129: Lead Up: The Art of Managing Your Boss While Protecting Your Team

Every corrections leader eventually faces the moment when the order coming down the chain doesn't sit right — when policy, pressure, or politics puts your people at risk. Leading up isn't insubordination. It's one of the highest forms of leadership. In this episode, we're talking about how to manage your boss, influence decisions above your pay grade, and still protect the men and women counting on you to have their backs.

We also dig into what actually builds influence in a prison or jail setting: checking your ego, choosing results over credit, and making yourself valuable through skills and outside training. If you want a seat at the table, you earn it by becoming the person leadership trusts for expertise.

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Transcript

Welcome And Sponsor Message

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome back to the Prison Officer Podcast. Before we get to our topic today, I just want to take a minute to thank one of our sponsors. Innovation has always been the key to success of Pepperball, and the Pepperball Blast is just one more way to deliver a payload that will distract, disorient, or incapacitate an inmate. This lightweight refillable delivery system is perfect for carrying in a holster in your pocket or just holding in your hand as part of a cell entry team or a cert team. Each reloadable blast cartridge contains up to three projectiles worth of Pava powder. When the quick flip safety is turned and depressed, the Pava powder is pushed out of the tube by a 1.8 gram nitrogen cartridge. This will quickly cover the inmates and saturate the cell. Since there's no actual projectiles deployed upon firing, this is a truly non-lethal product with no impact. To learn more about pepperball, go to www pepperball.com or click on the show notes today for more information. Pepperball is the safer option first. Welcome back, guys. Today I want to talk about leading up. Conversation I had last week with some young correctional officers. And many of them, when we had an open discussion, we talked about what they were dealing with, what their challenges were, a lot of them went directly to problems with their boss. Now we hear a lot of that these days, and we we hear the same thing from people who've been around a while that the newer generation isn't listening. I think there's a misconception, and it was it was something that I wasn't good at

What Leading Up Means

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early on in my career. Had to work at it, had to learn, had to learn some skills so that I could get through it. But I had some bosses very early who were who were hard to work with. And I had to learn some certain skills. I had to learn how to make things happen. Work still needs to happen. So uh today I'm gonna talk about the art of managing your boss while while still protecting your team, because I think that's that's the job of a leader, is it not? You know, every every correctional leader eventually faces a moment when the order coming down the chain doesn't feel right, doesn't sit right, doesn't seem right, when policy or pressure or one of the places I worked with, it was absolutely being driven by politics. And when I feel like that puts our people at risk or just interrupts the important work they're doing, right? It just becomes noise so that we can't get the real work done. So, you know, leading up, it's not insubordination. That's not what it is. Leading up is making things happen despite what's going on, what's going on with egos, and we'll we'll definitely get in more more into that. Um it's one of the highest forms of leadership. We talk about leading your peers, uh, we talk about being a leader of others, but being able to lead up may be just as important. It's definitely ten times harder. So, how do we manage our boss? How do we influence decisions? What do you do when decisions are being made above your pay grade and you want to have a voice in that? And how do you take care of the people who work for you? So that's the you know, that's the big discussion that I I want to have today, the thing I want to talk about. And I think the first thing to do is to take ownership in the relationship that you have with your boss. Okay? And what that's going to require out of you is to take your ego and set it to the side for a while. And that's hard for us. It's hard for a lot of us. You may even be dealing with that person's ego, more than likely. Which makes it double tough to take your ego and set it to the side, especially in correction. Sometimes we feel like there's a need for confrontation,

Own The Boss Relationship

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like there's this need to assert what's right. Does that make sense? You know, Harry Truman once said that uh it's amazing what we can accomplish if we don't care who gets the credit. So think about that for a moment. Because to me, that's the first step of what you're going to have to do in order to lead your boss. The second step is realize why you're doing it. Are you doing it to be right? Or are you doing it to protect your agency, your shift, or those that are counting on you? If you're doing it to to take care of those that are counting on you, then it's easier to check your ego. It's easier to not worry about who gets credit. Does that make sense? So take ownership of the relationship. This is a relationship that you're going to have to build. You're going to have to build trust. Uh, we're going to talk a little bit about building value, and that's value for you. So, one of the reasons that you may be dealing with this, and this this is uh the people I talked to last week. This was one of the conversations we had. So many people are moving up into leadership positions, and they're doing it before they're ready, my opinion. They don't have this broad knowledge base of experience. They're just being thrown in there because that's the next person, that's the next spot that needs to be filled. Some of these are getting thrown in there within months. A lot of them are getting thrown in fairly high positions within years. They don't have a broad expanse of knowledge across

