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.
All summer, the MLDC has been inside stories. Stories of leaders who built something lasting when the conditions were impossible. Who found a way forward when the path disappeared. Who refused to let circumstance determine outcome. The Summer Series — Stories That Shape Leaders — was designed to do exactly what great stories always do: expand what feels possible.
Now comes the harder question.
Inspiration is where it starts. But at some point, every leader has to walk back into a real organization, with real budget constraints, real council dynamics, real staff limitations, and a calendar that never stops, and actually make something change. That’s where most leadership development stops short. And that’s exactly where this fall begins.
Episode 377 of The HaltingWinter Podcast
Sponsored by Tyler Technologies
When people think about the path to becoming a city manager, they often picture someone rising through finance, public works, or administration.
Jennifer Wills took a different route.
Episode 376 of The HaltingWinter Podcast
Sponsored by Tyler Technologies
Leadership doesn’t only grow inside City Hall.
Sometimes it grows on a mountain trail, crossing washed-out bridges, climbing over fallen trees, and navigating uncertainty one step at a time.
There’s a leadership book that’s been sitting on a lot of shelves for the last decade, passed around in business circles, quoted in locker rooms and boardrooms, recommended by everyone from NFL coaches to Fortune 500 executives.
Most of those recommendations miss the group it was actually written for.
Episode 374 of The HaltingWinter Podcast
Sponsored by Tyler Technologies
Success in local government is often measured by bigger cities, larger budgets, and more prominent titles. But what if the greatest leadership opportunity isn’t the next step up the ladder? What if it’s the chance to make a lasting difference in the community that shaped you?
Episode 373 of The HaltingWinter Podcast
Sponsored by Tyler Technologies
There are few challenges more difficult in local government than managing rapid growth.
New neighborhoods. New infrastructure. New expectations. New residents. And alongside all of that comes a question every community must answer:
How do you embrace the future without losing what made your community special in the first place?
There’s a belief you’re leading from right now that you didn’t choose.
You absorbed it. From your organization, your predecessor, your council, the culture you walked into on your first day. It got handed to you without a label, so it didn’t arrive looking like an assumption. It arrived looking like reality. And you’ve been leading from it ever since.
Episode 371 of The HaltingWinter Podcast
Sponsored by Tyler Technologies
Local government leaders are constantly asked to solve complex problems.
A struggling organizational culture. Aging infrastructure. Workforce shortages. Political division. Public expectations that continue to rise.
The temptation is to jump straight to solutions.
Episode 370 of The HaltingWinter Podcast
Sponsored by Tyler Technologies
Communities don’t become exceptional by accident.
Behind every thriving downtown, every well-maintained park, every new library, and every neighborhood where people feel connected is a team of public servants making thousands of intentional decisions over many years.
Few people understand that better than Brenda Eivens.
There’s a moment early in The Ride of a Lifetime where Bob Iger describes what he inherited when he became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005. A legacy institution with a proud history. A culture resistant to change. Internal politics that had calcified over decades. A workforce that had seen enough leadership transitions to be appropriately skeptical of the new one.
If you’ve spent any time in local government, you recognized that organization immediately.
