Center for Personal Protection & Safety - CPPS

A safer termination/separation starts before anyone walks into the room. When teams plan a termination, layoff, suspension, or investigation, the focus tends to be on the details of the meeting.

--> Who says what.
--> Where the meeting happens.
--> How long it lasts.

Yes, those details matter, but as Jameson Ritter, CTM, CPP, PSP, PCI explains, the more important questions need to come before the meeting even starts.

--> Has the person been focused on unfair treatment or blaming others?
--> Have they become more isolated, angry, or fixated?
--> Are there recent losses, weapons concerns, or family stressors building?

Concerning cases rarely begin with a direct or obvious threat. The cases begin with changes in behavior, and an employment disciplinary action can add pressure to a situation that's already unstable.

That doesn't mean termination is the right action, it just means the level of planning should match the level of concern. Routine cases deserve a routine process, but elevated cases need coordination across HR, security, leadership, and sometimes outside partners.

You can find other videos and more resources here: www.cpps.com/safe-termination-resources/

Frontline managers see things the threat assessment team never will.

Why?

Because they are the day-to-day, ground-level employees. They tend to know the history of the people they work with, which makes them the first to notice when a person starts to change.

A single warning sign is easy for a threat assessment team to miss or explain away, whether it's increased substance use, trouble at home, or a change in attendance and increased tardiness. On their own, any one of these might not register. But a manager who knows their people notices when several behavior changes show up at once, and when an employee stops acting like themselves.

This is the intersection between frontline staff and threat assessment work. Frontline leaders aren't the ones conducting the assessment, but they are the ones who recognize something has changed and get it to the people who can. Without that first observation, the rest of the process never even begins.

It's worth asking whether your managers know the role they play in threat assessment, and whether they'd know what to do when they have a concern.

The Boise mall shooting highlighted the complexities security professionals navigate every day, especially in open and conceal carry states.

In that case, an unarmed security guard confronted an armed individual for open carrying in a gun-free zone. Moments later, the guard was killed. This situation raises hard questions for anyone responsible for security in a state where carrying a weapon is legal.

If you're an unarmed guard in an open carry state, what's the protocol? If you're seeing the same individual repeatedly, and the situations keep escalating, do you approach them alone? Do you need to? Should law enforcement be called every time, so the people confronting the individual are armed?

These are the questions worth working through before a moment demands the answer.

A few places to start. Know your local and state carry laws, and make sure your team knows them too. Define when a situation gets handed off to law enforcement rather than handled internally. Establish clear guidance on approaching a repeat or escalating individual, especially for unarmed personnel. And revisit those protocols as behavior changes, because the right response to a first encounter isn't always the right response to the fifth.

Open carry and conceal carry laws aren't insurmountable risks in threat assessment. They're variables to plan around. The teams that plan well respond with clarity instead of hesitation when it counts.

On October 25th, 2021, a gunman walked into the Boise Towne Square Mall. Security confronted him for open carrying. Moments later, a security guard was dead. The shooter was later intercepted by law enforcement in the parking lot, where a shootout ended his life.

Like many other acts of violence, this story started much earlier.

The shooter had a history. He was a convicted felon in Illinois with a misdemeanor in Wisconsin. In Idaho, where open carry is legal, he carried openly and publicly advocated for the right of convicted felons to do the same, at one point filming himself making that case at the state capitol in Boise.

Local law enforcement even knew him by name. A local Idaho Walmart had previously asked him to leave, and the mall itself had even dealt with him before.

The warning signs weren't hidden. They were documented, public, and connected to the very place where the violence eventually happened.

That's the part worth looking at. This wasn't a person who appeared out of nowhere. There was a trail, and pieces of it were visible to more than one organization. What was missing was a way to connect those pieces before the day they stopped being warning signs and became a tragedy.

Recognizing a pattern is only useful if someone is positioned to act on it. That's the work of a threat management process, and it lives entirely in the space before an incident.

The people in this video were abducted, detained, interrogated, and had to find their way out. It was a scenario, part of our immersive Advanced High-Risk Travel course. But the decisions they were forced to make were real, and so was the training behind them.

That same body of knowledge is the foundation of a very different event.

The Foreign Detention and Captivity Management Workshop will still be immersive with role-play, just not as intense. It's one day, built around discussion rather than simulation. But it draws from the same expertise: recognizing surveillance and targeting, navigating questioning and detention, managing information in a coercive environment, and making sound decisions when the stakes are high and the information is thin.

Led by Korey Staley and Stacie Brown, M.Ed., who bring decades of military, government, and high-risk environment experience to a small room of security professionals, risk managers, executive protection personnel, and the leaders who send people into complicated places.

August 26 in Los Angeles. In partnership with the ASIS Travel Risk Management Community.