Why Inexperienced Leaders Happen

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the industry. When you look at the Department of Justice labor statistics, right, and you look up correctional officers, which I'm going to go off here just for a second. I have no idea why the Department of Labor Statistics lists correctional officers as correctional officers and bailiffs. Those two, I don't think they understand that those two jobs are uh two totally different jobs, but we're all listed together. We're listed as correctional officers and bailiffs. So the reason we've got to talk about this and the reason we've got to deal with the fact that we have these inexperienced leaders, we have these leaders uh coming in who don't have this breadth of knowledge breadth of knowledge is because they say in the next 10 years that correctional officer positions are gonna drop by 7%. There's gonna be fewer correctional officer positions. I think some of that may have to do with technology. I think some of that may have to do with the fact we're lowering sentences, we're letting people out earlier, electronic monitoring. I think there's a lot of things that grow into that. But despite that, there are going to be almost 32,000 openings. 32,000 openings a year for the next 10 years for correction lawsuits. Now that's showing our retention numbers. We're just cycling through people. And there's a lot of reasons for that, you know, uh people exiting the labor force for other jobs. Uh, it also has to do with people who are retiring who have been in this a long time. Remember, we had a huge corrections boom back in the 80s and early 90s. Well, a lot of those people are at the end of their career. They're retiring. I'm one of them. I did retire already. So that's one of the things you're going to continue to have this turnover inside our agencies. And with that, you're going to continue to have people not getting 10, 20 years of experience before they move into a leadership position. I had small leadership positions, but I didn't get my lieutenant until I had, I think, 17 years in. Think about that. That that's many years too, that was four institutions and two agencies before I stepped into that leadership position. Part of that was because uh I did I wasn't ready to do that. I enjoyed being a correctional officer. I enjoyed what I did. I enjoyed the teams, I enjoyed that type of stuff. Part of it was it just took longer to get that experience and be looked at as a supervisor by your agency. We didn't have the turnover. So this is still going to keep occurring. So I think the next step in this, and I put out a clip last week about this, very few things that you're going to be asked to do in your career are going to be illegal, immoral, indecent, right? I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm saying it doesn't make up the bulk of what you're asked to do. In those situations, absolutely there's a line. You stand up, you say, I'm not crossing this line, this isn't what we're doing. This goes against my moral fiber, this goes against my ethics. Uh that's a no.

Change Isn't Always Bad Leadership

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But most of the things that we tend to fight about are simply change. They're simply change. And we don't like change. Humans don't like change, so we resist it. And this normally comes about, you're going to have, and let's just walk, I'll walk you through this, and you tell me if I'm right or wrong. Normally you're going to have the agency make a rule, make a decision, make a policy, change what we're doing, and they're going to come down and they're going to say they're going to tell their wardens, they're going to tell their AWs, they're going to tell their superintendents, their chief deputies, wherever you work, and they're going to tell them, okay, we need to implement this. That's usually what they say. There's very little to go with it. Not we're going to implement it this way, we're going to implement it slowly. The discussions for implementation at your supervisor level are usually nil. Someone's already decided above you that this is going to happen. And so they're just going to drop it in your lap as a supervisor, as an administrator, and they're going to say, get this going. So you've got to come in here and you've got to figure out, and I'm going to use the word to sell, but you've got to figure out how to sell this to your people. You've got to figure out how to get people on board. You've got to figure out how to influence others to get them on board with this new change that the agency's already determined. So here's what goes on. It used to go on in my mind. Well, why are they doing this? This is stupid. Why would we need to do this? Things are fine just the way they are. I don't agree with their decision. I don't like what they're doing. I don't think they have good justification for doing this. And you want to know something? You may be right. But that's irrelevant. It's irrelevant whether you're right or wrong unless it's immoral, indecent, or uh illegal. Other than that, you don't get to decide the decisions at the top. And if you want to, then you need to get your paperwork in, get your stuff together, and move up the chain. But for most of us, we don't get to make those decisions. We don't get to implement change in an agency that comes from higher up. So what do we do when that comes down? Well, the first thing we do is identify why we don't like it. Number one, we don't like change. Number two, nobody asks you your opinion. Humans feel like they should get their opinion asked a lot more than what they really need to have their opinion asked. And that's an ego thing. Everybody thinks they know how to do the job better than the next person. Everybody thinks that they have the best idea. But guess what? It may not be the best idea. Or it may be the best idea. But the reality is it's not your place to implement this. It's your place to make it happen. This is what I talked about last week. I take change and I reframe it. I reframe it into a challenge, right? Because that gets the ego out of it, that gets the the fight out of it for me. And my challenge almost always becomes how can I take what's happening? How can I take the what they're putting in place? And how can I make it better for the people that work for me, the people that work around me, and the agency. How can I make that better? And when I reframe that into that challenge, I get rid of my ego, I get rid of my need to be heard. So I think that's the first step when you're dealing with what we would call bad bosses, is to reframe and think about the decisions and think about our place in the decision-making process here. Now, why do I talk about all that? That's not necessarily a bad boss, is it? Just because we don't like the rules, just because it's changed, doesn't make it a bad boss. So let's talk about some bad bosses. A lot of us feel like micromanagers. I don't like being micromanaged. I know how to do my job. Okay. But you can't change the person who's doing it. You can't change your boss. So you've got two choices here. Your choice is either to be affected or to be angry, to have more stress on you, to take that stuff home because you don't like it, or you can do the same thing that you do with the change in policies, in in

