I remember the day I signed off on the policy.
Officers had been asking for years, campaigning really, to let go of decades-old grooming policy. No beards. No visible tattoos. Rules written for a department that didn’t exist anymore. I said yes. I remember walking through the building afterward and feeling the temperature change. Officers stopped me in the hallway to thank me. Somebody posted something nice about me online. I felt ten feet tall. I loved being the chief who finally said yes.
I want to be honest about something most leadership stories skip. I loved being liked. I still do. There is a specific kind of high that comes from making a call and having a room full of people cheer for you, and once you’ve felt it, some part of you starts chasing it without telling you.
So when the staffing crisis hit, I thought I knew exactly how this would go too.
We were bleeding officers off the street. The academy pipeline, the field training, all of it took nearly a year before a new hire could work solo, and by the time they got there we’d already lost someone else to retirement. I looked at it the way I looked at the beards. A policy that made sense once and didn’t anymore. So I did something the department had never done. We started hiring lateral transfers, officers already certified and seasoned at other agencies, and we sweetened it with a signing bonus to compete for them.
I thought I’d found another beards moment. Obvious fix, grateful department, maybe another handshake in the hallway.
Instead the union took out an ad in a regional publication telling people not to apply to Aurora because of me. Union buster, it called me. The argument, as best I could untangle it, was that the money should have gone to the officers already there instead of luring in outsiders. I understood the argument. I even understood the fear underneath it. I did not expect to be villainized for trying to solve a problem the union itself had been begging me to fix.
Here’s the part I don’t say out loud very often. I told myself, for a long time, that the hard part was the ad. The public shaming, the sleepless nights, turning it over for the hundredth time at three in the morning. But that’s not actually where the danger was. The danger was never the ad. The danger was what the ad tempted me to become.
Because somewhere in those sleepless nights, I found the door. Not a dramatic one. A quiet one. The door marked you could just let this go. Slow the hiring down. Cut the bonus. Let the union have their win, keep the peace, get my hallway handshakes back. Nobody would have blamed me. I could have framed it as compromise instead of retreat and most people never would have known the difference.
That door staying shut, that’s the moment of reckoning. Not the decision to hire laterals in the first place. The decision, at two in the morning with a smear campaign in print, to keep going anyway. To remind myself that I hadn’t taken this job to be beloved. I’d taken it to make the department safer, for the officers wearing the vest and the people they swore to protect, and popularity was never in the job description no matter how much I’d grown to like the taste of it.
You know this ache too, even if the specifics are nothing like mine. It’s the meeting you have to walk into knowing you’ll come out of it disliked by someone whose good opinion you wanted. It’s the employee you have to let go who was never lazy, just wrong for the seat. It’s the friend on the team you have to hold to the same standard as everyone else, watching their face change when they realize you meant it. You already know the decision. You knew it before you finished reading this sentence. What you don’t know yet is whether you’ll make it, or whether you’ll find a smaller, quieter way to avoid it and call that leadership too.
I held the line. I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a better story. But I want to tell you what holding it actually cost, because the cost isn’t the part people usually admit.
It hardened something in me. I played the victim card in my own head more than I’d like to confess. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, I told myself, and there’s a kind of righteousness that creeps in when you’re certain you’re the one being wronged. I wore being misunderstood like it proved something. I’m not proud of that. Being right doesn’t make you immune to becoming a little bit worse for having to fight for it.
And here’s the part I’ve never written down before. I’ve been retired almost six years now. I still struggle to walk into department functions. Not because I’m not welcome. I am. But because some old reflex in me starts counting the room the second I walk in. Who’s still upset. Who was on the other side of that ad. Who’s smiling at me because they mean it and who’s smiling because it’s polite. I call it the cost of leadership, like it’s a line item, tidy and paid off. It isn’t. It’s a game I still play, quietly, in rooms I have no reason to be afraid of anymore.
I used to think the reckoning was a door you walked through once. Make the hard call, survive the backlash, come out the other side changed but whole. I don’t think that anymore. I think some doors you walk through and just live differently on the other side of, for good.
You have a version of this. Maybe it’s not a union ad. Maybe it’s the promotion you didn’t push for because you didn’t want to be resented. The policy you softened because you couldn’t stomach one more person calling you difficult. The truth you’ve been sitting on because being liked has been working out fine for you so far. Somewhere close by is a door marked you could just let this go, and it is so much easier to walk through than to stand in front of.
I can’t tell you it stops costing you something once you don’t cave. I’m five years out and it still does. Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: the right call and the popular call are rarely the same call, and if you’re waiting for them to align before you act, you’ll be waiting a long time. Comfort was never the job. Doing the right thing is.
This is your moment of reckoning. Step into it anyway.
