Officer Matt Tomasic of the Central Patrol Division of the Kansas City Police Department was finishing his shift on the Kansas City West Side when he witnessed a man assaulting a woman. “Police Department,” he shouted. “Take your hands off her and back away.” Matt held up his badge. “Do it now!” The man took his hands off the woman, but he didn’t back away. “Back away. Now!” Matt shouted. The man turned and started heading toward Matt.
Just then, two cars coming up the road screeched to a halt. The doors flew open and a number of local men bolted from the vehicles. They made a beeline for the man and surrounded him. Their motivation? They wanted to protect Officer Tomasic.
The story of why these men and others in the community were helping the police is a lesson in the helpfulness of starting any change effort with mindset change.
For over fifty years, the corner of Southwest Boulevard and Summit Street in Kansas City and the nearby parking lot of a local liquor store had served as the ad hoc hiring site for day laborers on the city’s West Side. This site was in the downtown Hispanic area, which had numerous businesses that catered to the local Hispanic population. For years the numbers of men looking for work were manageable. Those looking for laborers and those looking for labor more or less found what they wanted there. But the numbers of men congregating in this area skyrocketed over a five-year period, and the numbers far exceeded the demand for work.
This swelling group generally consisted of two kinds of men: (1) documented and undocumented men willing to work, and (2) documented and undocumented men not interested in working. Those in this second group included a criminal element that gathered to prey on the others. Those who didn’t want or couldn’t find work loitered around the area. Without available facilities, they urinated on sidewalks and defecated in alleyways. Some would strip naked and shower using the hoses of homeowners. Crime spiked in the area, and businesses started to leave. The community was up in arms.
In response, KCPD tried to manage the situation the way most people do—with behavioral interventions. In this case, it employed overwhelming force and a zero-tolerance policy. Chip Huth’s SWAT team was part of this effort before the transformation of Chip and his men that we described in chapter 1. Chip’s team members and the other officers deployed in this effort conducted aggressive neighborhood sweeps and arrested large numbers of men for any and every infraction, from drinking in public to all the other laws on the books. But the men arrested typically were back on the same street corner before the day was out. It didn’t matter how many resources the department put on the problem. Despite the fifty officers deployed to the West Side, the situation kept getting worse.
Matt had been leading this zero-tolerance approach out of a small community center not too far from the corner of Southwest Boulevard and Summit Street. One day, he was called in to see his KCPD boss, who gave him an ultimatum: “West Side smells like a pisser, Tomasic. Clean it up. You’ve got two weeks.”
Matt was ready to give up. As he returned to the community center, he thought about how to get moved to an easier assignment, like Homicide. He walked into the center to prepare his civilian colleague, Lynda Callon, for his imminent transfer. “I’ve worked my butt off,” he told her, “and things just keep getting worse.”
Lynda listened and then said, “Matt, stop being a police officer for a minute and just think about these men. What is their life like? What do you think it would be like to wonder when you’ll work next or to be without basic necessities—without a restroom and not knowing where you’ll get your next meal? What would that be like?”
Notice what kinds of questions these were: questions about the needs and objectives of the men they had been trying to change. Lynda had invited Matt to begin thinking and seeing with an outward mindset. In response, Matt, for the first time really, began to consider the issues these men faced.
The community center where Matt and Lynda worked had a restroom and a small stove. Matt and Lynda thought of something simple they could do to help the men with some of their basic needs. They put the word out that the men were welcome to come use the restroom in the center. They also pooled their personal resources to keep a pot of beans on the stove and prepare coffee. This was the beginning of a myriad of changes that Matt and Lynda made to what they had been doing. Once they saw those they had been trying to corral as people, they began to discover ways they could adjust what they were doing to be helpful.
Matt and Lynda soon staged the hiring of day laborers out of the center. Those who didn’t find work for the day were invited out into the community to provide neighborhood services—from clearing brush to painting houses to helping neighborhood matriarchs make tamales. Matt spent his time with his sleeves rolled up, engaging in the work right beside these men. They got to know each other, and the men and the community started to trust Matt, which began changing their views of the police. This working side by side provided a way for Matt to see if his approach with the men was really helping them. He started to measure his impact based on the productivity of the men, not how many he took to jail. Based on what he learned, he made further adjustments to be more helpful in his approach.
