. I had homicide gang, street-level drug unit, you know, all the high speed, low drag kind of teams and, and you debrief these situations. Okay, what could we have done better? And it's not a blame game. It's okay. Let's rethink this. This is what we thought would be good at the beginning. Now, how do we change it? So you have this evolution going on, and you have this, you know, rethinking. And What's hard is that a lot of times we say, Oh, well, you know, on TV, they say, well, it's not like TV, you know, you have all of the human factors in there fear is a huge factor that people don't think about. You know, fear is hardwired in us, and it's been, it's been developed over million, you know, millions of years as we've evolved as creatures of the earth. You know is, it's evolved to protect us. Well, now we're maybe in a social situation where we don't need to, you know, worry about the growling in the woods or whatever it is, but we still need to protect ourselves, and that fear is still there. And a lot of times we can't understand what happens in, like you said, the heat of the moment or and some of these decisions are made, we don't know what, what they're about. We don't know why they're happening, which is the name of my other book, is called, because why? Understanding behavior in exigencies, and I talk about that is that there's, there's these things that if we've tried what we've been trained to do, and it doesn't work. Now what, you know? Oh, I tried something different well, but that we don't have a policy about that. So you are acting outside of policy, are you? But I'm still alive, you know? And, and that's the kind of thing you think about when people are in these dangerous situations, these they want to live they, you know, the fear, the survival instincts kick in, and they may do something outside of the norm, right? The captain who landed the plane on the Hudson River, [Ellie Sellenberg, yeah,] yes. So he did not follow policy. He did not follow procedure, but he saved everybody's life that and they were going to sanction him, the FAA looked into that. They were thinking about sanctioning him for not following policy. How to Follow policy, they wouldn't be able to sanction him because he'd be dead. So, you know, and, and now they train those things. So it's that kind of stuff that we need to think about when we talk about leadership and we talk about people's behavior because all three of my books are about behavior and, and that's, that's really a lot of it comes from the police world and dealing with behavior all the time. Because that's, that's when you, when you evaluate people in a job. You're evaluating their performance, their behavior, if you've taught them the right way, then they should be able to produce the right way or behave the right way to get the results you want. And so that's, that's, again, that's what I write about in all, all of my books. So it's, yeah, sorry, I kind of got off track there.
Kim Meninger
It’s really helpful. I'm curious if you have, I mean, leadership is such a broad concept, and we could talk about it from so many different angles. But is there a particular question you're trying to answer or problem that you're trying to solve in your books and the work that you do?
Chris Fuzie
Yes, it's, it's about, again, it's about behavior. It's about understanding behavior, and it's about the appropriate behavior. This latest book, The first one was, I don't know, maybe I did it backwards because the first book was about understanding behavior that has already occurred. The middle book, Score Performance Counseling, is about changing behavior as it you know, like, if you have someone who's not doing what they're supposed to do, how do you change the behavior and different ways of doing that. And then the last book, the most recent one, is about creating behavior that you want. And not only just creating behavior, creating behavior that you can you can teach if you can define it, you can teach it. If you can teach it, you can evaluate it, if you can evaluate it, then, then you can adjust, kind of like the rolling code three is that something we want to do again? Probably not. So having these. Last discussion. And this last one also talks a lot about, we talk about leadership, and this is the big question, is that are the behaviors of, of great leaders the same as behaviors of exemplary or good followers? So, and this is how I came upon. This is that 10 years of doing consulting, at the beginning of the training, I would ask people give me two traits of great leaders. For everybody in the class would have to give me two traits of greatly and like a good consultant, you know, I write them on a piece of paper and slap it up on the board and, and put them all over the place. And then then we started talking about followership, and what it means to be a good follower. And I'd go back to this, this list, and I'd say, is this, do you want all of these in your followers also? And they go, oh, yeah, yeah, we do. So then I took that list and kind of boiled it down to 86 behaviors, 86 behaviors that you want in your leaders and followers. And if you think about the power structure between leaders and followers, who has the most power, is it the leader, or is it the followers? Right? In this country, you know, who has the most power? Is it the leader, or is it the followers? I mean, we, we don't like somebody. We boot them our office, you know, and, and then they go and get reelected again, but, you know, whatever, however, that I don't like getting into politics, but, you know, but that's kind of where it's at that's, that's the, the great experiment that this country is based on, is the freedom. And then we elect our officials, but then, if they don't do what we want, can we get rid of them? You think about like, I just, I recently did an article on LinkedIn about one of the football games, one of the divisional title football game. And you look at the stands, you look at how many people are in the in the, in the stands, there 67,000 people, all rooting for one team or the other. If we could get 67,000 people to do one hour of work at a community park. 67 hours. 67,000 hours of work. Or, or they all, instead of buying a hot dog, they, they give three bucks, you know what, their $12 hot dog. So you know a quarter of that shift, three bucks to, you know, some charity now you have over $200,000 I mean, just think about the, the possibility, if we really do, if leaders really did, coordinate followers, think of how much power is there. So a lot of it has to do with the leaders of followers and getting the right behaviors. And so this last book is about creating the right behaviors using what I call tessellations of behaviors. It's, it's the, the math concept of tessellations, and then applying it to behaviors. And if you can say, these are the behaviors I want. These are the behaviors that are good for this organization. These are the ones that we want. How do we define those? Train those, teach those to everybody. Then when we do that now, we know what the expectations are, and we know what the performance expectations and the evaluation should look like, and we can very easily go back to those behaviors instead. If I, if I gave you, if I asked you, what's the definition, or what do you think it means to be, I don't know. Let's say honest, right? Your definition of honest and my definition of honest might be different, but if, if we say, this is a behavior that we want, okay, now let's define it. Let's, let's show what it is. So everybody has the same definition of what it means to be honest or have integrity, or be a risk taker, or any of those other behaviors. So now that we can define that, we can teach it, we can evaluate it. And so it's, to me, it's more about the behavior than, than anything else, and that's why, you know, like I said, I think I wrote the books backwards because I started with evaluating behavior, then changing behavior, and then creating behavior so.
