Municipal Leaders: Develop Faster, Lead Stronger, Build Better
Every week, you’ll get insights and actionable steps to help you navigate personal growth and professional success.
There’s a good chance your organization has a people development strategy.
A training budget. A succession plan. Maybe a leadership cohort or a mentorship program. On paper, it looks like you’re investing in your people.
But what if the way your organization is built — the norms, the culture, the unspoken rules about what’s safe and what isn’t — is quietly undoing all of that?
That’s the argument Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey make in An Everyone Culture. And it’s one of the most important books a local government leader can read right now.
In nearly every organization, people are doing a second job nobody hired them for. That job is covering their weaknesses, managing how they look, and making sure the right people have the right impression of them at the right time. It’s not laziness. It’s not politics. It’s what happens when a culture, consciously or not, makes self-protection necessary.
In local government, that second job gets a full-time salary. You manage up to elected officials who need confidence. Your department heads manage across to each other. Your staff manages down to avoid scrutiny. And somewhere in the middle of all that performance, the real work — the honest thinking, the risk-taking, the conversations that actually matter — gets crowded out.
The cost shows up in ways that are hard to trace. Meetings where everyone nods and nobody says what they’re thinking. Staff who stopped growing years ago but haven’t left yet. Turnover you can’t fully explain. Decisions made with blindspots nobody was willing to name out loud.
Kegan and Lahey spent years studying organizations that broke this pattern; organizations they call Deliberately Developmental Organizations, or DDOs. These are workplaces where development isn’t a program or a perk or something reserved for high-potential employees. It’s woven into the daily fabric of how people work together.
And the framework they offer — Edge, Home, and Groove — gives you a practical way to assess whether your culture is actually developing people or quietly capping them.
This week inside the MLDC, we’re unpacking all of the key insights.
Five days of content built specifically for local government leaders — blog posts, podcast episodes, and a conversation guide your leadership team can use right now — all organized around the insights from An Everyone Culture and grounded in the real constraints of city and county leadership.
If you’re not a member yet, this is exactly the kind of work the MLDC exists to support. Every week, we take the best leadership thinking available and translate it into something genuinely useful for the people running local government — not theory, not private sector case studies dressed up in government language, but real application for leaders doing one of the hardest jobs in public life.
Your organization deserves a culture that develops people. Not someday…now.
Come join us at HaltingWinter.com/MLDC.
The Municipal Leadership Development Circle (MLDC) is a professional growth community exclusively for city/county 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/MLDC.
