Every person has an obligation to improve their industry at least two or three generations ahead of where they found it. That is a pretty high standard, but I believe it is one worth pursuing. It means we cannot simply continue doing what has always been done, add another program, attend another conference, adopt another set of best practices, obtain another professional credential, or complete another organizational process and declare victory. If we are serious about leadership, our responsibility is to leave the profession measurably better than we found it.
That raises an uncomfortable question for law enforcement. After decades of professionalization, accreditation, executive education, strategic planning, policy development, organizational assessments, training programs, and an almost endless supply of “best practices,” are police organizations actually producing better organizational results? Before answering that question, however, there is an important distinction that needs to be made because much of the confusion surrounding organizational improvement begins with confusing objectives with processes.
At The Results Group, Ltd., we make a fundamental distinction between objectives and processes. Objectives are outcomes. Processes are not outcomes. An accreditation, strategic plan, training program, policy, organizational assessment, or other process may be intended to produce an objective, but completing the process does not mean the objective has been achieved. The only way to determine whether the objective has been achieved is to measure the result. That distinction becomes particularly important when we talk about police accreditation because accreditation is a process designed to help organizations meet established standards; it is not, by itself, evidence that an organization has achieved every result those standards are intended to support.
The Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, commonly known as CALEA, was created in 1979 through the joint efforts of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Police Executive Research Forum. CALEA describes its accreditation programs as providing public safety agencies with an opportunity to meet established professional standards, including written directives, management analysis, preparedness, community relationships, independent review and continuing assessment. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. In fact, there is considerable value in having standards, policies, documentation, review, accountability and an outside examination of organizational practices. CALEA itself describes its standards as foundational for contemporary law enforcement agencies and its accreditation process as a framework for addressing operational and administrative responsibilities.
The problem begins when the process becomes confused with the objective. An agency can be accredited and still have serious organizational problems. It can comply with standards and still have unhappy employees. It can maintain policies and procedures and still have poor communication. It can successfully complete an accreditation cycle and still struggle with recruitment, retention, funding, operational performance or public satisfaction. Those things are not mutually exclusive. The question isn’t whether an agency completed accreditation. The question is whether accreditation helped produce the Four Results That Matter©.
The Four Results That Matter© are deliberately simple. First, Employee Safety must be at the top of everyone’s list all the time every time. Employee safety cannot be something discussed primarily after an officer is injured, killed, or otherwise placed in danger. It has to be embedded in organizational thinking, decision-making, equipment, training, supervision, staffing, communication, and operational systems. A policy can establish expectations, and accreditation can examine whether certain expectations and procedures exist, but neither one, by itself, guarantees that people are actually safer. Safety is an outcome, and if safety is the objective, the organization needs a way to determine whether its decisions and practices are actually improving it. Rules don’t create safety. People do.
The second result is Adequate, sustainable, dedicated funding. An organization cannot consistently produce excellent services without the resources necessary to provide them. That means adequate funding, sustainable funding, and funding dedicated to the responsibilities the organization is expected to perform. Accreditation can help an organization demonstrate that it has sound management practices, identify deficiencies, and establish accountability, but accreditation does not create a tax base, appropriate an operating budget, persuade elected officials to invest in the organization or solve an agency’s long-term financial problems. Funding is a result that has to be secured, sustained, and measured.
The third result is A minimum of 90% satisfaction among customers with both the quality and quantity of services provided. This is where the difference between organizational process and organizational performance becomes especially visible. An agency may have excellent policies, accreditation plaques on the wall, beautifully documented procedures, extensive training records, and carefully constructed strategic plans, but the customer ultimately experiences the organization through the services actually delivered. Was the response timely? Was the interaction professional? Was the problem addressed? Was the person treated with respect? Did the organization communicate effectively? Did it provide the quality and quantity of services people reasonably expect? Those are results, and they cannot be established merely by demonstrating that the organization followed a process.
The fourth result is A minimum of 90% satisfaction among employees with job-related conditions. This may be one of the most neglected measures of organizational health because employees experience the organization differently than the public does. They know what it is like to work there every day. They experience staffing levels, workload, scheduling, supervision, equipment, compensation, communication, recognition, advancement opportunities, fairness, leadership, and the degree to which management understands the realities of their lives. An organization can have a comprehensive policy manual and still have miserable employees. It can have outstanding training and still have poor supervision. It can be accredited and still have an organizational culture that drives good people away. Employee satisfaction is not a process. It is a result that has to be measured.
