David Rabiner, CSP | Today’s Leadership Challenge: Getting the Right People and Creating a Culture of Commitment
The public deserves and demands the highest quality professionals in public service – particularly in public safety. Right now experienced professionals are retiring at a high rate, today’s labor market is tight and mobile, and the pandemic changed the way many people view work. How you lead and manage moving forward needs adapt to address these changes. This program outlines what today’s leaders need to be focusing on and what it takes to build and maintain a culture that attracts, retain, and motivates the best people.
David Rabiner has been a high-demand speaker on leadership, influence, peak performance, and team dynamics for more than a quarter century. His career body of work includes more than 2,300 presentations in 15 countries and 46 states. David has a keen understanding of today’s public safety leadership challenges and works frequently with public safety agencies and organizations.
Steve Robbins, Ph.D. | Your Brain is Good at Inclusion…
Except When It’s Not
The “Your Brain is Good at Inclusion… Except When It’s Not” workshop/presentation provides an innovative, neuroscience-based look at the benefits of creating inclusive workplaces. Using the fields of cognitive neuroscience, social-psychology, and communication (among others), Dr. Robbins explores the human, hard-wired need to belong – and what happens when that need is not met. He demonstrates how our brain has natural and developed tendencies (e.g. unconscious biases) that can help us achieve goals, but also lead to unintended consequences, like the exclusion of others who are different than us. He provides listeners with terms and a language that invite people into productive conversations about inclusion and diversity. In the end, Dr. Robbins shows that the key to battling bias and a cultivating a more inclusive organizational culture begins with a practical understanding of how the brain operates, but ultimately requires continuous and intentional practice of fundamental skills (i.e., open-mindedness and mindful engagement). With such skills, organizations have a strong foundation for creating and maintaining an environment that unleashes everyone’s talents and skills.
The presentation makes a compelling, neuroscience-grounded case for why addressing inclusion and diversity is not an option, but an organizational imperative for excelling in a dynamic, 21st century world. And as always, Dr. Robbins brings all this science-based content neatly packaged in real-world relevance, a good dose of storytelling and laugh-out-loud humor. Ultimately, listeners will walk away with 1) a greater motivation to engage the work of inclusion and diversity, 2) better understand what that work looks like, and 3) how such work will enhance individual and organizational performance.
Presentation Objectives
To help participants:
- Better understand the work of inclusion and diversity from the perspectives of human behavior and cognitive neuroscience
- Understand how the brain’s natural functioning can lead to unintended consequences and prevent us from leveraging human differences
- Better grasp unconscious bias and how it operates and effects individuals and organizations
- Better understand the root of cause(s) of inclusion and diversity-related problems
- Obtain concepts, terms and language that invite people into more positive and productive conversations about inclusion and diversity
- Develop a practice strategy to acquire necessary and fundamental skills
- Walk away with a deeper commitment and simple, yet powerful actions to address issues of inclusion and diversity
AJ DeAndrea and Madalena DeAndrea | Dark Nights of the Soul: When Terror Hits Home
Deputy Chief AJ DeAndrea (Retired) was in a leadership role in three school shootings that changed the fabric of American society and police response to active shootings around the world. He takes a deep dive into these tragic events and more importantly analyzes the positive things that came from them: from decision making, improved tactics, and mental health practices.
Most importantly, he will be accompanied during his presentation by his oldest daughter, Madalena DeAndrea, who survived the Borderline active shooting incident in Thousand Oaks, CA in 2018. Madalena, a current Senior Manager of Strategic Projects, Recovery, and Resiliency with Jefferson County Schools in Colorado current School District Emergency, shares how the protective factors she learned growing up the daughter of a life long law enforcement officer, ultimately saved her life. She shares her insights as a survivor of an active shooter, and her choice to experience post traumatic growth following an experience of evil.
AJ and Madalena passionately speak from a perspective of having been inside the building during the aforementioned active shootings. These events have lead to the creation of our Seven Pillars of awareness and preparation that can help prevent active shootings from occurring or help stop and manage them more effectively if one is to kick off in your jurisdiction.
Kevin Gilmartin, Ph.D. | Emotional Survival
This presentation is designed to assist public service professionals in developing behavioral strategies to prevent the loss of idealism and the emergence of inappropriate behavior patterns. It explores the short- and long-term effects that high-stress careers can have on both personal and professional aspects of life. The presentation examines how the initial enthusiasm and desire to contribute positively can, over time, transform into negative cynicism, social distrust, and hostility towards the world, significantly impacting job performance, decision-making, and overall quality of life.
The presentation also reviews the effects of career-related stress on the families of public service professionals, particularly their children, in areas such as school functioning and health. The goal is for participants to recognize the potential impacts of their careers on their personal lives and to develop strategies for emotional survival. These strategies are intended to help professionals continue to function effectively and ethically without “burning out” or resorting to emotional isolation from friends, family, and colleagues.
This session addresses how, within a few years, idealistic and committed professionals can become cynical, frustrated, and experience difficulties in both their personal and professional lives. It outlines the factors that can lead individuals to engage in inappropriate behavior patterns and poor decision-making, which may result in administrative or, in some cases, legal challenges. The purpose is to offer insights into how the deterioration process occurs and to provide specific preventative strategies that promote long-term engagement, motivation, and emotional health.
The goal is to equip participants with tools to avoid becoming “self-perceived victims”—individuals who spend excessive time resisting organizational directives and suffer unnecessary personal and professional harm.
Dale Henry, Ph.D. | Ethics – Nobody Needs It…Until They Get Caught
This is a must workshop for everyone preparing for management and leadership. It is the misunderstood and most slippery slope of organizational empowerment. No one really gets hurts by twisting the truth a little – right? Everyone wants to do the right thing – right? Nope! We want to do the easy thing. In this empowering and life changing presentation everyone will leave with a new understanding of – and appreciation for – the power of self-ethical monitoring.