Municipal Leaders: Develop Faster, Lead Stronger, Build Better
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MLDC Book of the Week: “Just Listen” by Mark Goulston
You prepared for three hours. Your presentation is solid. The data supports every recommendation. Your proposal will save money, improve service delivery, and solve a real problem.
Fifteen minutes into the meeting, you watch it die.
Not because the proposal is flawed. Not because the numbers don’t work. But because three council members decided they weren’t interested before you finished your opening remarks.
You leave frustrated. Again. Wondering why good ideas keep getting rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with merit.
Here’s what nobody tells you when you take a leadership role in local government: Your technical competence got you the job. Your ability to reach people determines whether you can actually lead.
You know how to analyze problems. You know how to develop solutions. You know how to manage budgets and coordinate departments and navigate regulations.
But do you know how to get through to the council member who’s already decided you’re wasting taxpayer money? The department head who sees every change as a threat? The community member who shows up angry before you’ve said a word?
Most of us don’t. We were never trained for it. So we do what seems logical: we prepare better presentations, gather more data, rehearse our arguments. We think if we can just explain it clearly enough, people will understand.
They don’t. And the harder we push, the more they resist.
Mark Goulston is a psychiatrist who trained FBI hostage negotiators. He spent decades studying a critical question: How do you reach people when everything is on the line and they’re not ready to listen?
What he discovered applies just as much to city hall as it does to crisis situations.
In “Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone,” Goulston reveals the counterintuitive truth about persuasion: Getting through to people isn’t about what you tell them. It’s about what you enable them to tell you.
Think about that resistant council member. They’re not listening to your budget proposal because they don’t feel heard yet. They’ve got concerns, fears, political pressures you haven’t acknowledged. Until they feel understood, they literally cannot consider your perspective. Their brain won’t let them.
The defensive department head? Same issue. They’re protecting themselves because they don’t trust that you understand what they’re dealing with.
The angry resident at the public meeting? They’re escalating because nobody has demonstrated they get what’s really bothering them.
Goulston identifies the pattern all persuasion follows. People move through predictable stages and here’s the critical insight: You cannot skip steps.
When you walk into that council meeting with your brilliant proposal, where are those council members? If they’re still at step 1, so it doesn’t matter how good your presentation is. They’re not ready to consider yet.
Your job isn’t to convince them you’re right. Your job is to move them from step 1 to step 2. Only then can they consider your ideas.
And that movement happens not through better arguments, but through them feeling genuinely understood.
This week in the Municipal Leadership Development Circle (MLDC), we’re doing a comprehensive exploration of Goulston’s proven techniques. Not theory. Not concepts. Specific, practical strategies you can use in your next difficult conversation.
You’ll discover:
How to manage yourself first. You can’t reach another person when you’re emotionally hijacked. Goulston’s sixty-second reset moves you from panic to clear thinking: a skill that works whether you’re walking into an ambush at a council work session or dealing with an angry department head.
How to make people “feel felt.” This isn’t about agreeing with them. It’s about demonstrating you genuinely understand their perspective. When you do this correctly, defensive walls drop instantly. The impossible conversation becomes possible. We’ll show you the exact words to use.
How to interrupt anger in ninety seconds. Goulston teaches the Empathy Jolt—a technique based on brain science that stops hostile escalation dead in its tracks. Because anger and empathy cannot exist in the same place at the same time in the brain.
How to recognize where people are in the Persuasion Cycle. Once you can see it, you stop wasting energy trying to convince people who aren’t ready to be convinced. You focus instead on moving them to the next stage.
You have difficult conversations coming. You know you do.
The budget presentation where you’ll face pushback. The performance conversation with the resistant employee. The community meeting where people are already angry. The coordination discussion between departments that won’t collaborate.
You can approach those conversations the way you always have. Prepare your arguments. Hope for the best. Feel frustrated when it goes sideways.
Or you can learn what hostage negotiators know: There are specific, learnable techniques for reaching people who don’t want to be reached. And they work.
Here’s the truth: You could ignore all of this. You’ll still be competent. You’ll still do your job adequately.
But you’ll stay stuck in the exhausting cycle of fighting for every inch of progress. Good ideas will keep getting rejected for emotional reasons. You’ll keep spending enormous energy managing conflicts that didn’t need to escalate. You’ll keep leaving meetings frustrated that people just won’t listen.
The leaders who thrive in local government—not just survive, but thrive—aren’t the ones with the most experience or the best technical skills. They’re the ones who’ve learned how to reach resistant people. To move councils from opposition to collaboration. To help defensive staff become engaged. To turn hostile community members into partners.
That’s not a personality trait. It’s a skill. And this week, we’re teaching you exactly how to develop it.
Your next difficult conversation is coming. Probably this week. Maybe tomorrow.
Join the Municipal Leadership Development Circle now and get immediate access to this week’s complete exploration of “Just Listen” plus our expansive library of content translating best-selling leadership books specifically for local government leaders.
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The question isn’t whether these techniques work. Goulston proved they work when lives are on the line. The question is whether you’ll learn them before your next impossible conversation.
The Municipal Leadership Development Circle (MLDC) is a professional growth community exclusively for city managers, administrators, and local government leaders. Each week, we explore insights from transformative books and apply them specifically to the unique challenges of municipal leadership. Join Seth Winterhalter, President of HaltingWinter Municipal Solutions, and leaders from across North America to build stronger cities through stronger leaders. Learn more at HaltingWinter.com.