This is where I believe law enforcement has sometimes fallen into what I call the accreditation trap. The organization begins with a legitimate objective: improve professionalism, consistency, accountability, and service delivery. It then adopts a process designed to help accomplish those objectives. Over time, however, the process itself can become the focus. People begin asking whether the agency is accredited instead of asking whether the agency is performing better. Meetings become focused on compliance. Staff members become experts in documentation. Policies are reviewed, files are organized, evidence is collected, assessors arrive, and corrective actions are completed. Eventually, the organization receives its accreditation, and everyone congratulates everyone else. Then the process starts again.
There is nothing wrong with doing any of those things. The problem is assuming that completing them proves the organization achieved the objective. It doesn’t. Research illustrates why the distinction matters. A 2017 study by Steven Hougland and Ross Wolf examined 628 agencies, including 314 CALEA-accredited agencies and 314 non-accredited agencies, and found no difference between the two groups in either the total number of citizen complaints or the number of sustained citizen complaints. That does not prove accreditation is ineffective, but it does demonstrate why we should be careful about assuming that accreditation automatically produces better organizational outcomes.
Consider the building-code analogy. A building code exists for a reason. It establishes requirements intended to produce a safe, functional building, but having a building code does not construct the building. Passing inspections does not guarantee that the people occupying the building will love it, and possessing a certificate demonstrating compliance does not tell you everything you need to know about how well the building actually performs over time. The same is true organizationally. Accreditation is a framework. Leadership is the construction process. The organization’s results are what ultimately tell us whether the building is working.
That same problem appears when organizations become overly dependent upon “best practices.” The phrase sounds so authoritative that people sometimes stop asking whether the practice is producing the intended result. A practice can be widely accepted and still be wrong for a particular organization. A practice can have worked somewhere else and still fail here. A policy can be legally defensible and still be operationally ineffective. A training program can be professionally designed and still fail to change behavior. A strategic plan can be beautifully written and still sit on a shelf. The existence of a process tells us what an organization is doing; it does not necessarily tell us what the organization is accomplishing.
The same principle applies to policy-management systems such as Lexipol. Standardized policies and training can be useful, particularly for smaller agencies that may not have the resources to develop everything internally. At the same time, scholarship examining the privatization of police policymaking has raised legitimate questions about transparency, liability-driven policymaking and the role of private companies in establishing police policy. The point is not that standardized policy is inherently bad. The point is that a tool should remain a tool. It should not become confused with the result it is supposed to help produce.
An organization can have the capability to perform well without actually performing well. That distinction matters because accreditation can help establish capability, standards can establish expectations, policies can establish consistency, training can develop knowledge and skills, and strategic planning can establish direction. Execution, however, happens every day. It happens when a supervisor talks to an employee, when an officer makes a decision under pressure, when a dispatcher answers a call, when a manager decides where scarce resources will be allocated, when an employee raises a problem and leadership decides whether to listen, and when a citizen contacts the organization and forms an opinion based upon the service received. That is where organizational performance actually lives.
There is also a subtle danger when compliance becomes the dominant organizational objective. People begin making decisions based on whether something can be documented rather than whether it works. They ask, “Can we demonstrate compliance?” That is a legitimate question, but it cannot be the only question. The next question must be, “Did compliance produce the result we intended?” If not, then we have a process problem disguised as a performance problem. This is what I mean by defensive compliance: the organization becomes very good at demonstrating that it did what it was supposed to do without determining whether what it did actually worked.
A completed checklist is not organizational improvement. A certificate is not organizational improvement. A policy manual is not organizational improvement. A training record is not organizational improvement. An accreditation award is not organizational improvement. Those things may contribute to organizational improvement, and some of them may be very important, but they are not the result. The result is the result.
This isn’t merely a law enforcement issue. Healthcare provides another useful example because accreditation has also been extensively studied there. Research examining hospital accreditation has produced a mixed picture. A large 2018 observational study published in the BMJ examined more than 4,400 U.S. hospitals and more than 4.2 million patients aged 65 and older and found no significant difference in 30-day mortality associated with accreditation status. Other research has found positive associations with areas such as safety culture, efficiency, and length of stay, while findings concerning mortality and healthcare-associated infections have been mixed. A 2025 systematic review of Joint Commission International accreditation found that the available studies were highly heterogeneous and that the evidence base remained limited, with additional research needed. Again, the lesson is not that accreditation is worthless. The lesson is that accreditation should be evaluated by what it actually produces. That is a much more demanding standard, but it is also a much more useful one.
I am not suggesting that law enforcement agencies abandon accreditation. Quite the opposite. A good accreditation process can be valuable. Standards matter. External review matters. Consistency matters. Documentation matters. Accountability matters. But those things should support the organization’s objectives rather than replace them. If an agency is investing significant money, time and personnel into accreditation, leadership should be able to explain what organizational results that investment is intended to improve, and then leadership should measure those results.
