At LeaderGov's June 2024 Summit Leadership Workshop, the spotlight was on innovation. Dozens of local government leaders from across the country came together to share their insights, challenges, and strategies for fostering innovation within their teams. Here's a summary of the workshop discussions and feedback from these dedicated leaders.

Barriers to Innovation

Leaders identified several factors that hinder their teams from being more innovative:

• Fear of mistakes and lack of courage.
• Complacency and comfort with the status quo.
• Time constraints and heavy workloads.
• Resistance to change and lack of capacity.
• Poor communication and lack of initiative.
• Rules, regulations, and red tape.
• Budget constraints and lack of consensus.
• Cultural barriers between what's innovative and what's allowable.

Defining a Growth Mindset

When discussing a growth mindset, leaders highlighted the importance of:

• Openness to new ideas and willingness to share and consider them.
• Proactive be
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LeaderGov published a poll on LinkedIN recently about how to best build trust on teams.   We provided four answer options as to how to build trust.  Two answers of the four were far and away the most valued.   The chart below shows the results of the poll. 

Listen to their concerns / ideas

The largest poll response on building trust had to do with listening to employees' concerns and ideas.   Here are some examples and ideas on that important topic. 

Listening to employees' concerns is an important aspect of being an effective leader. When employees feel that their concerns are heard and valued, it can lead to increased job satisfaction, higher trust, better performance, and improved retention rates. 

Here are some tips on how to listen to employees' concerns as a leader:

1. Create an open-door policy: In staff meetings or other venues, ensure your team knows that you are available to listen to their concerns, feedback, and suggestions. Encourage them to approach you and assur...

In a recent LinkedIn poll, we asked local government leaders if their teams’ emotional intelligence was above average, average or below average. The results were not surprising in that most people rated their team below average or average. 

So, what does it take to increase and develop emotional awareness on a team? Developing emotional intelligence in an organization can have numerous benefits, including improved communication, increased teamwork, and better conflict resolution. 

Here are some ways to grow emotional intelligence in your local government:

• Invest in training and coaching: Employees can benefit from workshops, seminars, and coaching sessions on emotional intelligence. These programs can help them develop self-awareness, empathy, and effective communication skills. 
• Lead by example: Leaders play a crucial role in fostering emotional intelligence in their organizations. By modeling behaviors such as active listening, compassion, and empathy, they can inspire their ...

Like any organization, local governments need to build strong teams to get important things accomplished.   Even the mundane tasks are done with greater ease when we operate like a team.  

We recently completed a LinkedIn poll and asked local government leaders what key topics they liked most in retreat. By large margin the top two most popular aspects of retreats were team building time and goal setting time.

Team-Building Exercises

Next time you plan an offsite retreat for your Department, City or County staff, City Council or County Commission, we encourage you to include exercises that bring the team together and grow the level of trust and understanding among individuals.

Here is a list of several exercises you can consider. Let us know if we can help you think through the rest of your offsite retreat needs. 

1. Two Truths and a Lie: Have each team member share three statements about themselves, two of which are true and one of which is a lie. The rest of the team must guess

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Having a high level of trust on City and County teams is paramount to the success of everything you do.  Trust between individuals and teams can either stifle success or multiply success.  Great sports teams who were under-rated in terms of skills often beat teams with much greater talent because they trusted each other and worked as a team.

Having a high level of trust on your team (whether it’s a department team, project team or city management team) has a range of positive benefits to those in local government.   Below are a few indicators to know if you have high trust on your team: 

• Is your team open to hearing honest feedback?
• Do your team members express their ideas in a transparent and honest way?
• Are your team members protective or careful in how they talk to each other?
• Do they know that the intentions of the people they work with are good?
• Does your team take input personally?

Your team may or may not have these attributes and it’s likely that you don’t have them ...

There are some great coaches that have influenced athletes over time.  You probably can think of some examples.    

In local government, you're the coach and the players are your employees.   As with all coaching, it’s the athlete who has to carry out and execute the plans.  You're not "on the field" and shouldn't be….you're on the sidelines encouraging, cheering and directing, just like a coach.   

Coaching is based on the idea that you believe the person is capable of solving their own issue.  Your goal is to help them develop a path to address a need by asking great questions.

Coaching is not a few things….

• Coaching is not an annual review
• Coaching is not feedback per se
• Coaching is not being someone’s friend, although you may like the person
• Coaching does not rely on your inspiration, but rather the person’s
• Coaching is not directly telling someone what to do

Coaches facilitate, they don’t offer direct input per se or micro-manage.  Mainly they ask questions to get to ...