60 Minutes of Game: Career Excellence for Law Enforcement

The Playbook They Wished They Had Sooner

By Sheronda D. Grant  |  wearestrongenough.com

Last week, I stood in a room full of women in law enforcement and delivered a session I have been building for the last several months — not just as a course, but as a calling.

The session, titled 60 Minutes of Game: Career Excellence for Law Enforcement, was built around a simple but honest premise: every play that moves your career forward has a game designed to stop it. The session covered both sides — the excellence plays you should commit to, and the unethical games that show up in our workplaces to derail them.

I decided to create this course after I sat and reflected on what I had experienced in the profession with a person who actively attacked me and who had harmed others by using advanced workplace manipulation tactics. I wanted to create a playbook to help others in the profession who wanted to do their job without playing the games, and if unethical games were played against them, they’d be able to protect themselves.

What the Course Covers

The course is structured around four quarters. Each one addresses a dimension of career excellence — the games that come for you when you practice it, and ways to protect your reputation.

The first quarter is about taking initiative. Nobody owes you a career. The officers who advance are the ones who own their development, build visibility with decision-makers, and claim credit for the work they do. This quarter also covers what happens when you do — credit grabbing, strategic positioning, and the gotcha game — and how to counter each one.

The second quarter is about embracing challenges. Growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone, not inside it. This quarter covers the stretch assignments and visibility opportunities that build careers, alongside the games designed to stop ambitious officers: being set up to fail, slow-rolling, death by a thousand cuts, and the double standard.

The third quarter is about helping others. Leadership is not a title — it is a practice. This quarter explores what it means to invest in people, open doors, and share what you know. It also names what controls access and blocks that development: gatekeeping, pecking order enforcement, and Queen Bee dynamics.

The fourth quarter is about overcoming workplace toxicity. This is where most people in that room needed to spend the most time — naming the conditions that allow it to thrive, the forms it takes specifically for women in this profession, and a framework that maps what a coordinated attack and sabotage campaign looks like. This quarter closes with a framework for how to respond: Recognize. Respond. Refuse.

Every quarter has the same structure: the excellence play, the games that come for you when you start winning, and ways to protect yourself against them.

What Happened in That Room

When the session ended, women approached me. One after another, they shared their experiences — hostile work environments, isolation, being undermined, being targeted, watching the culture reward the wrong behaviors. Some had been dealing with these things for years. One woman expressed that she sought counseling due to the actions taken against her. One even expressed how challenging it was dealing with toxicity from other women.

The phrase I kept hearing was: I wish I had this information sooner.

“I wish I had this information sooner.”

That landed differently than I expected it to. Not because it surprised me — I have been in law enforcement for 24 years and I have lived or witnessed some of what those women described. It landed because it confirmed something I already believed: that the information exists, but the access does not. People are going through experiences that could be named, contextualized, and navigated — but no one gave them the framework to do it.

No one gave me the framework either, so I built it — hoping to provide tools and strategies to protect one’s mind, work, and reputation as they go out each day to serve their communities.

Why This Work Matters

I want to be honest about something. Delivering this session was not just a professional milestone. It was personal.

I developed the 60 Minutes of Game framework from my own career — the positive plays that served me, the games I had to learn how to recognize, and the strategies I built while navigating this profession. But this is not just my story. Over 24 years, I observed what happened to others — colleagues who were targeted, undermined, and pushed out — and I learned from those experiences as well. Every lesson in this framework, whether lived or witnessed, was earned.

I did not have a course like this when I was coming up. I had mentors who poured into me, experiences that shaped me, and enough faith to keep going. But I did not have a structured system.

Now there is one.

It is not theory. It is not generic leadership content. It is a framework grounded in what may happen inside some law enforcement organizations — the culture, the politics, the toxicity, and the excellence that is still possible in spite of all of it.

“Authority is assigned. Influence is earned. This work is about learning how to build both.”

What I Want You to Know

If you are experiencing unethical games being played in the workplace, I want you to know that you can overcome them. You are important and you belong in this profession. There are strategies to navigate them without losing yourself in the process.

If you have been through it already — if you are on the other side and you recognize the landscape your peers were describing — then you know how much it would have meant to have someone hand you a map.

That is what this platform is. A map.

The women who came to find me after that session, and the ones who kept talking about it later, reminded me who this course is for.

If you are strong enough to be a woman, you are strong enough to be a cop! And you deserve every tool that helps you remind yourself of why you belong in this profession — to yourself and to everyone watching.

If any of this resonates with you, join the waitlist at wearestrongenough.com/60-minutes-of-game.

— Sheronda D. Grant