What Changed
The environment changed faster than leadership patterns could adapt. Understanding what shifted is the first step toward navigating it.
Three Shifts That Changed the Game
AI Transformation
Over 70% of workers express concern about AI disruption, yet fewer than 20% have heard from their manager about how it affects their role.
Workforce Expectations
Five generations working side by side, each with different expectations about communication, recognition, autonomy, and purpose.
Political Dynamics
Council dynamics, community expectations, and media scrutiny operate differently than five years ago. The playbook changed while we were executing the old one.
The Core Insight
The practices that built a career in local government were sound. They were calibrated for conditions that have since changed, and city managers and county administrators have worked through that change together in more than 250 Think Tank sessions since 2020.
Research from the 2025 World Happiness Report and Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace confirms what practitioners already sense: the gap between what leaders intend and what employees experience has widened. The research library goes through that evidence in depth.
Recent evidence
What This Means
The answer is not working harder or learning more techniques. The patterns that built a leader’s success were calibrated for the conditions in place when the leader formed them, and those conditions have shifted.
The challenge is the environment, and seeing that clearly is where a leader’s own shift begins. The people in an organization spend most of their waking hours in conditions their leaders shape. Whether they find meaning, clarity, and purpose in that work is largely decided by leadership. When a leader sees clearly and adapts, everyone downstream feels the difference.
One conversation to try this week: Ask a colleague who joined within the past two years: “What has been most surprising about how work gets done here?” Then listen without explaining. The answer may reveal a pattern that has become too familiar to notice. This is Face the Truth in action.
Rob Duncan, who founded Imagine That Performance, wrote the Local Government Companion Guide to the 2025 World Happiness Report.
Changed conditions call for a method: a structured way to see clearly, decide deliberately, and build the systems that make the organization’s priorities real.