Leadership Forewarned: Preventing Bad Things From Happening to Good Organizations

By Kevin A. Rice and Phil Carlson

Leadership Forewarned was written for organizational leaders and Human Resource professionals to create safer workplaces. As a manager or HR representative you have no higher duty than to ensure that your charges are free from threats. Like a doctor whose first priority should be to do no harm, a leader's role above all else is to protect their employees from danger. Leadership Forewarned was written by Kevin Rice, a career police officer and secret service agent who imparts his subject matter expertise for creating safe environments for people. Rice presents a series of concepts known to law enforcement and professional threat assessors to the reader. He then shows how that concept is applicable and relevant to anyone responsible for leading people in any organization. This book presents ideas that will change your mindset in the workplace. The reader will learn about subjects that are never discussed in business school of some HR course.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098316556

Book preview

cover.jpg

Disclaimer: This book is not intended as a substitute for the advice and guidance from Human Resource professionals and legal counsel. The reader should regularly consult these professionals relating to workplace violence. The information in this book is meant to supplement, not replace, proper leadership skills. Like any other profession that deals with interacting and managing human beings, there will always be some inherent risk. The author advises readers to take full responsibility for their safety and know their limits. Before practicing the skills described in this book, be sure to always err on the side of safety and apply common sense.

©2020 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-09831-654-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09831-654-9

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

About the title

About Me

Introduction

Section One: Forewarned is Forearmed (Because Bad Things do Happen to Good Organizations)

Chapter One: Cross-Pollination

Chapter Two: Why Listen to Me?

Chapter Three: Why Write the Book Now?

Chapter Four: The Problem of Workplace Violence

Section Two: The Concepts

Chapter Five: "What Law Enforcement Can Teach

Business Leaders and HR Employees"

Chapter Six: "What the Field of Threat Assessment

Can Teach Managers and HR Employees"

Chapter Seven: Free Advice

Chapter Eight: Conclusion

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

To Cynthia, my beautiful wife of twenty-five years, as I always say, I married above myself. Thanks to Phil Carlson for his friendship and his contributions in a hundred different ways. To the boys in that band, those four Secret Service agents that are more like brothers to me than friends. I was never really the leader of that band, but I appreciated that moniker more than you will ever know.

To my Mom and Dad, words cannot express my love and appreciation.

Thanks to Maryann and Janet, two rock stars in the HR field, for their insight and their support.

Lastly, and this might sound crass, but I want to acknowledge the HR and business leaders I have witnessed act in hundreds of unsafe and unwise ways. If it wasn’t for you, I would have never put pen to paper. Your actions in the past may make for safer work environments in the future.

- Kevin Rice

Foreword

There is a great quote attributed to boxer Mike Tyson which says, Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. It sounds good, but is it really true? As a professional involved in law enforcement for over thirty years, at all levels of government, I have been well-trained on situational awareness, as well as identifying and mitigating risks. My training also includes the use the Incident Command System (ICS) to systematically deal with almost any imaginable situation. After transitioning from law enforcement to the private sector, and working with numerous companies in a corporate security role, sadly, I have learned that most companies do not have a plan to deal with risks and emergency situations (the punch in the mouth) which could result in adverse or even devastating consequences to their employees and business. Many companies are focused on IT security as they should be, but have completely ignored physical security risks and have no plans to mitigate or deal with them.

My lifelong friend and colleague, Kevin Rice has identified this disconnect and has sought to assist organizational leaders by showing how basic law enforcement and threat assessment techniques can be utilized in the private sector. Businesses today simply cannot afford to operate without incorporating the tried and true basics of these concepts. The time to identify risks is not when a situation is happening. Hoping that something terrible could never happen is never a good strategy.

Kevin’s career spans over three decades, and his organizational and operational experience is second to none. He has served as a police officer in Orlando, FL, and as a Special Agent with the United States’ Secret Service. While with the Secret Service, Kevin held numerous positions including Special Agent, polygraph examiner, vice presidential protective detail agent, instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), Assistant to the Special Agent in Charge, Los Angeles Field Office, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Little Rock Field Office, and Special Agent in Charge at the Phoenix Field Office. After transitioning to the private sector, Kevin was the Director of Asset Protection and Investigations for a multi-billion dollar company that operates in over ninety countries. Kevin is currently an Associate Director of Safety and Security at a university in Maine.

Kevin has distilled his vast knowledge and experiences into this much-needed resource for business leaders at all levels. He uses his unique style to communicate, to any organizational leader, to take the time-tested principles of risk mitigation from the law enforcement world, and adopt them into a workable plan for companies of any size. The time to act is now. Your employees deserve it and your company’s future relies on it.

- Phil Carlson

Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Orlando, FL, (Ret.)

U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security–FLETC (Ret.)

