Don't Chase Positions, Follow Your Purpose.

How did you get to where you are today? Tell us about your career journey.

I was in junior ROTC through high school and received a full scholarship to North Georgia College. During my freshman year, my wife and I found out we were expecting a baby, so she turned down a scholarship, and I came home to work.

My dad managed a grocery store in Chattanooga, so I became a night manager there. I was a husband about to be a father, and I figured out pretty quickly that I did not like retail. But I had bills to pay.

During that time, I rode along with a Chattanooga police officer who worked an extra job at the store. He invited me out one Friday night in East Lake on the midnight shift, and right then and there, I knew. I felt like the Lord told me, "This is your purpose. This is where you're supposed to be."

I eventually settled in Chattanooga to start my career with the police department. To this day, those midnight shifts are some of the best experiences of my life. The bonds you build with your teammates, and the work you do with and for your community, are unlike anything else.

What has motivated you throughout your career?

I've always been a student of leadership. I'm interested in what makes people excited to follow someone and motivated to do good things because of them. My goal was never about chasing a particular position. In fact, I never actually wanted to be chief.

My focus has always been the same: to be the best I can be at whatever I'm doing at that time. If I'm a patrol sergeant, I want to be the best patrol sergeant I can be. And I've realized that the further up the ladder you go, the greater your opportunity to positively influence more people.

So my advice is this: Become an expert at what you're doing and be the best you can be. Then ask yourself, "How do I prepare for that next level so I can have a positive impact on more people?"

You don't get anywhere by yourself. A lot of people poured into me and gave me opportunities. Some of them worked out, and some were failures, but you learn just as much from both.

When did you realize you wanted to become chief?

Before I ever put my name in the hat, I had worked in every bureau and division within our department. It was an incredibly valuable experience, and I didn't realize at the time that all of it was preparing me for what would come next.

I'm a Christian and a faith-based individual, and Galatians 6:9 came up three separate times in the year leading up to the chief position becoming available. The message is essentially, "Don't grow weary, keep doing the good work, and you will reap the harvest."

My philosophy has always been to put myself in a position to have a positive impact on the most people, and at some point I realized that becoming chief was how I could do that. So when the time came, I put my name in the hat, went through the process, and the Lord blessed me with this position.

Who has had the biggest influence on the way you lead?

Three come to mind.

First, my parents. They instilled a strong work ethic in me, and my mom had a saying I'll never forget: "Be a task great or small, do it right or not at all."

Second, my wife. She has probably had an even greater impact on me as a leader than she realizes. Something she taught me is people over principle. I'm a very principle-minded person, and especially in my younger leadership roles, it was always principle over people. I could be very black and white about it: this is right, this is wrong. I've learned that it's not always that simple. Life can be gray. In a leadership role, you can never lose sight of the humanity of things. Policies matter. Procedures matter. Principles matter. But they can never be more important than humanity.

Third, Fred Fletcher. He promoted me to lieutenant and then told me I wasn't going to like where he was putting me. He put me over crime analysis and technology. My whole career had been on the tactical side, SWAT and patrol operations, and now I was in charge of the "nerds" in an area I knew nothing about. I told him that as long as he committed to giving me the education I needed, he had my 100 percent. He did. Two years later, he handed me the job of building our real-time crime center from the ground up. I couldn't do that alone, so I had to partner with departments across the city, and that experience laid the foundation for where I am today.

Years later, I asked him why he took that chance on me, and his answer was simple: "Because you care. And you can't teach that." That has stuck with me ever since. If the people you're bringing up don't already care, they're not going to suddenly start.

What makes an ideal team player?

It really comes down to one question. Do they care?

The people who truly care are the ones who add the most to your team. They understand that this is not just a job; it's their purpose.

Self-discipline is another big one. You can care deeply about something, but if you're not disciplined, that caring isn't always enough to keep you moving toward success. I think of self-discipline as an umbrella category, one that includes things like work ethic and integrity.

What's a common mistake that can hurt a team or its culture?

When leaders want to be liked more than they want to be respected. Those are two very different things. They can both exist, but as a leader, it's more important to be respected than liked.

If you want to be liked, you'll shy away from the hard conversations, and when you do that, the culture suffers. Accountability, or the lack of it, destroys a culture. You have to be willing to have the difficult conversations, and you have to be consistent and fair with everybody.

How do you balance accountability with caring about your people?

For me, it always comes down to one question: what's best for the organization?

If somebody isn't meeting expectations, you have to consider what might be going on in that person's life. That doesn't mean you skip the conversation; it means you go into it with a lens of grace. People may disagree with the decision, but I'm always going to make sure they understand the why. And the why always comes back to what's best for the organization.

What's one skill or trait that will be essential for success moving forward?

Discipline in decision-making. I can't take credit for this one. It comes from Nick Saban.

There are two decisions every person has to make every single day. 

1. You have to decide to do the thing you don't want to do, because you know you're supposed to. 

2. And you have to decide not to do the thing you do want to do, because you know it won't lead anywhere good.

Maybe getting up and going to the gym instead of hitting the snooze button. Maybe it's studying for a test instead of staying up late with friends. It's the discipline to do what you know you should even when you don't want to, and the discipline to skip what you want when you know it will hurt your success. That's a choice everyone has to make every day.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to grow in their career?

Don't be afraid to fail. Especially in leadership roles, there's this feeling that everyone is looking to you to make the right decision, that you're supposed to know all the answers. That's ridiculous.

People respect someone who will make a decision, admit when it was the wrong one, and change course. They respect the person who can say, "This isn't my strong suit, so I'm going to reach out to someone who knows more about it than I do."

Don't be afraid to look a challenge in the eye and say, "We're going to try." You can even say up front, "We may fail." And when you do, you course-correct, you try again, and you do it together as a team. Failure isn't something to make excuses for. Own it, learn from it, and commit to trying again.

What's one final piece of advice you'd want people to take away?

Don't chase positions. Follow your purpose. When you chase positions, people see right through it; you can't hide your intentions.

And when you're looking for the right person for a leadership role, don't just look at the resume. Look at their characteristics and their character. You can't expect someone who has been a mediocre performer their whole career to suddenly become a high performer just because you handed them a new title. That's not how it works.

Thank you so much for sharing, Chief Chambers.

If you'd like to connect with Chief Chambers or learn more about his work, find him on LinkedIn here.