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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In local governments and in private business, having a toxic boss can be a difficult and stressful experience for any employee. Toxic bosses can cause a lot of harm to an employee's career, as well as their emotional and mental well-being. However, sometimes leaving a job or getting the toxic boss fired is not an option. In this post, we will explore ways that employees can work successfully with a toxic boss.

Understand Your Boss's Behavior

The first step in dealing with a toxic boss is to understand their behavior. Recognize that their behavior is not about you, but rather a reflection of their own personal issues. By understanding this, you can avoid taking their behavior personally.  It's also important to have an open and compassionate mind.  Their behavior may be temporary and driven by some crisis outside work that you are not aware of. 

Set Boundaries

One of the best ways to deal with a toxic boss is to set boundaries. You can do this by being clear about your work hours, r...

Ever wonder why you just don't get along with certain people? 

They rub you the wrong way or they aren't as responsive as you'd like?  

When these people are your employees it's especially important that you have tools to resolve team conflict.  Part of your role is to engage, approach, coach, inspire and lead all sorts of personality types.  But we need to value, understand and know how to support them.

LeaderGov now offers a new system to help you do just that. 

LeaderGov's Team Assessment System is a powerful way to compare personalities on your team and visually see how and where you are different.

Knowing how to modify your approach to others is a key to successful management.   LeaderGov's new system gives you a way to better relate, coach and work cooperatively with your team. 

Below is a sample of how Tim and I compare.  You can use the drop down to select any team member to compare yourself to.

The LeaderGov Team Assessment System also shows the styles of everyone on ...

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 ...

Whether you are Director of Finance at a City, a County Manager or a Public Works Manager, providing customer service to other departments or to citizens is everyone’s job and it’s job #1.  As a leader you should be involved in the design, implementation and measurement of a customer service strategy to ensure your department is serving others well. 

Citizens are becoming more and more accustomed to next day delivery and ease of shopping all brought about by customer service innovation at Amazon and other online retailers.   They’ve tried to perfect the experience of shopping and they’ve raised the bar for other providers of services, including cities and counties.

In this blog we want to share six service strategies you can oversee to ensure the delivery of exceptional customer service in your department, city or county.

#1 Define Success

As a leader or manager, you should oversee the successful definition of customer service to your citizens or the employee you serve. In creating...