Originally published February 14, 2024 · Edited February 23, 2026 · About our editorial process
City managers, county administrators, and their executive teams occupy a particular kind of leadership space. They balance council directives with community expectations, public accountability with internal culture, and the pressure to innovate with the obligation to maintain stable services. Every decision ripples outward in ways that private-sector leaders rarely face.
That combination of visibility and constraint is what makes local government leadership distinct. Not harder or easier than other sectors, but structurally different. And the leaders who navigate it well tend to share something specific: they’ve examined what they actually protect when the pressure builds, and they’ve built systems that hold when they’re not watching.
Purpose Under Pressure
Most local government organizations have mission statements. Many have strategic plans. But the test of purpose isn’t whether it exists on paper. It’s whether it survives contact with a tight budget cycle, a contentious council meeting, or a staffing crisis that forces hard choices about what gets resourced and what gets deferred.
Simon Sinek frames this as the difference between knowing your “why” and actually living it:
“People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.” — Simon Sinek, Start with Why
For local government leaders, the question isn’t whether they can articulate purpose. Most can. The question is what happens to that purpose when it costs something to protect. When the development program competes with the infrastructure repair for the same budget line, the choice reveals what the organization actually values. Not what it claims. What it funds.
That examination, distinguishing stated purpose from demonstrated purpose, is the core of Define What Matters. Leaders who’ve done this work describe a shift: decisions get clearer, not because the constraints disappear, but because the criteria for navigating them become explicit.
What Psychological Safety Actually Requires
The phrase “psychological safety” has become common enough in leadership conversations that it risks losing its meaning. It’s worth returning to what the research actually describes.
“Psychological safety is not about being nice or lowering performance standards, it’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from them.” — Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
In local government, the conditions that enable or prevent psychological safety are often structural. A department head who raises a concern about a council priority may face political consequences that have nothing to do with the quality of their thinking. A mid-level manager who admits a process failure may discover that the organization’s actual response to mistakes contradicts its stated commitment to learning.
These aren’t individual courage problems. They’re environmental design problems. The leaders who build genuine psychological safety tend to do it through specific, observable choices: how they respond when someone delivers bad news, whether budget discussions include honest assessment of trade-offs, how performance conversations handle the gap between what was intended and what actually happened.
Sinek describes this as the Circle of Safety, the boundary within which people can focus on the work rather than protecting themselves from internal threats. In local government, where public scrutiny adds an external layer of exposure, that boundary requires more intentional construction than it does in organizations where mistakes aren’t subject to FOIA requests.
Adaptability and the Cost of Honest Assessment
The landscape of local government changes faster than most organizational structures can absorb. New technology, shifting workforce expectations, evolving community demographics, and intensifying political dynamics all create conditions that yesterday’s playbook wasn’t designed to address.
Adaptability in this context isn’t a personality trait. It’s a leadership practice that requires honest assessment of what’s working and what isn’t, including honest assessment of the leader’s own assumptions.
That’s where Face the Truth does its work. Not as a one-time diagnostic, but as an ongoing discipline of examining the gap between intention and experience. The leaders who adapt well tend to be the ones who’ve built feedback systems that surface uncomfortable information before it becomes a crisis. They seek out perspectives that challenge their assumptions, including from people who have less positional power.
The cost of this practice is real. Honest assessment sometimes reveals that a decision the leader championed isn’t working. It sometimes means hearing that the culture the leader believes they’ve built isn’t the culture people actually experience. That gap is the diagnostic. Closing it is the work.
How Decisions Reveal Values
At the executive level, the decisions that matter most aren’t the ones made in public meetings. They’re the ones made in the margins: who gets heard before a policy is finalized, whose concerns shape the final version, and which voices are absent from the conversation entirely.
Fair process in local government means more than transparent procedures. It means actively examining whether the decision-making environment is designed to include perspectives that don’t naturally surface. Communities have residents whose needs are real but whose voices aren’t amplified by political organization or media attention. Staff have insights about operational reality that don’t always reach the executive level.
The leaders who sustain trust over time tend to be the ones who’ve examined their own decision-making patterns. Not just “did we follow the process” but “whose experience shaped this decision, and whose didn’t?” That question, applied consistently, is a Define What Matters practice in action.
Innovation Inside Constraints
Innovation in local government operates inside constraints that most frameworks don’t account for. Public accountability means that every experiment is visible. Political cycles mean that long-term initiatives face scrutiny on short-term timelines. And the people most affected by change, residents and employees, often have no say in whether it happens.
Ronald Heifetz names the dynamic precisely:
“What people resist is not change per se, but loss.” — Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
In local government, that distinction matters enormously. A new records management system isn’t threatening because it’s new. It’s threatening because it replaces the competence someone spent years building. A reorganization isn’t resisted because people fear the future org chart. It’s resisted because it disrupts the relationships and routines that made the work feel manageable. When leaders recognize that resistance is about loss, not stubbornness, the entire approach to change shifts from persuasion to understanding.
That insight reframes innovation as a trust problem, not a creativity problem. The organizations that innovate well in local government tend to be the ones where leaders have invested in the relational infrastructure that makes change survivable. People can absorb new processes, new technology, even new organizational structures, when they trust that the people making those decisions understand what’s at stake for them.
Building that trust is Make It Real work: designing systems where the rationale for change is visible, where feedback loops exist, and where the people affected by decisions have genuine input before the decision is final.
What Excellence Actually Looks Like
Leadership excellence in local government isn’t a destination. It’s a set of practices that compound over time, and that erode when they’re neglected.
The leaders who sustain it share a common pattern. They’ve examined what they actually protect under pressure, not just what they aspire to (Define What Matters). They’ve built environments where honest assessment is structurally supported, not just personally tolerated (Face the Truth). They’ve translated their values into systems that hold when they’re not watching (Make It Real). And they’ve built the rhythms that prevent drift, so that the clarity of today doesn’t become the nostalgia of next year (Reinforce the Change).
That’s the territory The Shift That Sticks maps. Not a program to complete, but a discipline to sustain.
Related Reading
Research Foundation:
- The Expectation Gap: What drives engagement and organizational performance in local government
- Political Dynamics: How governance pressures shape the leadership environment
Related Articles:
About Rob Duncan
Rob Duncan spent two decades watching what happens when leaders say one thing and protect another. As founder of Imagine That Performance, he works with city managers, county administrators, and government leaders through Think Tanks, workshops, and executive coaching to close the gap between intention and experience.
The Question Worth Asking
What does your organization actually protect when the budget gets tight, the council pushes back, or a key position sits vacant? The answer reveals more about leadership culture than any strategic plan. In the Think Tank, government leaders examine that question with peers who face the same constraints.
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