| We Are Emotionally Aware | Managing your own emotional responses and adapting your leadership style when dealing with difficult people or complex situations. | Describing a time you were simply nice or empathetic to a victim. That is basic policing, not leadership. | Admitting a genuine assumption or blind spot you held, and showing how you changed your approach in real time because of it. |
| We Take Ownership | Stepping into the gap when nobody else will. Holding yourself and others accountable for the final outcome, not just the process. | Describing a standard job where you followed an SOP or did what you were told. Compliance is not ownership. | Showing how you gripped a failing situation, made a hard call under pressure, and stood by it when questioned. |
| We Collaborate | Breaking down silos to reach a result your immediate team could not have achieved on its own. | Listing people you had a meeting with or copied into an email. Passing information is not collaboration. | Identifying a blockage with a partner agency or another function, negotiating a shared solution, and delivering a joint outcome. |
| We Support and Inspire | Getting the best out of your people by understanding what drives them individually. Building capability, not just giving orders. | Sending a struggling officer to occupational health and leaving it at that. Process compliance is not leadership. | Noticing a subtle drop in performance, uncovering the root cause through a direct conversation, and adapting how you lead because of what you found. |
| We Analyse Critically | Making sense of messy or incomplete information to reach a safe, justifiable decision under pressure. | Gathering lots of data but never explaining how that data changed your plan. Description is not analysis. | Naming the framework you used to weigh competing priorities — the NDM, a risk matrix, an intelligence gap — and showing how the decision changed when you applied it. |
| We Are Innovative and Open Minded | Finding a better way to do things when the standard approach stops working or wastes resources. | Creating a new spreadsheet for a minor admin task that did not need one. Small optimisations are not innovation. | Challenging a longstanding force practice with hard evidence and successfully implementing a more efficient alternative, even where there was resistance. |