Things That Go Bump in the Night

From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Anonymous

About the title

As I thought about capturing the essence of this book with an appropriate title, I was comforted by two quotes attributed to business legend Arnold Glasow. His story is an American success story and I recommend that you read up on his life. The first Glasow quote struck me to the core because this book is fundamentally about training leaders, to prevent horrific acts before they happen. Glasow, a successful leader in his own right during the Great Depression, was once quoted as having said, One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency. The entire premise of this book is summed up in that Glasow quote. This book is intended to provide you with the ability to recognize problems, specifically workplace violence before it rears its ugly head in your organization. The second Glasow quote, relevant to the contents of this book, discussed the fact that the future cannot be constrained and that leaders can’t delay or postpone dealing with future problems. Although Glasow probably never envisioned workplace violence as an issue to be dealt with by today’s leaders, it is still relevant. Glasow once stated that The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we’re ready for it.

This book aims to make you ready for the future, at least the future where you create a safer workplace.

There is a tendency of managers in all organizations to view scary (albeit rare) scenarios, such as targeted violence at work, like unicorns. The managers hope that due to the odds involved, they can ignore the situation and that workplace violence will not visit their organization. And as many speakers have said, hope is not a strategy. Or, many organizational leaders will pass this type the responsibility, of preparing for and taking proactive steps, to thwart workplace violence off to the HR or the security departments, and never concern themselves again with planning for such a rare possibility.

The title of this book has undergone several changes. I originally planned it to be called ‘Cross-Pollination,’ because I envisioned that the book would be able to pass concepts from one type of profession onto another. I then changed the title to ‘Bumps in the Night,’ alluding to the fact that all organizational leaders tend to concentrate on the business at hand and fail to concern themselves with issues like workplace violence until something goes bump in the night. I then flirted with incorporating something about waiting for the second shoe to drop. But then, I finally landed on the old saying- Forewarned is Forearmed. It captured the core meaning of this book. The essence was the fact that I wished to warn and educate business leaders and HR personnel. I was confident that if I could inform these folks, they would incorporate relevant safety concepts, and together we might be able to save lives and increase productivity. I planned to take the best concepts from the two career fields I know best (law enforcement and threat assessment), and make it relevant to business and HR leaders.

Leaders know for a fact that some type of targeted violence event will eventually occur in their organization. Maybe it will be a small event, like a domestic violence incident involving married employees, or a fistfight between competing managers. Leaders hope and pray that it will not be anything worse than that. Leaders play the odds, and they hope that the other shoe never drops. But, with a little bit of education, leaders can now be better prepared if that bad day reaches their organization.

For those unfamiliar with the saying on which the title is based, here is what the internet says about it: "Advance warning provides an advantage. The Latin saying ‘praemonitus, praemunitus’ loosely translates as ‘forewarned is forearmed’."

So, the premise of the book is simple. I will provide, to organizational leaders, signs and clues that telegraph potential danger and provide them with tools to counter that danger. Hopefully, they use that warning to their advantage.

Targeted violence in the workplace, in my opinion, is an expected and inevitable event. You, as a manager, should lead before the other shoe drops. We hope that this book will empower you to make better decisions and plan more effectively on this subject.

About Me

I am the proud son of a New York police detective. My dad continues to be the smartest and most charismatic man I have ever met, and I have interacted with some fairly famous and powerful people in my life. After college, I wanted to follow in the footsteps of that great man, so I pursued law enforcement and spent thirty years in that profession. I started out as a police officer in Orlando, Florida, but spent the bulk of my entire adult life as a Special Agent with the United States Secret Service.

During the course of a very successful twenty-three-year tenure with the Secret Service, I held numerous positions in various locations. It was truly the honor of a lifetime to work among such professionals and play a small role in providing safe environments for several presidents, vice presidents, candidates, cabinet secretaries, foreign leaders, and miscellaneous other officials. Along the way, I was a firearms instructor, a criminal investigator, a threat assessor, and a polygraph examiner. I was promoted to several leadership positions within the Secret Service and was blessed with the opportunity to supervise some of the most talented and gifted law enforcement officers in the world, as well as a couple of knuckleheads (every organization has some).

At the tail end of my public sector experience, I left the Secret Service and was recruited to take a senior leadership position with another Federal law enforcement agency in the Intermountain West. Ultimately, I retired from federal law enforcement and took a security director position for a multi-billion-dollar company in the South. That is where, and when, I understood that leaders in the private sector see the world through very different lenses than the people I had been exposed to for the last thirty years. Their lenses were not wrong and they are perfect glasses to be worn when worrying about the bottom line. However, that vision often left them blind to some very obvious danger signs. Therefore, I knew that I needed to bring realistic training and life-saving concepts to the business world.

I am a member of the American Society of Industrial Security (ASIS), the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), as well as numerous other law enforcement groups. Most importantly, for the themes associated with this book, I am a member and proponent of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP). I recently authored (along with co-author Phil Carlson) a book entitled From Sheepdog to the C-Suite, which was intended to assist law enforcement and military veterans transition to positions in corporate security. (Shameless plug alert: If you know a veteran or cop looking to transition to the private sector, we would be honored if they took a look at our book). I am currently working on a book of funny stories and experiences from my days as both a police officer and a Secret Service agent.

I