Kim Meninger
I really like this concept too, because I think a lot of what creates anxiety is unpredictability or uncertainty, and so there's a lot of especially when we talk about things. Like imposter syndrome or self-doubt, there's this feeling of I'm doing it wrong, and because a lot of expectations are not clearly defined, and there are a lot of assumptions about what success looks like, or how you know how you're being evaluated if my boss isn't giving me consistent feedback, then I'm going to be making up stories about how they think I'm doing, or, you know, I'm going to get a surprise performance evaluation because I haven't been getting this information along the way. And so what you're talking about is really bringing transparency and order to assist often feels really chaotic.
Chris Fuzie
Yeah, yeah. And, and think about the your average organization, right? You have, you have the vision, the mission, the values, whatever else, the goals, you know, how many people can actually quote what those are? And then, how do you? How do you say, Okay, if our mission is to serve and protect, I'll just use that one. What does that mean? You know, okay, that means to serve myself, protect myself. I mean, you know. So you make it so ambiguous, like that, that that nobody really knows. And then you try to do that with the vision, the mission, the values and, and are those values? Are they some of these things that are nebulous and you could never touch, or is it a behavior? So if we take those away and we replace it with behaviors. So in the, in the CEO suite, in the C-suite of, of the world, we replace it with three behaviors, three things that are, are all-encompassing for everybody in the, in the organization. And you define it, and you train it, you know, you do that with each one. And then in the tactical, that's in the strategic area at the top of the organization. And then in the tactical, the middle area of the organization, you have four behaviors, four core behaviors, four things that you want everybody to do. And it, you know, I'm not going to say what for they are, because it could be anything, right? And you say those four things are what we want people to do, and that's how you your expectations for your managers, your, your expectations for your supervisors, plus now you can evaluate them. You can say, Okay, how does this fit with our strategic goals? How does this fit with what we're doing? And all I need to remember is four words I need to be, you know, like I said, I'll pick any of the words right. And I have in the book, I have 86 behaviors out of that list of 10 years that I compiled. I boil that down to these 86 behaviors, and almost all of those behaviors when I go back and do trainings now, I'd look at the list that I have, and almost every time I get the same behaviors. And so these are kind of universal things that people have said, at least people in our culture, I should say western United States kind of culture, right? So they would be different in there. There are some differences when you talk about Europe and, and Asia and some of the other cultures. But these are the ones that we in the United States have said, Yeah, this is, this is important for us. And then at the bottom, you have a six, six behaviors. That's the operational division. So you put in six core behaviors. And the people in the in the, in the operational division, they only need to remember six things that they have to do, you know, and it kind of feeds into everything, so that, you know, that's how I look at this, as why this is important with the behaviors because it's about the behaviors.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, you know, you're, absolutely right and big, ambiguous concepts mean nothing when it comes time to take action. Right? [Right.] Behaviors are where the where the action happens. So one question I have for you is, in the work that you do, do you find that this model can be plugged into an existing organization, like is it? Is this something that you would have to, like an organization would have to overhaul or make major changes? Is there anything that tends to get in the way of the ability of an organization to adopt a model like this?
