Ten Weeks in a Classroom in Nashville, and His Classmates Voted for Him Twice
There is a version of a police department's story that gets told in flashing lights and another that gets told in classrooms, and the second one almost never makes the news. It should, occasionally, because it is the version that determines what the department looks like in ten years.
Lt. Josh Workman of the Mt. Juliet Police Department has just finished the School of Police Staff and Command, a ten-week leadership program run by Northwestern University's Center for Public Safety and hosted this session at Belmont University in Nashville. He did not simply complete it. He was given the Franklin M. Kreml Leadership Award — the single highest leadership honor the program presents to a graduating class.
The part his classmates decided
What makes the award unusual is how little of it can be studied for. The Kreml recognizes the graduate who demonstrated leadership, integrity, dedication and commitment across the full run of the course. It is not a test score. It is a judgment about how a person conducted themselves for ten weeks among peers who arrived with the same credentials and the same reasons to be competitive.
Workman's classmates also elected him class vice president. That is the detail worth pausing on. A room full of command-track officers from departments across the region, most of them strangers in week one, picked the lieutenant from Mt. Juliet to speak for them — and then the program's own criteria landed on him too. Two separate mechanisms, one answer.
What the program is
The School of Police Staff and Command is one of the more demanding professional development programs in American law enforcement, aimed squarely at officers moving from doing the work to running the people who do the work. Northwestern's Center for Public Safety has spent decades building curricula for exactly that transition — the point where an officer's job stops being about personal performance and starts being about organizational judgment, budgets, policy and personnel.
Ten weeks is a real commitment for a mid-sized department. Every hour a lieutenant spends in a Nashville classroom is an hour a division commander is not in the building. Mt. Juliet has now sent seven members through the program. That number is a policy choice, made repeatedly, over years.
Why a growing city keeps doing this
Workman commands the department's Investigative Services Division. Chief Tyler Chandler described the recognition as a reflection of Workman's commitment to professional growth and to serving both the department and the wider Mt. Juliet community, and said the department is proud of him.
The context behind all of it is Mt. Juliet's growth. A city that keeps adding rooftops, retail corridors and interstate traffic does not get to run its public safety operation the way it did when it was smaller. The pressure lands hardest on the middle of the organization — the lieutenants and sergeants who translate the chief's direction into what actually happens on a shift. Sending seven of them to a command school is how a department tries to grow its leadership at the same rate the city grows around it.
It is the same instinct visible elsewhere in the department's recent build-out, including the expansion of its canine unit — we wrote about that when Mt. Juliet added its third K-9. Different investment, same underlying idea: build capacity before you need it rather than after.
Residents who want to keep an eye on how the city is planning for that growth can also follow the Board of Commissioners calendar, where the latest round of public hearings is on the agenda.
No sirens in this one. Just a lieutenant, ten weeks of classes, and a room full of peers who agreed.
