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.
On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. That same day, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Weeks later, France would fall. And for the next year, London would face nightly bombing raids that killed tens of thousands and left the city’s leadership wondering, night after night, whether they’d survive to lead again.
This summer, The HaltingWinter Podcast is doing something different. Instead of working through leadership frameworks, we’re reading stories, because watching a real leader face the impossible teaches you things a framework never will.
We’re calling it Stories That Shape Leaders, and we’re starting with one of the best leadership books published in the last decade: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson.
Larson spent years reconstructing Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister from diaries, letters, and once-classified intelligence files. The result isn’t a textbook account of World War II. It’s an immersive, almost cinematic look at what it actually takes to lead through sustained, relentless crisis and what it costs the person doing it.
Here’s why municipal leaders should care.
You don’t manage a wartime government. But you do lead through sustained pressure of your own—budget constraints, staffing shortages, political complexity, a community that needs you steady even on the days when steady is the last thing you feel. The parallels are closer than you’d expect.
This week, we’re pulling five ideas out of Larson’s book: Churchill’s communication discipline, the inner circle he trusted completely, his insistence on radical clarity, and his capacity to keep leading through a crisis with no end in sight and translating each one directly into the work of local government leadership.
If you’re a city manager, county administrator, or department head, this week is for you.
Want the full breakdown? Inside the Municipal Leadership Development Circle, we’re spending all five days of this week unpacking The Splendid and the Vile—one big idea each day, built specifically for local government leaders.
Learn more and 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, Host of The HaltingWinter Podcast, and leaders from across North America to build stronger cities through stronger leaders. Learn more at HaltingWinter.com/MLDC.
