TL;DR
A practical leadership manual written by a sitting sheriff, Loudoun County’s Mike Chapman, built on the same STEP-UP program he runs in his own office. It’s aimed at police and sheriff’s leaders at every level, elected or appointed.
Most sheriffs who write a book wait until they’ve left office. Mike Chapman wrote his while still running the largest full-service sheriff’s office in Virginia. It shows on every page. STEP-UP and LEAD isn’t a memoir. It’s a working manual from someone still doing the job.
Chapman self-published it through BookBaby in 2025. It runs a little over 200 pages, and it’s written for state, local and federal law enforcement leaders.
What does STEP-UP stand for?
Service, technology, efficiency and professionalism. The letters aren’t a book gimmick. STEP-UP is the name of the initiative Chapman has run at the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, and the book explains how he built it, set goals under each of the four parts and measured whether they were being met.
The approach is incremental. Set a vision, set measurable goals and use each success to fund the next one, in money, in goodwill or in political support.
What else does STEP-UP and LEAD cover?
A good deal of what leadership books for the private sector never touch. Chapman writes about building a leadership base, and about finding the influential people in a community whose backing can launch a program. He covers servant leadership, leading by example, group dynamics and leaving your comfort zone.
He spends real time on communication, inside the agency and out, and includes a template for working with the media. He writes about the limits of a leader’s power and the transactional relationships every chief and sheriff depends on.
And he’s frank about obstacles. Supervisors, council members, mayors and county executives all show up as sources of pressure, and so do adversaries. The book’s own description promises advice on disloyalty, subterfuge and treachery. You won’t find that language in most management books.
He also separates advice for elected leaders, who have to win re-election, from appointed ones, who have to keep the job or move up. That’s a distinction policing books rarely make.
Who is Mike Chapman?
Chapman started with the Howard County, Maryland, police in 1978, working patrol, SWAT and detective assignments. He joined the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1985 and spent 23 years there, in Miami, Tampa, Pakistan and McAllen, Texas, then as the agency’s attaché in Seoul, an assistant special agent in charge in San Francisco and its chief of public affairs.
He was elected sheriff of Loudoun County in 2011 and has been re-elected three times. In 2020 he chaired a homeland security working group on a national commission on law enforcement, and in 2023 the National Sheriffs’ Association named him Sheriff of the Year. His office runs crisis intervention training, an opioid task force and a cold case unit.
What makes a sitting sheriff’s leadership book different?
The pressures are real and current. Chapman writes about how geography shapes a sheriff’s priorities, how a county’s size and makeup decide what the public expects, and how a leader handles demands from council members and county executives who control the budget. A retired chief writing twenty years later can describe those pressures. Chapman describes them while they’re still landing on his desk.
He has also put the book in front of audiences outside policing. He discussed it on The Chris Voss Show, a business podcast I’ve also been a guest on, and on law enforcement podcasts, talking about leading under pressure in Loudoun County. That’s what a leadership book is for: it gets the author into rooms where the lessons travel.
What STEP-UP and LEAD shows a leader planning a book
It proves two things a sheriff thinking about a book should know. A sitting sheriff can write one. And a sheriff doesn’t need a New York publisher to get the book to the people who’ll use it. Chapman built the book on a program he’d already proven at home. That gave it structure and evidence before he wrote a word.
For a leader whose career is still going, that’s a strong model. Write the book about the system you built, and save the life story for later.
Keep reading
Hiring a ghostwriter for a sheriff’s or police chief’s book: how law enforcement leaders turn a career into a book, and what has to stay out.
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