Introducing: The Municipal Leadership Development Circle (MLDC) - Save 50% During Launch Phase
Every week, you’ll get insights and actionable steps to help you navigate personal growth and professional success.
Your parks director just proposed an ambitious new project. It’s innovative, community-focused, and completely impossible with your current budget constraints. You know you need to say no, but you also need to maintain the enthusiasm and creativity that sparked the idea. What do you do?
Enter the Yes-No-Yes formula, a revolutionary approach from William Ury’s “The Power of a Positive No” that transforms how we handle these delicate situations. Let’s break down how this framework can revolutionize your municipal leadership.
Last week, a city manager told me something that stopped me in my tracks: “I came to this role passionate about serving my community. Now I feel like I’m just surrendering pieces of myself every day.”
Does that resonate with you?
The Scene: It’s 8:00 PM on a Tuesday. You’re finally sitting down to dinner with your family (your kids ate hours ago) when your phone buzzes. A council member wants your thoughts on a new policy proposal – right now. Your fork hovers halfway to your mouth as that familiar tension rises. You know you should protect your personal time, but saying “no” to elected officials feels like a political minefield.
Sound familiar?
How to balance competing demands without falling
Every municipal leader knows the feeling.
You’re in a council meeting, defending your budget while your phone buzzes with an emergency at Public Works. Your inbox is full of resident complaints about the new parking policy, while your calendar reminds you of three overdue performance reviews. Meanwhile, that strategic plan you’ve been meaning to update sits untouched on your desk.
Welcome to the municipal leadership tightrope.
One wrong step, and everything falls.
Too far one way, and you lose balance.
Too much focus here means dropping something there.
But what if you could do more than just survive this balancing act?
What if you could master it?
Hello, Impactful City Leaders!
Welcome to this week’s edition of “The Leader’s Lens!” In our journey to build stronger cities through stronger leaders, we’ve been challenging a pervasive myth in municipal leadership: that self-sacrifice equals dedication. Through Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s helpful book “Burnout,” we’ve discovered how sustainable leadership practices actually lead to better service for our communities.
This week, we’ve explored three critical insights about burnout in municipal leadership:
Today, we’re turning these insights into action. Because understanding burnout isn’t enough – we need a concrete plan to transform how we approach leadership sustainability.
How to transform your municipal culture by design, not by chance
Culture isn’t something that happens to your municipality.
It’s something you engineer.
Yet most municipal leaders treat culture like the weather – something to be observed, discussed, and endured rather than designed, built, and improved.
Let me show you what intentional culture engineering looks like.
Ever notice how the same qualities that make someone excellent at public service can also lead to their eventual burnout? There’s a reason for this paradox and understanding it could transform how you approach municipal leadership.
In their groundbreaking work on burnout, the Nagoski sisters identify something they call “Human Giver Syndrome” – the deeply held belief that certain people must give all their energy, attention, and resources to others. Sound familiar? In municipal leadership, this syndrome takes on a unique and particularly challenging form.
What happens when your hometown becomes your workplace? When every trip to the grocery store is a potential town hall meeting? When the water superintendent whose work you watched as a child becomes the foundation for your own leadership journey?
This week on The HaltingWinter Podcast, we dive into these questions and more with Bill Wagoner, who’s celebrating 20 years as Arcola, Illinois’ first and only City Administrator.
“Just stop thinking about work when you’re home.”
If you’re a city manager, you’ve probably received this well-meaning advice – and known in your bones how impossible it feels. Today, we’re exploring why that mental “off switch” is so elusive in municipal leadership, and more importantly, what we can actually do about it.
