Angela Workman-Stark: Transforming the face of Canada’s police force

My journey to AU was a circuitous one. When I did my undergraduate degree at St. Mary’s in Halifax, I didn’t think I’d amount to anything. I’d had a lot of trauma in my childhood, and I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem. Then I joined the Mounties and moved out to Alberta. After a few years, I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing well. I felt safe in that MBA environment because I was anonymous, and I didn’t have to talk to people face-to-face. AU provided an experience that no other university had at the time.

At the time, I was a police constable. I was focused on operations and detective work. The program at AU opened my mind regarding strategy and leadership and culture and change. My day job seemed less relevant. I wanted to explore how we treated our people and how we led the organization.

I was doing Strategic Human Resource Management. The strategy course was an eye-opener. It got me thinking about the Mounties’ relationship with the community and what kind of organization we wanted to be. What’s our identity? How do we want to be known? What kind of service do we want to provide? Everything I’d seen was about ‘we know best’, but I realized we needed to have big discussions with stakeholders to understand what kind of organization we wanted to be. I thought, ‘this is what I want to do.’

If I’d been face-to-face with them, I’d never have said a word. I’d have been too intimidated. We had senior people at the VP level, people in significant leadership positions in healthcare, and business leaders in other industries. But I felt comfortable interacting with them from behind my keyboard.

I moved to Ottawa for more opportunity, where I continued working as a constable. And then I built a network of people who were in the kinds of roles I aspired to. I didn’t advance to those positions right away. It took about four years. But because of my MBA skills, I was able to jump the ranks. In my first leadership role, I was able to transform our regional recruitment model from Ontario-Quebec. I went back to what I’d learned in my strategy course—operations management, process improvement, and organizational change.

We had a lot of redundancy. We were receiving 8,000 applications every year, but we didn’t have enough focus on proactive recruitment. We created a processing centre to process applications but also actively seek out more diversity, more visible minorities, and more women.

I started coaching in the MBA program in 2010, while I was doing my PhD at Walden University in public policy and administration, with an emphasis on organizational management. I’d done some teaching at the RCMP and I’d kept in touch with AU, and I wanted to give back. I was able to combine my professional skills and academic knowledge.

I see an incredible calibre of students. They’re motivated to undertake positive social change in their community. The things students are interested in are creating inclusive organizations. I find it really enjoyable to engage the students and to support them in their applied projects. They’re often experiencing similar challenges that I faced in the Mounties. I can now dig into those issues and conduct experiments to deal with them. I can see everything from different perspectives and it’s so enriching.