Chris Fuzie
No, I don't, I don't think so, because what they're looking at is, most organizations, they have, you know, what their, their core function, right? And just think of those words, core function. What is a function? It's a behavior. So, you know? So whatever? What is it that they're supposed to be doing? Like, you know, the, the police department, they're supposed to protect and serve. Okay, so, you know, a lot of, lot of older cops used to say, we're not social workers. Oh, by the way, you are. Yes, you are one of, you're one of the most visible social workers, there is so, you know, you are social workers, and they would get pissed when they'd hear that. But, yeah, get over it. But, you know, and so we, we talk about this going in, and you could, you could, I've done this with different companies, and you can look at what their current vision mission values are and replace it with behaviors that support their core function and, and they go, Oh, that's much easier. Yeah, it's much easier. Because now, not only can you it's not, you know, we're going to be, you know, helpful to the community. What does that mean? Okay, we're going to donate, you know, and then you come up with these behaviors and make that what they have to remember to do, and that makes it so much easier.
Kim Meninger
Well, and it strikes me too that obviously the most effective approach would be to tackle this at a holistic level across an organization, but if you don't have that kind of power or influence, even just being able to do this within your own team would be helpful too, because, again, just the clarity that you're providing to your team is going to lead to so much more productivity and again, confidence, right? I mean people, they, they show up more effectively when they feel like they understand what's expected of them.
Christ Fuzie
Right. And the ambiguity is gone and, and that really, like you said about the stress and people talk kind of surprised me, lately, you hear a lot about anxiety in the workplace. What is that from? And I think a lot of it is, like you said, I think a lot of it is the ambiguity and that well, what is our goal? What is our mission? Well, if you know what the mission, or if you know what the goal is, now you work backwards. And you can figure out where you're supposed to go, what you're supposed to be doing. How do I get towards that goal? And the ambiguity is part of what these behaviors take away. If I know I'm supposed to pull this lever five times in an hour, and I pull the lever five times in an hour, I'm done, you know, and, and it, it gets way more complicated than that when you get into some of these, you know, legal fields and medical fields and all these other ones. But, but still, it comes down to doing what you need to do to accomplish the goal. And any kind of do, comment or statement or something is a behavior. That's why I keep going back to this behavior stuff. You know?
Kim Meninger
Yeah, I appreciate the way that you're, you're simplifying something that feels really complicated.
Chris Fuzie
Well, that's kind of how the experience works. I have to make it, I have to make it simple in order to, in order to get there. Yeah, remember, I only had one PhD until age 40, so public high school diploma.
Kim Meninger
You know about that too before we wrap up, that's a big change, especially at 40, right? I'm going back to school. Did you struggle with any self-doubt, becoming a student again at that, you know, at that point in your…
Chris Fuzie
Oh, with this self-doubt, came after the first class, you know, I got in there, and there's, you know, a bunch of 18, 19, 20 year-olds, and who, who, really, you know, just finished high school, just came out of high school. And I've been a cop for 20 years, and, and, you know, know what's going on in the world, especially in little Modesto here and now, having to go into class and then and arguing with some of the instructors because I had one sociology instructor who's a sociology class, you got a cop in the class, why not ask the cop, right? But she says, she said, All, what did she say? It was all domestic violence victims are women. They're not men. Cannot be victims of domestic violence. And I said, I said, No, you're wrong. And then in the same class, we had somebody who has worked for mental health and somebody else who worked at the sheriff's department, and they agreed with me. They said no. And she goes, No, I I've been teaching this for 25 years, and men cannot be victim. I said, Well, I arrested a woman the other night because she had beat up her well, she actually slashed with the knife, you know, beat up her husband, and she got arrested, and he was the victim, so he told me he's not a victim of domestic violence. And so she called me on it. She said, we took our break. She, she says, Chris, I want to see you. It's okay, fine. So I say, Don't argue with me again in my class. You will not as I okay. Do I need to be here? I mean, I almost cut out right after that. So, yeah, that's when the Yeah, it was, it was like, Okay, I don't need this.
Kim Meninger
Oh, my goodness. Well, good too for keeping going at that point too.
Chris Fuzie
Yeah. Well, I knew that I needed to get through it, and I knew she didn't know what she was talking about. It's like, okay, I'm just gonna get through it. I'm just gonna do what I have to do. You know, like every college student, you do what you have to do to get a good grade in the class, right? So I stopped arguing with her in class. I argued with her outside of class, but not in class in front of other people. Yeah.
Kim Meninger
Wow. Well, I just I so admire the path that you've taken, and it's so fascinating for you to be able to put all of that experience that you have in the police force into an organizational leadership context. And I really am grateful to you for sharing some of your, your wisdom with us today. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about you and your work?
Chris Fuzie
The best way to find me is www.cmfleadership.com that's my initials. I just need to remember my initials and say leadership.com after that. So cmfleadership.com Again, I gotta keep things simple, you know. And then on there it has, has a contact page, and that goes straight to my emails. So that works. You can also just use my emails Chris at CMF leadership com, so again, I just have to remember who I am and where I work.
Kim Meninger
Well, this is super helpful, Chris. I'll make sure those links are in the show notes as well. And thanks again for being here and for doing what you're doing. Oh,
Chris Fuzie
Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate being able to tell my story.