ABSTRACT
Improving the quality of leadership is a crucial issue for the police service. Learning about theories of leadership is not enough. What really matters is for each of us to understand and improve our own unique practice as leaders’: this was the challenge taken up by a mixed group of police managers (including the author) in the Hertfordshire Constabulary in an 18-month-long action inquiry – ‘Developing Ourselves as Leaders’. For most participants, the results have been positive, exciting and tangible (though hard to quantify). However, we also found that doing collaborative inquiry in the police context had particular problems – not least that of creating a safe learning environment in an overtly hierarchical organization in which neither the democratic and emergent processes of collaborative inquiry nor the kind of transformative learning claimed by some members of the Action Inquiry Group (AIG) sit comfortably.
