preview

My Leadership Reflection Paper

Decent Essays

Glimpses of Me
The following is a self-reflection of my leadership style and the experiences in my careers that have led me to a Captain with the Henderson Police Department. The intent is to provide the reader with some insight into why I am the person that I am and what I need to do to improve myself and in turn the department as a whole.
I was born in May of 1968 in San Diego, California. I was the first of what would eventually become 3 children. My parents divorced when I was five and I spent my early years with my mother and sister, visiting my father on the weekends.
In 1980, my mother remarried and we moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where my younger brother was born, 13 years my junior. My step-father was not a father figure by any …show more content…

There was not much in the way of mentoring or assistance in guiding my career, but being new and wanting to please, I worked hard and did what I was asked, even if I did not like the way it was asked.
In 1995 the department decided that it needed a Crime Prevention Unit and I was selected to design and implement this unit. They failed to mention that I was the unit and would be doing it by myself.
Based on the success I had in the Crime Prevention Unit, I was asked to create a Crime Analysis Unit and then asked to implement Computer Forensics into our Investigations Bureau. During all of these assignments, I worked as an individual and answered to a supervisor, who was uninvolved as long as I did not cause them issues up the chain and obtained results.
The problem with this was that I learned to depend on no one and developed patterns that prevented me from learning how to deal with and in turn lead others. If a project missed a deadline it was my fault. I had the timelines, the due dates, and where the project was in my head at all times. There was no need to determine how vacations, sick leave or any other scheduling issue would interfere with the completion of a project. I never had to learn how to ask another person to pick up the pace, provide a status check, handle additional workload, etc. Basically, I was a one man show, which as I moved up the ranks of my department, turned into a weakness as I had not developed those interpersonal

Get Access