The CopDoc Podcast - Season 10 - Episode 175
GUEST: Chris Hsiung, Undersheriff, San Mateo County Sheriff's Office, and Executive Director, The Curve
EPISODE SUMMARY:
Rank does not make a leader. That is the premise Chris Hsiung and I worked through in this conversation, and it shapes everything else we talked about.
Chris has spent more than 30 years in policing, most of it with the Mountain View Police Department, where he rose from patrol officer to chief. He now serves as Undersheriff with the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office and leads The Curve, a nonprofit he co-founded with Simon Sinek to help police leaders build cultures grounded in trust and purpose. We talked about what it actually takes to change a department's culture, and why that work starts with what leaders do, not what they say.
Chris put it simply: culture equals values plus behavior. A lot of agencies have values painted on the wall and printed on the cruiser. Few agencies have leaders whose daily behavior matches those words. We got into what happens when that gap goes unaddressed, why leaders need people who will tell them the truth instead of what they want to hear, and how Chris learned to lead by taking off the stars and getting into the jail, onto the ride-along, into the training room, alongside the people he was asking to trust him.
This one is for chiefs, sheriffs, sergeants, and anyone tired of waiting for a promotion before they start leading.
KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- Why rank grants authority but not leadership, and the difference between the two
- Culture by design versus culture by default, and what happens when leaders leave culture to chance
- How to build change from the middle of an organization by working with early adopters instead of trying to convince everyone at once
- Why "everything is green" reporting should worry a leader more than it comforts one
- What it means to get out of the office: riding along, training with your people, learning the job from the ground up
- How Chris's own mistakes and uncertainty as a young leader shaped the leader he became
- Why a healthy culture is one of the strongest recruitment and retention tools an agency has
INSIGHTS FROM THE CONVERSATION:
Chris made a case that leadership starts long before anyone pins on a badge or a stripe. Waiting for the title is the wrong strategy. He also pushed back on the idea that a leader can understand an organization from behind a desk. His answer to reading an agency's real condition was blunt: go find out for yourself, in person, without the rank showing.
On trust, Chris was direct about the danger of an organization where nobody tells the boss bad news. If every report comes back green, that is not evidence things are fine. It is often evidence people are afraid to say otherwise, and a leader steering by false readings will not see the iceberg coming.
He closed with a simple answer to a hard question: what should policing never stop doing? Caring. Everything else in this conversation, the culture work, the trust building, the willingness to admit mistakes, comes back to that one word.
KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR LISTENERS:
- Audit the gap between your agency's stated values and your own daily behavior. That gap is your culture, whether you intended it or not.
- Do not try to convince the whole organization at once. Find your early adopters and let their results do the persuading.
- If everyone tells you things are fine, ask why. Build channels where people can safely tell you when they are not.
- Spend time outside your office, in uniform-optional settings, doing the work your people do. You cannot lead what you do not understand.
- Treat your own mistakes and uncertainty as material, not liabilities. Vulnerability, handled honestly, builds more trust than the appearance of having it all figured out.
ABOUT CHRIS HSIUNG:
Chris Hsiung currently serves as Undersheriff with the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office, a role he stepped back into in November 2025 to support Sheriff Ken Binder during a period of organizational rebuilding. He is a retired police chief with more than 30 years of public safety experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of it with the Mountain View Police Department, where he worked as a detective and SWAT team member before being appointed chief in 2020.
Chris is a founding board member and Executive Director of The Curve, a national nonprofit he co-founded with Simon Sinek and a network of police chiefs and sheriffs to modernize leadership development in policing. He co-chairs the IACP Human and Civil Rights Committee and holds board advisory roles with the University of Virginia Center for Public Safety and Justice, the Future Policing Institute, and the Crisis Ready Institute. He is a nationally recognized speaker and writer on organizational culture and adaptive leadership.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
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Contact us: [email protected]
Website: www.copdocpodcast.com
If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at [email protected]