Instead of asking only whether policies are current, we can ask whether employees understand them and believe they are useful. Instead of asking whether training has been completed, we can ask whether training changed performance. Instead of asking whether the organization is accredited, we can ask whether employee safety improved. Instead of asking whether the strategic plan has been completed, we can ask whether the organization is actually moving toward its intended future. Instead of asking whether the organization follows best practices, we can ask whether those practices are producing the results we need. That is leadership.
This is also why I developed The Guidant Path. The purpose isn’t to create another binder, produce another certificate, or develop another plan that gets presented to the governing body and then quietly disappears into a file cabinet. The purpose is to understand where an organization is, where it needs to go, what is preventing it from getting there, and what has to change to move it forward. That requires a different kind of conversation, one that asks leaders to look at the organization as it actually exists rather than as the organizational chart, policy manual or accreditation report says it exists. Bling does not create excellence. People do.
Sometimes that means confronting things nobody wants to discuss. Sometimes it means admitting that something that worked ten years ago no longer works. Sometimes it means acknowledging that employees are not satisfied. Sometimes it means recognizing that customers are not receiving the quality or quantity of services they expect. Sometimes it means admitting that the organization has been extraordinarily busy without actually making meaningful progress. Leadership without direction is often an apparition — a magic wand held by a yard gnome riding a unicorn. It looks impressive, but it doesn’t accomplish much.
Our responsibility is to leave the profession better than we found it. That means we have to become more interested in outcomes than appearances and distinguish between objectives and processes. Objectives are outcomes. Processes are not outcomes. Accreditation can be a useful means. Training can be a useful means. Strategic planning can be a useful means. Policies can be a useful means. Organizational assessments can be useful means. But none of them should become the objective. The objective is the result.
The Four Results That Matter© are straightforward: Employee Safety must be at the top of everyone’s list all the time every time; Adequate, sustainable, dedicated funding; A minimum of 90% satisfaction among customers with both the quality and quantity of services provided; and A minimum of 90% satisfaction among employees with job-related conditions. Those are measurable outcomes. If we cannot demonstrate that the things we are doing are moving those results in the right direction, then perhaps we have invested heavily in processes without achieving the objectives those processes were supposed to accomplish.
And that is the accreditation myth. The problem isn’t accreditation. The problem is believing that completing the process means we achieved the result. You didn’t get here in a day, and you’re not going to get out of it in a day, but you can begin by asking a better question: Are the things we are doing actually producing the Four Results That Matter©? That is where real organizational improvement begins.
Additional Reading
Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), “About Us.”
Adam G. Hughes & Manuel P. Teodoro, “Assessing Professionalism: Street-Level Attitudes and Agency Accreditation,” State and Local Government Review, 45(1), 36–45.
Steven Hougland & Ross Wolf, “Accreditation in Police Agencies: Does External Quality Assurance Reduce Citizen Complaints?” The Police Journal, 90(1), 40–54.
Ingrid V. Eagly & Joanna C. Schwartz, “Lexipol: The Privatization of Police Policymaking,” Texas Law Review, 96(5), 891–976.
Ingrid V. Eagly & Joanna C. Schwartz, “Lexipol’s Fight Against Police Reform,” Indiana Law Journal, 97(1), 1–56.
Miranda B. Lam et al., “Association between patient outcomes and accreditation in US hospitals: Observational study,” BMJ, 363, k4011.
Mohammed Hussein et al., “The impact of hospital accreditation on the quality of healthcare: A systematic literature review,” BMC Health Services Research, 21, 1057.
Anni Vuohijoki et al., “Impact of Joint Commission International accreditation on occupational health and patient safety: A systematic review,” PLOS ONE, 20(6), e0325894.
If you have a problem you’d like to discuss in a confidential, no-obligation Zoom visit, you can self-schedule it by clicking on this button:
Author’s Note: The content provided in this article is designed exclusively for educational and informational purposes, reflecting opinions shaped by decades of leadership training and organizational consulting experience. It should never be interpreted as formal professional advice. By reading or engaging with this material, you acknowledge that no professional-client relationship is established and that these insights do not substitute for tailored guidance from a qualified professional familiar with your specific circumstances. Consequently, readers are strongly advised to seek independent counsel from licensed legal, financial, medical, or other appropriate advisors before implementing any strategies or making decisions based on these perspectives. Ultimately, you assume full personal responsibility for any actions you choose to take or omit as a result of reading this material, releasing the author and publisher from any liability for outcomes arising from your reliance on the text.