As this initiative gathered momentum, another officer—Octavio “Chato” Villalobos—heard about the officer who had put a pot of beans on the stove for the people on the West Side, inviting them into the community center to use the restroom. Having grown up on the West Side and knowing about the area’s challenges firsthand, Chato was intrigued by what Matt was doing. He asked to be assigned to work with Matt in the neighborhood where he had been raised. On his first day, Chato showed up in full uniform, wearing sunglasses, with extra am munition and handcuffs hanging off his belt. Matt strongly suggested that, to do the kind of policing that was working on the West Side, Chato go home and change into jeans and a tee shirt.
Since that time, Matt Tomasic and Chato Villalobos have worked together out of the West Side Community Action Network Center in Kansas City. The revitalization of the community has become a national success story. Crime in the area has dropped to an all-time low, and businesses are moving back to the area. These two officers have accomplished what a force of fifty police officers could not—all because they addressed the problem with an outward mindset and did so in a way that invited a change in mindset throughout the community.
“These guys had been around for fifty years on that corner,” Chato observes now, still astonished by the changes that have occurred on the West Side. “Matt addressed the issues just by treating people as people—you know, unconditional respect and getting to know who they were and who the bad guys were. It was overwhelming.”
The police department’s initial response to the challenge on the West Side was to try to clean the problem up with an overwhelming behavioral intervention. The department wanted quick results and deployed overwhelming force to get them. But it didn’t work. The West Side changed only because of Matt and Chato’s slow work on mindset.
We call mindset work slow in this context because too often people who think only of direct behavioral solutions to problems don’t understand the need for attention to mindset. They therefore think efforts to shift mindset are a waste of time and would only slow things down. As the approach on Kansas City’s West Side demonstrates, they couldn’t be more mistaken.
A similar start-with-mindset approach was the key to resolving a long-standing labor-management dispute in a large multinational company. We began our work with this organization by spending two days with twenty leaders from the management side of the operation and ten of the labor leaders. During these two days, we helped the team members improve their mindset toward their work and each other. The last hour of the second day was set aside to apply what we had learned together to any particular challenge they were facing.
They told us of a deadlocked labor-management dispute. (We should have been thorough enough in our information gathering to know about this conflict in advance.) The dispute was about to go to arbitration. Despite the high-dollar stakes, labor and management had been unable to find an agreeable way to a resolution over the prior months. The group members said that they wanted to see what they could do to find a way through their impasse in the time we had remaining.
For the first time during our two days together, we split the group into labor and management. We supplied each side with a flip chart and three questions that would help each group to (1) consider the needs, objectives, and challenges of those in the other group, (2) think about what they could adjust to be more helpful to the other group, and (3) consider how they might measure their impact. Twenty minutes later we came back together. We asked one group to present their responses to the first question. Then we invited the other group to present their responses to the same question. We then moved to the second question, reversing the order of the group presentations.
Before we could get to the third question, the presentations evolved into an earnest and very outward discussion, each side showing real interest in and concern for the other’s needs and issues. Before forty-five minutes of the hour had passed, the leaders had resolved their conflict. They had done this themselves, with no guidance from us other than the work we had done to prepare them to engage together with an outward mindset and the simple structure we devised for the final exercise. They had resolved their differences in a way that strengthened their working relationship and their trust in each other.
Now it’s true that we spent the better part of two days with them to help them get to the point where they could do this. That was the time it took in this case to sufficiently shift mindsets. But if you start with changing mindsets, behavioral transformations can happen quickly. Two days spent working on changing mind-sets enabled the leaders to accomplish in forty-five minutes what they had been unable to solve in six months.
Whether in rethinking community policing or resolving labor- management disputes, when people see situations that need to change, the temptation is to immediately apply a behavioral solution. That seems like the fast approach. But if mindset is not addressed, it is usually the slow approach to change.
We invite you to do a mindset check before you begin rolling out behavioral solutions. Ask yourself the following questions: Have I (or we) thought this through with an outward mindset? Do I understand the needs, objectives, and challenges of those involved? Have I adjusted my efforts in light of those issues? And have I been holding myself accountable for my impact on these people?
You will make progress toward change much more quickly to the degree you first attend to mindset.