Forgiveness Is the Key
to Restoring Relationships

The City Manager had attended one of my presentations at a Character Cities conference and invited me to his police department. He knew they were in trouble and he was concerned by what he saw as a lack of character and ethics.

The agency was fraught with internal relationship problems. With a force of only 24 police officers, they were having 10-12 employee grievances filed per month!

When I am conducting on-site leadership training for a single agency, I often have the police officers engage in the following exercise:

I ask them to list all of the problems they have in their law enforcement agency and I write them on a flip chart. The purpose of the exercise is to assist them in arriving at a character based solution for each of their problems as the training program unfolds.

When I asked for their list of problems, the first officer to raise his hand said, "The problem around here is that we all hate each other!"

I started to chuckle, thinking that this was an obvious over-exaggeration of the problem. Then I realized I was the only one in the room laughing. All of the police officers were stone cold serious!

I thought to myself, "What kind of a law enforcement agency have I come to? This group has some major ethical problems if they all hate each other."

During the course of the Police Dynamics leadership program, we began dealing with some of the underlying issues. It became evident that many of the internal relationship problems stemmed from events that happened up to a decade before. They were still holding grudges after all those years!

That's why I say bitterness is such a destructive influence. A root of bitterness will defile many within a police organization.

Someone once told me that bitterness was like you drinking a poison and hoping the other person will get sick! Holding a grudge doesn't hurt them nearly as much as it hurts you.

At this point in the training program, I told the officers that they were just going to have to forgive each other. There was no other solution to their problem. They were just going to have to decide that they would "clear their list of offenses and refuse to hold a grudge," our definition of forgiveness. There was no other hope.

Do you know that's exactly what they did? They forgave each other... and the internal relationships began to improve.

I was scheduled for a total of three trips to this agency for character training... but they canceled the last trip. They said they didn't think they needed me again - that they had worked out their problems by applying the character based principles of Police Dynamics. A spirit of forgiveness had restored their relationships.

Return from Forgiveness to Dynamic of Restoration