You Can’t Lead What You Don’t Understand

Every local government leader has had this moment: a conversation that should have gone fine went sideways, and you walked away thinking, I have no idea what just happened in that room.

Here’s a book that explains it: The Road Back to You, by Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile.

The book is built around the Enneagram, a framework that maps nine distinct personality types, each with its own core fears, motivations, and blind spots. If that sounds like a personality quiz you’ve taken before and forgotten, this isn’t that. It’s less about sorting people into categories and more about understanding the patterns already running underneath your own leadership, and everyone else’s, whether you’ve ever named them or not.

Cron came to this material during a genuine identity crisis. After ten years as the founding pastor of a church he built from nothing, he stepped away exhausted, unsure who he even was outside of that role. A monk introduced him to the Enneagram not as self-help, but as a way to separate who he actually was from the version of himself he’d built to survive and succeed. He later partnered with Suzanne Stabile, a longtime Enneagram teacher, and together they turned that personal reckoning into one of the most accessible entry points into this material available.

Here’s why it matters for the job you actually have in the public sector. Most leadership books assume you got to build your team. Most of you didn’t. You inherited a council or board you can’t hand-pick, career staff who’ve been there longer than you have, and residents who show up furious about things you didn’t create and can’t always fix on the spot. Your job isn’t choosing who’s on your team. It’s leading the team you already have, exactly as they are, exactly as you are.

That’s where this book earns its place. It’s not asking you to become a different kind of leader. It’s giving you the language to finally understand why the people around you operate the way they do under pressure, under praise, under a public comment period that just went sideways, and just as important, why you do too. Once that becomes visible, a lot of the conflict that used to feel personal stops feeling personal. It starts looking like exactly what it is.

This week, inside the MLDC, members are working through five specific insights from this book: practical, daily tools for reading your team, your board, and yourself, especially on the days nothing goes according to plan. It’s the kind of work that’s hard to do alone, which is part of why the MLDC exists in the first place: a community of city managers, county administrators, and department heads across North America, working through exactly this kind of material together, with people who understand the specific weight of this job because they’re carrying it too.

If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting wondering why it went the way it did, this week’s inside the MLDC is for you.

Join us at HaltingWinter.com/MLDC.

The Municipal Leadership Development Circle (MLDC), led by Seth Winterhalter, is a community for city and county managers, administrators, and local government leaders who believe leadership shouldn’t be carried alone. Through trusted peer relationships, candid conversations, and practical leadership development, the MLDC creates space for municipal leaders to think differently, grow intentionally, and navigate the challenges of leadership alongside people who understand the weight of the work. Learn more at HaltingWinter.com/MLDC.