When the market crashed in 2008, a manufacturing company called Barry-Wehmiller lost nearly a third of its orders almost overnight. The math was brutal. The company needed to save around $10 million to keep the doors open. Given the pressure, the board wanted to do what most boards do in a crisis: they recommended layoffs.

The CEO, Bob Chapman, refused. Instead, he asked everyone to share the pain. Every person, from the newest hire to Chapman himself, took four weeks of unpaid leave. As he put it when he announced the program, “It’s better that we should all suffer a little so that none of us have to suffer a lot.”

Something amazing happened after the furlough program was implemented. Morale went up. And then something unexpected happened: people who could afford to take more time off quietly picked up the furlough weeks of coworkers couldn’t afford the time off. This was never part of the program. This was something the people spontaneously did for each other.

This is not a story about furloughs or how to manage in a down economy. This is a story about what people do when they feel protected by their leaders. They protect each other and they protect the organization.

At The Curve, we have spent the last few years working to bring this philosophy back to a profession that, in too many cases, seems to have lost sight of it. That to “protect and serve” is more than a decal on a car door; it’s a mindset for leaders to guide them in leading their own people. It’s also a rallying cry for those who run America’s cities and counties.

The best leaders in policing learned the hard way that the profession is much more than “policing our communities.” It’s about culture and trust. The trust of those the police serve and the trust police have for each other, their leaders, and the city/county managers with whom they work. Policing cultures can happen by design or by default. The ones that are designed and managed have higher rates of morale, fewer scandals, lower crime rates, higher retention rates, and better relationships with the community. Those police cultures that happen by default, however, tend to struggle with some or all of those same metrics. (And don’t let numbers of arrests be an indicator as to the strength of the culture—there is little to no correlation.)

There is a huge opportunity for city managers to play a bigger role in what the culture of their police force can look like by hiring a police chief who understands the fundamentals of good leadership and how to build a strong, human-focused, corporate culture.

The Curve Is Leading the Movement

In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder, Simon Sinek, New York Times bestselling author and leadership expert, gathered together a small group of police chiefs and sheriffs from across the country and the political spectrum to connect over Zoom. He had gotten to know a few of us over the years and wanted to offer a safe place to connect during a time when it felt like the whole country hated everyone with a badge. The first calls felt less like strategy sessions and more like therapy. These were people who loved the profession and were as angry as everyone else and heartbroken by what was happening to the profession they had devoted their lives to.

After about the third call, the conversation turned. The calls moved from therapy to what can we do about it. Simon asked simply, “What’s the problem with the profession?” What was the real cause of the abuses? It was tempting to say “racism” or “a few bad officers” and stop there. But the deeper the group dug, the more they kept landing on the same word. Culture. And if culture is set by leaders, then the near total absence of real leadership development in the profession wasn’t a side issue. It was the issue.

Most of that original group decided to work together to help fix the problem. And thus, The Curve was born: a nonprofit founded by working chiefs and sheriffs who were already ahead of the curve in their own agencies. The Curve exists to serve leaders and aspiring police leaders as they modernize their cultures and grow the next generation of leaders. The Curve is so named because it serves the early adopters, those who want to help fuel a movement and find the tipping point that can change the whole profession for the better—for those who work in the profession and for those they serve.

The Purpose of Policing Is More Than What We Do

After George Floyd, there were some who called for the outright defunding of police. Instead of simply being defensive or angry, we decided to challenge ourselves. We did something few in the profession ever do—ask ourselves why we exist. What is the purpose of police?

Most officers will tell you they work in “law enforcement” or that their job is “to protect and serve.” But enforcing the law is only one aspect of the job, and “protect and serve” too often ends up as a slogan on the side of a car. We realized that most police themselves didn’t have a sense of their own purpose. A good purpose statement inspires. It also offers clear guidance about how to make a decision at 2:00 a.m. when there is no policy manual at hand. And it turns out, there is a very good reason for police. Police exist to protect the vulnerable from harm. When someone is the victim of a crime, they are the vulnerable to be protected. And as soon as a police officer places a suspect in handcuffs, that suspect then becomes the vulnerable one. Even our own employees can be vulnerable and it’s up to leaders to protect them as well.

Purpose drives behavior. And if police only define themselves as “law enforcement,” for example, it will influence how police officers think of themselves and how they will act. The services our police and sheriff’s departments provide go far beyond enforcing the law. Yes, arresting criminals is a core part of the job, but it’s not the only part. Tell a rookie their job is to “enforce the law,” and they go looking for laws to enforce. Tell them their job is to protect the vulnerable, and they become protectors. Same person. Same uniform. Different purpose. Different behavior. Different relationship to the job and to the community.

The People Who Lead the People Who Serve

Those in city/county management don’t run a police department day to day. You run something bigger and harder. You’re responsible for police and fire, public works and parks, libraries and permits and budgets, and the hundred quiet services people only notice when they fail but touch their daily lives. You don’t lead any one of those functions yourself. What you do is set the conditions and create the environment to enable the people to lead.

You are the leaders of leaders. And the first rule of effective leadership is that you’re not directly responsible for the results, you’re responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.

