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Ed Pallas knows a thing or two about leadership. That assessment has nothing to do with his police captaincy or 25 years and counting of experience. Many rotten leaders have climbed organizational ladders successfully. There are plenty of people with decades of experience who still suck at leading....

Ed Pallas knows a thing or two about leadership. That assessment has nothing to do with his police captaincy or 25 years and counting of experience. Many rotten leaders have climbed organizational ladders successfully. There are plenty of people with decades of experience who still suck at leading. My assessment has nothing to do with his doctorate in organizational leadership. Too many ivory tower theories fall flat in the real world. What’s most powerful about Leader Armor is the sincerity that provides a practical guide for leaders serious about leading. Ed is a master storyteller. He takes you into the squad room, on nighttime stakeouts, and adrenaline-pumping, high-pressure arrests of armed and dangerous criminals to reveal leadership lessons. You’ll love the poignant, authentic ah-ha moments as the author points out his mistakes and what he’s learned in the crucible. Learning from the experiences of others is essential to your growth. Personal experience is the best teacher of leadership, but you can cram only so many into a single lifetime. Personal experience is also the school of hard knocks, and the tuition gets very expensive. Average leaders avoid repeating their own errors. The most successful leaders learn from others’ experiences so that they can add best practices and avoid repeating their mistakes. Leader Armor is the combination of hard and soft skills that make up your leadership capacity. Hard skills—technical and tactical competencies—are necessary but not sufficient. You need to build critical soft skills so that you can inspire people to contribute their best to your team’s success. Leader Armor provides you with practical wisdom for doing that. Leader Armor for Law Enforcement 2 Between the powerful stories, Ed crystallizes important leadership ideas and gives you tools to build your leadership habits. SIMPLE, LEAD ME? F-U, SPEAR, and ARETE (the ancient Greek word for excellence) are among the powerful memory aides you get in this superb book. Leader Armor focuses on first line police leaders, who often get no formal training for the role. That situation is unacceptable. There’s too much at stake in America today for police leaders to be forced into discovery learning because their departments lack the resources and wisdom to prepare front-line leaders for their jobs. Your department’s culture is not what senior leaders write on the walls or put in memos. Your department’s culture is formed by what happens in the halls, squad rooms, and patrols when no one is watching. First-line leaders are the makers or breakers of your culture. This book helps you get it right. Leader Armor comes at a critical time for police in America. The four horses of the 2020-apocalypse—COVID, economic lockdowns, social unrest, and a divisive presidential election—have placed more public pressure and scrutiny on police than any time in the past fifty years. Calls to “defund the police” reportedly increased attrition and damaged morale. And yet, Americans want their streets safe. We want criminals arrested and innocent people to be unharmed. I can appreciate how hard it is to get the balance right. I’ve never walked a mile in your shoes, but I do know a bit about split-second life and death calls from combat in Afghanistan. As a task force commander of about 800 paratroopers spread over an area the size of Rhode Island, there was no possible way for me—or my captains and lieutenants—to make these calls. We had to rely on our sergeants to set the right example and make the right decisions, so our paratroopers would do what’s right in highly ambiguous and deadly situations. Our sergeants got these calls right and trained their paratroopers to do the same because of how well they prepared before combat. The culture you build in peacetime is the one you take into combat. Leader Armor shows that the culture you build in the squad rooms and on the beat is the one you take into the dangerous, high-stress, uncertain Foreword 3 situations. Ed’s book provides much needed practical wisdom for firstline leaders to build a team that protects and serves every day and rises to the occasion when things turn chaotic and deadly. That level of excellence does not happen by accident. It happens because leaders make it so. The best leaders, Ed Pallas tells us, pull others up the ladder behind them. They never expect you to pay it back. They expect you to pay it forward by helping others up the ladder. This remarkable book helps you do precisely that