Every week, you’ll get insights and actionable steps to help you navigate personal growth and professional success.
As we conclude our journey through the ABC’s of Municipal Leadership, you’ve gained valuable insights into the challenges facing city managers and strategies to overcome them. But knowledge without action is like a map without a traveler – full of potential, yet unfulfilled. Today, we’re focusing on turning these insights into tangible improvements in your personal and professional life, and exploring how an executive coach can be your guide on this transformative journey.
As a city manager, you’re not just overseeing operations—you’re a master craftsman, carefully cultivating a workplace ecosystem that can elevate your municipality from functional to exceptional. Your role is to shape, nurture, and refine the culture within city hall, knowing that the environment you create internally will directly impact the quality of service your city provides externally.
Let’s explore three essential elements of this craft that can foster a municipal workplace defined by employee engagement and collaborative achievement: Captivating Communication, Dynamic Collaboration, and Enthusiastic Culture.
As a city manager, your unique role can often feel like walking a high-wire tightrope while attempting to fend off a three-headed snake; each head—elected officials, department heads, and citizens—demanding your attention and often pulling you in conflicting directions. In this precarious position, finding balance isn’t just a desire—it’s your anchor to sustainable leadership and personal sanity.
Mastering the art of balance is crucial, not only for your well-being but also for the long-term success of your city. Let’s dive into the three pillars of balance that can revolutionize your leadership approach: Avoiding Burnout, Setting Boundaries, and Work-Life Integration.
As a city manager, you’re at the helm of a complex organization, navigating the choppy waters of public opinion, political pressures, and community needs. Amid the daily challenges of municipal leadership, awareness isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a crucial skill that can make or break your effectiveness as a leader. Let’s dive into the three key areas of awareness that can transform your leadership: Self-Awareness, People-Awareness, and Language-Awareness.
As a city manager, you stand at the helm of a complex organization, navigating waters that can become treacherous in an instant. Your role is unique, demanding, and often misunderstood. You’re expected to be a visionary leader, a master of operations, a political diplomat, and a community champion – all rolled into one. But in the whirlwind of responsibilities, three critical challenges often emerge that can make or break your success and, by extension, the prosperity of your city.
As we conclude our journey through Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism, it’s time to bring all the pieces together. Over the past week, we’ve explored powerful concepts that can transform your approach to leadership and management. Now, let’s focus on how to implement these ideas in your day-to-day work, creating lasting change for you, your team, and your city.
Before we dive into implementation, let’s quickly revisit the key principles we’ve covered:
Throughout this series, we’ve explored various aspects of Essentialism and how they apply to your role as a city manager. We’ve discussed the power of saying ‘no’, identifying your highest point of contribution, and removing obstacles to your essential work. Now, let’s dive into a core principle that ties all of these concepts together: the idea of “less but better.”
In today’s fast-paced world, there’s often an assumption that more is always better. More projects, more initiatives, more meetings, more emails. As city managers, you might feel pressured to constantly do more, to be seen as proactive and responsive to every community need.
However, this approach often leads to:
In our previous posts, we explored the power of saying ‘no’ and identified your highest point of contribution as a city manager as we continue to mine gems of insight from Greg McKeown’s book, “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.” Now, let’s tackle the next crucial step in your journey towards more effective leadership: removing the obstacles and distractions that stand between you and your most essential work.
At the heart of every thriving community lies an unseen high-wire act: city management. As a city manager, you’re not just walking a tightrope – you’re doing so while taming a three-headed snake, each head representing a crucial stakeholder: department heads, elected officials, and community citizens. It’s a delicate balance of collaboration, diplomacy, and strategic leadership that few truly understand.
That’s why we’ve created this new, 5-part podcast series titled, “The Municipal Tightrope: Taming the Three-Headed Snake.” Drawing from insightful interviews with almost 50 city managers across America, this series pulls back the curtain on the challenges, triumphs, and daily realities of those who keep our cities running.
As a city manager, you’re walking a tightrope every day. On one side, the demanding responsibilities of running a city efficiently. On the other, your personal life and well-being. It’s a delicate balancing act, one that often feels like you’re performing without a safety net.