We Can’t Order People to Trust

A team is more than a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other. The problem is that trust takes effort to earn. We can require attendance. We can mandate a policy. We can demand performance. But we cannot order anyone to trust us. Trust is a feeling, and it shows up only when people feel safe enough to be open and honest. The job of a leader is to create that psychological safety.

On teams that trust each other, people feel comfortable raising their hand to say, “I made a mistake,” or “I don’t know how to do this,” or “I need help.” On the teams that don’t, people learn to hide all of that. They shade the truth. They fake competence. They bury the problem and hope it doesn’t surface on their watch. And when that happens, things will crack or break…eventually.

Trust can only be built and people will only report how things are really going when they feel safe to do so.

Before Alan Mulally took over as CEO of Ford Motor Company, the previous CEO would literally fire someone for delivering bad news about how the company was performing. So, guess what happened in all his status meetings? All green slides—everything was great! Except the company was losing money hand over first.

When Mulally took over, he held his first status meetings to get a sense of how things were going in the company he was now charged to lead. Every executive presented their work as fine. All green. He finally asked how that was possible when the company was bleeding money. Silence. Eventually one executive took the risk and marked a project red. He was sure it would cost him his job. Instead, the CEO praised the honesty and asked who could help. Week by week, the reds and yellows appeared, and only then could anyone see the truth clearly enough to fix it.

The lesson for a leader of leaders is simple and uncomfortable. If everything your people tell you is green, you don’t have a healthy organization. You have a frightened one. And a frightened organization can’t fix itself because no one will say out loud what’s actually broken.

Most dysfunction in public service works exactly this way. It doesn’t come from bad people. It comes from fear. Fear of being blamed. Fear of looking weak. Fear of saying the hard thing in a room full of people who outrank you. The fear that keeps a status report green is the same fear that can keep someone silent while a colleague crosses a line. Both are what happens when people don’t feel safe enough to speak or to act.

Removing that fear is not soft, and it’s not the same as lowering the bar. It means building what we call a circle of safety, an environment where people can be honest about mistakes and gaps and still know you have their back. The leader has to take the first risk. You go first. You admit your own misses. You thank people for hard truths instead of punishing them. Then, slowly, people step in.

You Get the Behavior You Reward

There’s one more habit worth examining because it quietly shapes every organization: who and how you promote.

In most of government, we promote the high performers. The ones who hit the numbers, are technically proficient, and get the projects done. We rarely ask the other question: Do the people around this person trust them? Is there a correlation between being great at a task and being able to lead others? Even the most elite teams in the world have learned to ask it. They’ve found that the most dangerous person on a team isn’t the low performer. It’s the high performer nobody trusts, the one who’s talented and toxic, who delivers results today and erodes the people around them every day that they stay.

Every time you elevate someone like that, the whole organization reads the message. Trust is optional here. Results are all that count. And every time you develop and reward the people who lift others up, the organization reads that, too. Culture is nothing more complicated than what you value plus how you behave. Your people are always watching both.

The Good News: Leadership Is a Learnable Skill

If trust and leadership were traits you were born with or without, this would be a sad story. Luckily, they aren’t. Leadership is a skill, like reading a budget or running an incident. It can be taught, practiced, and developed on purpose. That’s the whole premise of The Curve, and it holds up just as well in a public works yard as in a police briefing room.

This means that the culture of a city, town, or county is not fixed. It’s a choice made every day, in small moments, by you and the people you put in charge. And the biggest choice belongs to you. The words you use, the spaces you create for dialogue, and the people you choose to lead in your organization all matter each and every day.

This Is an Infinite Game

One last idea: There’s no such thing as winning at public service. No final whistle, no trophy, no day the city is finished. You inherit an institution from those who came before, you serve, and you hand it to those who come next, hopefully stronger than you found it.

We call that an infinite game, and it changes what good leadership looks like. When leaders chase a finite win—this quarter’s numbers, this week’s headline—they tend to burn down trust to get it. When leaders play the long game, they invest in what lets an organization endure. Trust. Cooperation. The will of their people. Those assets outlast any budget cycle and any administration. How are you creating a legacy of public service, trust, and culture for those who follow you? What have you done to invest in the next generation of leaders in your organization and in the profession?

An Invitation to Go First

We built The Curve for the leaders who don’t wait for permission to do the right thing. The ones willing to look honestly at their own house and lead the change before a crisis forces it on them. That work began in policing, but the principle belongs to all of public service. Culture by design, not default. Service over control. Trust before performance, because performance almost always follows trust, and rarely the other way around.

Public trust in government won’t be won back with better press releases or one more program. It’s rebuilt one honest conversation at a time, one leader at a time, by people who feel led, who feel safe, and who still remember why they signed up to serve.

We imagine a world where people feel that justice and service and government itself are delivered with dignity and fairness. We don’t think that vision is naive. We think it’s a leadership problem. And leadership problems get solved by leaders who decide to reflect and grow. You lead the people who serve. Start there.

SIMON SINEK is the founder of The Curve.

KELLY MCADOO is city administrator for Santa Barbara, California.

CHRIS HSIUNG is executive director of The Curve and a retired police chief and undersheriff.

The Curve exists to help public sector leaders modernize culture and leadership, one leader, one agency, one community at a time. Learn more at thecurve.org.

Hear more from Simon Sinek in his opening session keynote, “Leading with Purpose,” at the 2026 ICMA Annual Conference.