Bernard Welten

Q: What did Bernard Welten steer on as chief of police over 6,000 people in Amsterdam?

A: On two things. The first is the result on the street, the city had to be safe and there could be no race riots. The second is competence, meaning the people he gathered around him. According to Welten it is not about what you can do yourself, but about what you can organize. In crucial positions he put people with passion, talent and a big conscience, people who have professional stomach ache all day when the streets are not safe. He calls them pathologically alert.

Q: What does Bernard Welten mean by professional stomach ache and values-driven work?

A: That an officer imagines what happens to people or could happen to them, and then acts. In government he still sees a lot of rule-driven behavior, where the protocol outranks common sense and problems are pushed into a procedure instead of being solved. He wanted officers who take the rules seriously but solve the problem. Anyone who sets the protocol aside and acts professionally, with integrity, decency and proportion, could count on his backing. His motto for every officer was therefore, behave as if you are the chief of police yourself. That way nobody has room to pass the buck.

Q: How did Bernard Welten decide who became a commissioner in the Amsterdam police?

A: By looking at performance and communication on top of results and competence. A commissioner has to understand the system and the political context, be able to explain it well, and connect his responsibility to what he wants to achieve on the street. A good boss, according to Welten, gives people hope, is a source of inspiration, sets the example and makes people do things they did not know they could do. He often saw that difference on the street already, where some officers naturally connect people and others follow.

Q: Which four strengths did Bernard Welten look for in leaders?

A: The power to act, the power to connect, the power to imagine and the power to develop. He links them to four examples, Patton for the power to act, Obama with yes we can for the power to connect, Martin Luther King with I have a dream for the power to imagine, and Gandhi for the power to develop, getting things done without violence. A leader always has to bring something of all four, but which one weighs heaviest depends on the phase the organization is in. Welten calls the power to develop his own weakest point. He was regularly accused of running too far ahead of the troops and lacking the patience to walk people through how it should be done. That is why he deliberately picked commissioners who did have it, for example for the relationship with the city council, the Public Prosecution Service and the roughly 25 social service agencies in Amsterdam.

Q: Why did Bernard Welten hire twelve young academics who were never allowed to agree with him?

A: Because a boss is vulnerable. Everyone assumes the boss knows, while by his own account Welten sometimes talked nonsense that people went along with anyway. He hired twelve young academics, some with a doctorate, from disciplines he had no idea about, so no lawyers, criminologists or public administration graduates. For two years they were free to go anywhere in the organization, look at whatever they wanted and propose changes. On two conditions, do not fall in love with the police and never agree with me. That is how he organized his own feedback and broke open the monoculture, just as he did with the engineers from TU Delft who came to the police as interns.

Q: Why does Bernard Welten call people who tread water more dangerous than people who make mistakes?

A: Because treading water produces nothing. Welten describes it as hard work, maybe 80 hours a week, but flailing without a clear beginning and end and without a clear goal. He quotes Alice in Wonderland. If you do not know where you want to go, it does not matter which road you take. What he did want was getting things done. A meeting where people end up in the same place they started he calls waffle. His second big dislike was opportunism, people mainly busy with what is good for their own career. He removed both types from the top, in Groningen as well as in Amsterdam, with all the media attention that came with it.

Q: Why is friction necessary to get anything done, according to Bernard Welten?

A: Because these days you get nothing done without it hurting on several sides. Inside government, according to Welten, you get far by not making mistakes, and that is exactly what he sees as the problem. People are held to account for what they did, but rarely for what they did not do. About himself he says he is a rebel with a cause, who suffered a lot from his own statements but never from his conscience. Anyone who wants to perform has to leave the comfort zone and be able to take a hit, because between the first and the last day the job is mostly a battle with the works council, the unions, the media, the mayor and the Public Prosecution Service.

Q: What is the difference between a manager and a leader, according to Bernard Welten?

A: A manager makes sure the process and the administration are right, that all the performance reviews have been held and everyone has been appraised on time. A leader is someone people are willing to follow and who sticks his own neck out. Welten says the word manager makes him nervous. To bring 6,000 people along he built a conference hall with 600 seats at the police training center every year to year and a half, and stood on stage himself ten days in a row, among others with actor Peter Faber, to explain what treating people as equals means. No managing by email or letter, but together in one room.

Q: Why does Bernard Welten want the police to work more like Darwin than like Newton?

A: Because most safety problems have become wicked, everything is connected to everything. Under Newton you look for a formula and a mold for every problem, and that feels safe because you cannot make a mistake with it. Darwin worked with trial and error, seeing what works and what does not. Welten gives the example of roughly 200,000 reports a year about people in mental distress. That is not a police problem and not a mental health problem either, so he argues for white and yellow cars in which a police officer rides along with someone from the municipal health service. A leader has to be able to see that whole picture and understand the concept.

Q: Which three traits predict good police leadership, according to Bernard Welten?

A: From a set of cards with traits he chose focus, emotional intelligence and a sense of responsibility for a new chief of police in Amsterdam. Focus because leading without direction is treading water, his own theme was treating people as equals. Emotional intelligence because with that many stakeholders you have to be able to feel what is going on around you, and because every extra point on it has immediate impact. A sense of responsibility is the professional stomach ache. Intelligence and energy he sees as hygiene factors that everyone at that level has to have. You do not have to be an Einstein, an officer gains nothing from clever minds who cannot translate their smartness to the shop floor.

Q: Which traits did Bernard Welten have least himself, and how did he make up for that?

A: He calls himself not exceptionally intelligent and did not always find it easy to adapt. He made up for it by gathering smart people around him who contradicted him and by being direct, what you see is what you get. A line his colleagues collected for his farewell sums it up, I have heard all of you, you are all right, and now I am going to explain what we are going to do. He says himself that he really was not the best police chief, but that he did drive a stake into the ground. There were people who hated him and people who thought he was okay, and few in between.

Q: What did Bernard Welten learn from the mayors and from his predecessor Jelle Kuiper?

A: That every era asks for its own type of leader. Jacques Wallage, according to Welten, had the gift of stepping back and seeing the big picture, where he himself sometimes stood too close to the painting. Job Cohen had a great ability to adapt and as a father figure for the city brought calm, which rubbed against Welten's own drive to act. Eberhard van der Laan was on focus and a sense of responsibility and dared to make painful choices. He learned the most from his predecessor Jelle Kuiper, who had enormous imagination. Where Welten as a young police officer handled incidents task by task, Kuiper taught him to see the system, political, administrative, social and economic. He compares it to being color blind and suddenly being able to see colors. Together they deliberately traveled to places outside the police, such as the Disney training academy, to pick up ideas and to climb the mountain now and then and look out beyond ground level.

Q: Which trait did Bernard Welten miss on the cards?

A: Being able to communicate. A leader has to be able to stand on a stage, explain what the organization stands for and make sense of it socially so that people feel the story adds up. In public service, according to Welten, you are only as good as your last appearance, and that is the image you go into history with. You see it most sharply in who does and does not communicate well in a crisis. Communication inward and outward is what he calls the most important thing missing from the cards, alongside imagination.