Handling Micromanagers As Challenge

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agency. And you can grab a hold of this, look at it as a challenge how am I going to work with this person to get the most accomplished for the people I lead, for the people around me, and for my agency. How am I going to work with this person? And there's a few things that you can do. Okay. One of the first, and I didn't know I was doing this at the time. I didn't care for the Bureau of Prisons has very limited training outside of the Bureau of Prisons. They think the Bureau of Prisons only know how to train people in the Bureau of Prisons. Okay. So getting the opportunity to go to a Maxwell leadership course or even firearms courses that uh make you a better firearms instructor, not just the same old stuff year after year after year. Sometimes taught by

Build Value With Skills And Candor

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people who aren't the best, who aren't the most qualified. They're the people they wanted out of the institution, so they made them a trainer. I found a lot of that in my career. Despite that, I decided I wasn't going to let the Bureau decide how trained I became. I decided I wasn't going to let them determine how far I could go, what I could learn, what I could learn about corrections. Because my agency wasn't the only agency that does corrections. Right? There's jails and prisons and states and private, international. All of these things exist. Yet my agency thought they're the only one that knew how to do corrections. And I'm not saying they do it bad. I'm just saying they didn't look outside of the agency for anything. So one of the first things I did was start taking classes. And we would take it out of my family budget. I went to NRA firearms classes. I went to breaching classes at several places to become a breacher, a fortified breacher. I went to leadership classes at Maxwell and a couple of others that were local. Anyway, I took I took these classes. It was on my dime. The Bureau didn't pay for any of it. But one of the things that happened that I don't know that I expected was that I became valuable. And I became valuable to my bosses because I didn't bring them the same ideas over and over and over. I didn't, when it came to training, I didn't just have one playbook, you know, the red playbook that the Bureau had given me. I learned how to train the science of uh adult learning. I learned how to influence people in a classroom. These are things that I brought from outside, which made me valuable, which made them count on me for expertise, count on me for uh bringing new ideas, count on me for having a fresh look at old ideas. So I made myself valuable. And I think that's the first thing that you can do when you are dealing with what we might call a bad boss or a difficult boss or a boss that you don't agree with, whatever you want to call it. I say bad boss, it's not necessarily just a bad boss. Sometimes it's just, you know, we don't think down the same line. And that's okay. You don't have to. You don't have to think like they do. You don't have to be like they are in order to bring value to the table. I listened to a Jocko, and forgive me because I don't remember the exact uh story, but there was a person in the military, and he was not agreeing with what they were doing. Okay, the military had made a major change, and I don't remember what it was, but I remember Jocko talking about this. And um so the military's making this big change. He ends up on the news, which is you know kind of rare. That doesn't happen when you have people standing up to that level when they have rank in the military and getting on the news against their own agency. But anyway, he ends up on the news and he he basically gets to the point where he says, if they don't change this or if they don't fix it or change it back, whatever, I'm gonna resign. This guy had many years in, decorated, lots of stuff going for him. And that's what happened. They didn't change their mind. The agency, the branch of the service didn't change their mind. And then he resigned. And I heard him on one of Jocko Wilnick's podcasts, and Jocko kind of asked him, he said, Why did you do this? And he said, Well, I thought it, you know, I'm standing on principal and blah, blah, blah. And I really took what Jocko said. He said, Yeah, but now you have no influence. Now you have no say. Now you can't protect the team that you were protecting. You gave all that away when you did this. Now you're completely on the outside and you're not part of the argument. You're not part of the discussion. You're not part of fixing this. We often do that, and I've seen people do it in my career where that's it, I quit. I'm not gonna be part of this. Okay, then don't complain how it turns out. I love that. I love the fact that he he looked at it that way. We have to be part of the discussion if we want to take care of our people, our agency, and those around us. We've got to be part of the discussion. We've gotta have value. I want people to come to me for my opinion, especially bosses. I want to have a place at the table. I want to be able to