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.
Most leadership books will tell you what to do. This one will show you who to be.
This week inside the MLDC, we’re continuing our Summer Series — Stories That Shape Leaders — with Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. And if you’ve never read it, clear your weekend (you can also watch the movie!).
Louis Zamperini survived 47 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean with no food, no fresh water, and sharks circling his life raft. Then, he survived two and a half years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, where a guard made it his personal mission to break him completely — body, spirit, and sense of self.
The shocking reality…he didn’t break.
Unbroken is not a leadership book. There’s no framework. No five-step model. No sidebar on delegation or communication styles. What there is instead is a portrait of a human being pressed to the absolute limit and what, against all odds, held.
That’s exactly why it belongs in our special summer series.
The best leadership development doesn’t always come labeled as leadership development. Sometimes it comes from watching someone get hit with everything and seeing what survives. And what survives in Zamperini’s story — resilience built before the crisis, perception as a choice, dignity as a survival issue, the true cost of bitterness — translates directly into the work you do every day as a local government leader.
This week inside the MLDC, we’re doing that translation.
Five days. Five big ideas from Zamperini’s story brought directly into the context of local government leadership. Daily blog posts and podcast episodes that take what Hillenbrand surfaces in this remarkable book and ask: what does this mean for the leader sitting across from a hostile council, managing through a budget crisis, or carrying something from years ago that they haven’t been able to put down?
That’s what the MLDC does every week, not just in the summer. We take books worth reading and do the work of making them actionable for your specific world. City managers, county administrators, department heads. The leaders doing the hardest, most important, least celebrated work in American civic life.
If you’re not a member yet, this week is a good week to change that.
Head to haltingwinter.com/MLDC and join us. The content is already live.
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 Host of The HaltingWinter Podcast, and leaders from across North America to build stronger cities through stronger leaders. Learn more at HaltingWinter.com/MLDC.
