How to Use Evaluations to Develop People and Strengthen Organizations

Supervisors reviewing body-cam video see it all the time.

An officer de-escalates a tense encounter. Another explains a decision particularly well. A veteran officer demonstrates patience with a frustrated resident. A rookie exercises sound discretion.

These moments are easy to notice and move past. Nothing went wrong and there is nothing to correct. But supervisors who see them differently can turn good police work into a concrete example of what the agency means when it talks about professionalism, procedural justice, de-escalation, or community policing.

Organizations often discuss accountability in terms of correcting poor performance. But accountability involves more than correcting what goes wrong. Strong leadership also means recognizing what goes well, understanding why it works, and intentionally using those examples to develop others.

Supervisors in public safety organizations have a unique vantage point. They see employees perform in real situations, make decisions under pressure and interact with the community. Effective leadership requires more than monitoring performance. It uses those firsthand observations to coach people and strengthen the organization.

Take, for example, body-worn camera (BWC) review. Random BWC review is an important accountability practice, and agencies should consider true random review as part of a meaningful/best practices accountability system.

However, a review’s value extends beyond  identifying policy violations. Supervisors should also look for examples of good policing in everyday interactions. When they identify them, they can flag them both to recognize the officer and to create real, non-hypothetical training opportunities for others.

One agency we worked with started showing those videos during roll call. That approach has a distinct advantage: It features the agency's own officers doing the agency's own work in real situations with people from their actual community. That instantly makes the lesson immediate, credible, and achievable. Rather than simply telling employees what good performance looks like, the agency shows them that it is already happening within their organization.

The same developmental approach should extend beyond BWC review to routine supervision. Reviewing activity logs, having regular conversations with officers, and conducting employee evaluations should not simply be mechanisms for detecting problems but opportunities to connect, mentor, and professionally develop employees.

A meaningful employee performance evaluation should answer more than whether someone met minimum expectations. It should highlight strengths, discuss skills that need improvement, identify professional goals, and explain how the supervisor plans to support them.

And that development should not begin and end with an annual evaluation. Once a supervisor identifies a development area or commits to helping an employee reach a professional goal, they should follow up throughout the year. More frequent check-ins create an opportunity to ask not only whether the employee followed through, but whether the supervisor did too. Accountability runs in both directions.

Evaluation conversations may still require addressing deficiencies or having difficult conversations. Positive development does not mean avoiding poor performance. That only creates risk within the organization. The goal is to create an environment where accountability and development work together to strengthen individual employees and the organization.

Leaders should also ask whether their organization’s performance evaluation system actually reinforces what they claim to value.

If an agency emphasizes community policing, problem solving, communication, mentorship, or de-escalation, those behaviors should also be reflected in performance evaluations. An agency cannot say community engagement matters, for example, while evaluating officers primarily on arrests, drugs seized, or guns recovered.

The same applies when officers are encouraged to participate in programs or initiatives. An organization cannot consistently tell employees that something matters while measuring and rewarding something else.

In my consulting work, I often remind leaders that “what gets measured gets done.”

Strategic leaders take the behaviors of their own employees and turn them into concrete examples of organizational expectations. They do not rely exclusively on failure to drive training. They also study successful encounters and ask: What happened here that we want repeated?

That approach also sends an important cultural message. Employees learn that supervisors aren’t just looking for things that go wrong, but are also paying attention when they get it right. The goal is not to praise everything or lower expectations, but to become more intentional about identifying excellence, understanding it, and multiplying it.

Recognizing good work becomes more than employee recognition; it becomes a strategy for organizational development.

Dr. Theron L. Bowman is a nationally recognized expert in Police Practices, Constitutional Policing, and Law Enforcement Oversight with more than 40 years of experience in public safety leadership, consulting, and litigation support. A former Chief of Police and Deputy City Manager for Arlington, Texas, he is the founder and CEO of The Bowman Group, a consulting firm specializing in police reform, accountability, and compliance monitoring.

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