bring them what I've learned. But there's two ways to come to the table. One is to try to grab a chair and push yourself up to the table. And what's going to happen is you're going to be removed. The other one is when you get invited to the table. And the main way we do that is to add value. Be someone who they look to, right? Be someone who they when they think, well, I'm pepperball. You know, pepperball's my sponsor on this podcast. So I'm going to use them for an example. If they're making decisions about pepperball, I don't want the brass on the top making the decisions about, you know, whether or not we buy pepperball or making decisions about what pepperball rounds we buy. I don't want them making decisions about policy of pepperball without coming to me. Who at the time, and still am, but at the time was a pepperball instructor, very well versed in pepperball policy, very well versed in the legalities of using pepperball inside a correctional facility, very well versed in the different types of launchers and pepperballs and all that stuff that uh was part of being an instructor. So when they make those decisions, I want to get invited to the table. I want them to bring me up and go, hey, we're thinking about doing this change, we're thinking about, you know, putting pepperball in SEG or I want them to come to me as an expert, as a knowledgeable person, and invite me to the table. And the only way to do that is to be valuable to them, to be a team player, to be someone who they see as knowledgeable and skillful in the decisions that they're making. Now, pepper ball's just one example. But when they're looking at policy, When they're thinking about changing the cuffs we use. Right? Well, go to the officers who put on a hundred cuffs a day in and out of the cell, feeding and wreck and uh whatever else is going on. Go to those guys. I I I don't want them making that decision without me. And you don't either. So that's why we have to make ourselves valuable. We have to drop our ego out of this. Okay? Because the other thing that bothers us a lot is I go up there and I give them this good idea. I've studied a lot. I've learned a lot. I give it to my boss. Here's what we should do. And then they write it up and take credit for it. Are you mad? Well, I didn't get credit for that. Your ego hurts, right? Nobody looked at, nobody came to me and said, hey, you really did a good job on that. That's about reframing. It's about thinking for a moment. Somebody did come to you, they took your input. You were able to give input that took care of those who you lead, those around you, and your agency. That's what matters. Not your little fragile ego. Ego causes more problems for us than about anything. The other thing I'm going to say that makes you valuable to a boss is to speak the truth. Be ethical. Now, one of the things that we have in corrections, we call it candor. You know, I speak in a way that is honest, right? I say what I mean. I say what happened without unflinchingly. Candor is knowing when to say something and how to say it. It's not just saying what you want to say. We tend to be very blunt. We tend it's one of the things in my writing that I had to work on because when I wrote my books, I had to take out institutional language and blunt language. Now, my last book does have a warning in the front that there are graphic depictions in there. I was honest. I was absolutely honest in what I saw and what was said. I had several editors who wanted me to take out cuss words, but I didn't feel that was true to what I saw and what happened. So we can use candor. We can speak the truth, but be careful how you do it. Telling your boss that everybody hates you, you know, probably isn't the way to add value to them. Telling your boss that, you know, that idea you had last week? I've heard a couple of things, and people are looking this way at it. What do you think about revisiting that? You know, we bought all those new cuffs for the segregation unit, and I've actually heard from some of the officers that they may be having trouble with that. Do you want to take a look at those? That's being honest with them without being disrespectful, without bruising their ego, which is easy to do. Some of us think, and I I you know I hold the heard the old timers say a lot, I don't care about their ego. I don't care if they get their feet, I don't care. That's fine. Do you want to have a seat at that table? Do you want to have influence or you want to sit in the corner and just have things given to you with no influence and how it's implemented or how it affects the agency and your staff. Another thing is being loyal to your boss. And when I say loyal, that doesn't mean follow blindly. One of the first uh leadership classes I ever had, I had an AW who talked about blind loyalty and how that led him down the wrong road. And it took him a long time to recover. He did, but I always took a lot from his honesty about that conversation, what he learned and how it affected his career. So we're not talking about blind loyalty, we're just talking about loyalty, how to be loyal. You know, a lot of people are gonna think, and I hear people talking

