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.
In 1962, a twenty-four-year-old named Phil Knight had no money, no team, and no business plan…just a conviction he couldn’t shake that he could build a better running shoe. Shoe Dog, his 2016 memoir, tells the story of what came next: a company that nearly collapsed more times than it succeeded, before becoming Nike.
There’s a moment in the 1936 Berlin Olympics that still gives me chills.
Nine young men—sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers from the Pacific Northwest—sit in a wooden boat, about to race for gold in front of Adolf Hitler and a crowd expecting a German victory. They weren’t the biggest. They weren’t the most celebrated. And they won anyway, not by outworking everyone in the final stretch, but because something clicked in that boat that the other crews couldn’t manufacture.
That story is the foundation of The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown and it’s our second book inside this summer’s series, Stories That Shape Leaders.
There’s a moment in American history that still doesn’t quite make sense on paper.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the Republican nomination for president over three men who were better known, better connected, and, by almost every measure available at the time, were more qualified for the job than he was. William Seward had been a sitting senator and governor. Salmon Chase was a nationally respected statesman. Edward Bates had a reputation as one of the sharpest legal minds in the country.
Lincoln beat all three. And then he gave them seats in his cabinet.
It’s not a comfortable question. But it’s the right one.
This week inside the Municipal Leadership Development Circle, we’re working through Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and it starts with a finding that’s hard to ignore. Leaders who diminish the people around them, often without any awareness that they’re doing it, typically access only about half of their team’s actual capability.
Half. The other half is showing up every day and going unused.
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?