Save your seat: https://www.cpps.com/advanced-high-risk-travel-workshop/

What's the biggest hurdle most leaders face? Ego.

That's what Korey Staley thinks, and he doesn't exclude himself.

In his interview for Business Brew, he described a habit of catching himself mid-sentence. Why did I say that? Did I say it to make myself look bigger than I am? He gave a real example. When he mentions that a lot of CPPS clients are Fortune 500 companies, he stops and asks whether he said it to inform the room or to feed his own ego.

That kind of self-reflection can be uncomfortable, but it's the necessary work to develop as a leader.

Korey ties it back to a framework he uses. People are motivated by money, mission, and culture, with a fourth category lurking underneath: ego. Ego is the one that quietly distorts a leader's decisions. Am I influencing this person because it's what's best for the business, or because I need the ego stroke that comes with it? The answer isn't always flattering.

Leaders who never ask the question keep mistaking self-interest for leadership. The ones who do ask it, honestly and often, start catching the difference in real time.

There's a reason this matters beyond personal growth. A leader operating from ego doesn't listen well. And people who don't feel heard stop bringing things forward, including the concerns that matter most.

"I want to talk to my embassy."

Say it. Then say it again. If you're detained by a foreign government, that sentence is the most important thing you can hold onto, and you may have to repeat it more times than feels comfortable.

Everything else can wait. The questions will keep coming. The accusations might start. Every instinct will push you to explain, to argue, to prove you've done nothing wrong. That instinct is the trap. Every extra sentence gives someone another thread to pull, and the people across the table are trained to pull them.

Stay calm. Stay polite. Being difficult won't help you, and being rude can hurt you. Just keep returning to the same request until your embassy is in the room.

It sounds simple on paper. Under real pressure, with adrenaline running and no idea how long you'll be held, holding that line is one of the hardest things a traveler can do.

That's why the decision gets made now, long before you board the plane.

Korey Staley says you can't influence someone until you know what they're actually there for.

At Business Brew, he laid out what he calls the motivation triangle. These are three things that bring a person to your organization and keep them there: money, mission, and culture.

Everyone weighs them differently. Some people are driven almost entirely by pay. Others will take less to work alongside people they respect, on something they believe in.

Here's the part worth sitting with. People tend to need two of the three to give up the other one. A great culture and a mission someone believes in buy real flexibility on salary. Take away two, and no amount of the third holds them.

There's a prevention angle here that's easy to miss. When culture erodes and mission gets fuzzy, people stop feeling seen. Grievances form in that gap. And a workforce that doesn't feel valued isn't a workforce that speaks up when something feels wrong.

Knowing what motivates your people isn't just a retention question. It's how you find out whether anyone would tell you if something were off.

If you're detained while traveling overseas, the situation can quickly become disorienting. The questions from authorities come quickly. Then the accusations might start. The pressure builds, and every instinct tells you to explain yourself, to argue, to set the record straight.

You have to fight the urge to defend yourself.

At this point, there's only one thing worth saying, and it's worth repeating until it happens: I need to speak with my embassy.

You don't need to say anything else. Not the story of why you're there. Not arguing against whatever they're claiming or how it isn't fair. Every additional sentence is a thread someone can pull, and the people questioning you are trained to pull threads.

It's worth noting that you don't have to be rude about it. Stay calm. Stay polite. Just keep returning to the same request, over and over, until your embassy is standing in front of you.

It sounds simple, but under that kind of pressure, with adrenaline running and no idea how long you'll be there, it's one of the hardest things to actually do.

That's exactly why you decide now, before you ever board the plane, what you'll say if it happens to you.

Clients ask for stress in their training. What they usually picture is yelling, banging things together, and someone shouting "what are you gonna do now?" in a person's face.

That's not stress inoculation. That's theater.

Stress comes from complexity, not volume. Add a variable. Change the weapon from a gun to a knife. Put a smoking bag in the room. Move the person outside before the scenario starts. Now they have to decide, and the decision is the training.

The military calls it crawl, walk, run. There's also a sprint, and the sprint isn't louder, it's harder.

The other thing that gets missed is exposure. The first time someone sits through this material, their blinders are narrow. They're uncomfortable. By the third time, a weapon on the screen doesn't spike them anymore, and the lens opens up. That widening is the point.

It's also why adolescents handle this content better than adults do. They've been inoculated already, which says something uncomfortable about the world they're growing up in and something useful about how response actually gets built.

None of this works through fear. Nobody should walk out of a room quoting a statistic about how likely they are to become a victim. They should walk out standing a little taller, knowing they have options.

Two things worth doing before your next training: pick instructors who can actually hold a room, not just people who happen to hold a title. And survey your people first. Ask what they're worried about. You'll find out it's the 5 a.m. walk from the parking lot, and you'll build something they recognize as built for them.