Leadership Options in Criminal Justice

¶ … Leaders

Every organization that wants to be successful has to have at least one formal leader, because someone has to be in charge. However, many organizations have informal leaders, as well (Hersey, Blanchard, & Johnson, 2008). This is especially true in criminal justice and law enforcement organizations, where many people who are new to the job look up to others who have been there for a longer period of time. These people become mentors to them, and they are focused on ensuring that the new people learn what they need to know even though they do not hold formal positions of management or leadership. Law enforcement is a dangerous profession, as are many facets of criminal justice. Because that is the case, it is vital that both formal and informal leaders focus on imparting their knowledge to new recruits who may otherwise be struggling to "learn the ropes" and do everything they can to protect themselves while still handling their jobs effectively. While formal leaders provide plenty of insight and information about how a job is to be performed, specifically, there is another layer of information that can only be offered by those who have "been there" (Van Wormer, Besthorn, & Keefe, 2007). This is where informal leadership comes in when law enforcement and criminal justice are considered, because veterans can teach rookies a great deal of information if those rookies are willing to learn.

Informal leaders can have both positive and negative impacts on organizations. When considering the positive impacts, one has to look at how informal leaders can "pick up the slack" and take some of the pressure off of formal leaders (Van Wormer, Besthorn, & Keefe, 2007). By working with new recruits and people who are just learning what they need to know in order to be effective and valuable members of the organization, informal leaders are able to provide assistance when needed. They teach and train new people, and they are not being paid extra for that, so they also benefit the organization by performing leadership duties on a salary that does not always show as being commensurate with leadership. However, people look up to them and that can be highly important, because it allows those informal leaders to do something they care about and see that there are a number of rewards for it (Van Wormer, Besthorn, & Keefe, 2007). Financial incentive generally does not have anything to do with what an informal leader does, as he or she is generally much more focused on simply providing help to new people in the organization and value to the organization as a whole (Hersey, Blanchard, & Johnson, 2008). The largest downside with this is that informal leaders can have too much weight in the minds of new people, and that can jeopardize and undermine the information imparted by formal leaders (Hersey, Blanchard, & Johnson, 2008). Those who lead informally must be careful to defer to the people who actually lead the organization.