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.
Reed Hastings built one of the most studied organizational cultures in the world, not by adding more rules, but by systematically removing them.
His book No Rules Rules, co-authored with INSEAD professor Erin Meyer, tells the story of how Netflix reinvented itself four times over by building a culture rooted in three principles: talent density, radical candor, and leading with context instead of control.
Most local government leaders assume their culture problems are a people problem. Wrong hire. Wrong fit. Wrong attitude.
Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor have spent two decades researching what actually drives human performance and what they found should reframe the way you think about every person on your team.
In 2006, Eleven Madison Park was a forgettable restaurant in New York City. Decent food. Nothing special. By 2017, it had been named the best restaurant in the world.
The kitchen didn’t change. The location didn’t change. What changed was the philosophy of the leader running the front of the house and the culture he built around it.
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?
Owen Eastwood coaches some of the highest-performing organizations in the world, including elite military command groups, Olympic teams, and professional sports organizations. And the foundation of everything he does isn’t tactics, training, or strategy.
It’s belonging.
Most local government organizations are running a structure designed for predictability. Clear hierarchy. Specialized departments. Decisions flowing up, directives flowing down. It’s efficient…when the environment cooperates.
But when does this environment ever cooperate?
You’ve got capable people in your organization, who have good intentions and enough experience to handle almost anything your community throws at you.
And yet something keeps getting in the way.
You’ve walked into a difficult conversation fully prepared with the data, the rationale, the well-reasoned argument and you still didn’t get what you needed. The council member wasn’t moved. The union rep wasn’t budging. The community meeting didn’t go the way it should have.
If that’s happened to you, it wasn’t a preparation problem. It was a negotiation problem. And this week inside the MLDC, we’re fixing it.
Most culture change efforts fail. The retreat happens, the values get posted on the wall, and six months later nothing has actually changed. Leaders feel the frustration of it. Staff learn to wait it out. And the cycle repeats with the next administration.
There’s a reality most leaders never consider: your organization doesn’t just have a culture; it has a future already in motion. Not the future in your strategic plan. Not the one you described in your last all-staff meeting. The future your people actually believe is coming, built from every initiative that stalled, every promise that quietly disappeared, every reorg that promised efficiency and delivered exhaustion.