Loyalty, Ego, And Real Influence

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out there right now who are saying, Well, you want me to just build this person up. You're wanting me to give them my ideas, you're wanting me to be loyal to them like they're like they're a good boss. You're expecting me to ignore their ego problems. I'm gonna say, Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Because if you're thinking that way, then you're not thinking about what your real job is. You've got to reframe this, you've got to think about what your real job is, and your real job is supporting those people who look up to you. Your real job is making your agency successful and making the people around you successful, that's your job. And if that takes you dropping back your ego a little bit, if that takes you supporting someone, and when I say support, I mean getting in there and working so that they look good, and which increases the efficiency in the agency, which makes the agency work better, which makes the working conditions better. If that's what it takes, then do it. Don't be undermining them. Don't be going in there and and working behind their back to make them look bad. Get in there and do the best you can to help them run the agency, or throw up your hands and and not be part of that conversation. That's the choices there. I didn't say every choice is good, but that's your choices. That's what you have there. And I'm not going to tell you I'm perfect at this. I can tell you from my own career that I had more than I I remember one time very specifically that I had a boss who wasn't bad. They were a huge micromanager, and I was not allowed to make real decisions. I wasn't allowed to have real input. And my ego got in the way. My ego, boy, it I didn't like it. I know what I'm doing here. Why are they even doing this? And why are they looking at my job? Go take care of your job. But they weren't. They were looking at my job, and my ego got bruised. It got bruised bad. Uh it was a tough time in my life, not just from the ego, but from the stress that was put on by this micromanager. What I caught myself doing was becoming so wrapped up in how I felt, how I felt disrespected, uh, how my ego was bruised, how I didn't feel like I could do my job. I got so caught up in this that I started feeling sorry for myself. And it took a friend of mine to kind of give me a shake and look and see I was ignoring the people I'm supposed to lead. I didn't feel like I was getting leadership. Well, guess what they didn't feel like? They didn't feel like they were getting leadership. And so that changed my thoughts on a lot of things. I had to back up. I had to become a better leader. I had to get in there and become a leader for those people who were not getting the leadership they needed. To become a leader for everyone who was missing leadership, and to take my ego and go put it on a shelf, to take my feelings and put them to the side. Because were my feelings justified? I don't know. I don't I don't know quite know how to answer that. Everybody says, well, you have a right to your feelings. Yeah, unless they're preventing you from accomplishing stuff. Those aren't good feelings. Those aren't those aren't productive feelings. So I had to take some of those feelings and move them to the side. I didn't have to like the decisions being made from above. What I had to do was give my boss value, have influence, and hopefully give that institution that agency what they needed to succeed. So a lot of this is about changing the way you look at where you're at in your job. A lot of this is about changing how you look at your boss's ego, at your ego. You can't get anything done as a leader if you don't have influence. And that influence has to be built with the people that work for you, the people that work around you, and the people that work above you. That is a productive leader. If you have influence in all three of those areas, if you're missing influence in any of those three areas, you're not as productive. If you have influence for those around you because you're always nice to them and you don't make hard decisions, you know, and they look at you that way, but that causes you not to have influence to those above you, then how do you protect those around you that work for you? If you don't have influence up the chain, think about little stuff. What if they need something? What if what if they want promotion? Shouldn't you have influence on up the chain with who gets promoted? How much does that affect your work? Who gets promoted affects your work about as much as anything? Who gets put in important positions? Like a training officer, one of the most important positions in your agency. It sets your culture, it's just the culture for your agency. They get a hold of those people when they're brand new. Don't I wanna don't I want to be able to influence who my best officers are? Of course I do. So I hope that made sense. Hope the rain's not too loud. I went ahead and recorded through some of this, but you may hear that in the background. There's a little bit of lightning. This is gonna be fun. Probably in a couple of weeks, I'll sit down. This is my newest book, The Weight of Justice. Leadership Lessons from Inside America's Toughest Prisons, A Correctional Officer's Journey. And I talk about leadership in here. I talk about some of those times in my life that I had to learn some hard lessons. I talk about the way corrections shaped me. And I'll go more into that in the next podcast. If I'm really lucky, I think I've got it worked out to where I'm going to get to go up to Missouri State Pen. Yes, that's

Book Preview And Listener Requests

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how old I am now. And Missouri State Pen is now a museum. That's where I started my career. And you can go see Missouri State Pen now for the price of admission. Uh, but I tell people that's how old I am because the place I started work is now a museum. But I'm going to get to go up there, and that's where my career started. And uh so I'm hopeful and hoping to have some discussion about that book and some of those early influences that I had in my career that were shaped by that place. Some of the things I saw that were great, and some of the things I saw that weren't so great. So hey, if you like this podcast and uh if you get the chance, help me out. Just like everybody else on these channels, I need likes. I need to just need you to subscribe. And if you would, go check out W W Cantrail Rights.com. C-A-N-T-R-E-L-L, W-R-I-T-E-S dot com. And that's where I highlight my books. I'd love for you to order my books. I think you'll enjoy them. I worked really hard. I put together a team of uh designers and editors who uh who worked really hard, and I am proud of this book. I'm gonna talk more about that soon. Have a great day.