I’m the community development director of a rapidly growing suburb in the southern United States. The growth in our community and increasing demographic diversity have created a lot of challenges for our city government. One problem is that the increase in revenue has been inadequate to fund additional services, public facilities, and other infrastructure.

City departments, especially the Community Development Department, have been impacted by constantly shifting priorities from the city council. Most recently, the council has focused on traffic congestion and a surge of accidents and near-accidents on major roads in the city. The council has now directed the Community Development Department to come up with a plan to address the issue.

To deal with the problem, various groups have wanted the city to focus on:

• Widening the congested roads.
• Adding bike lanes.
• Installing traffic circles to enhance the flow of traffic.
• Maintaining the on-street parking in front of small businesses.
• Protecting neighborhoods from cut-through traffic.
• Providing better public transit options, especially for lower-income groups.

These mounting and conflicting demands have come with increased scrutiny and criticism of my department staff for not taking action. Yet no one approach is acceptable to all stakeholder groups.

My transportation staff is uncertain about how to proceed. I’m uncertain. 

Can you suggest how we might move forward?

Response

Local government leaders and their teams often find themselves struggling to find a way forward when dealing with difficult challenges, such as traffic congestion, housing affordability, homelessness, climate shifts, and immigration enforcement. These challenges cannot be solved with technical solutions. Rather, they are adaptive challenges. Different stakeholder groups have competing expectations, conflicting values, and different preferred solutions. Any of the groups can block city action.

In your case, you find yourself in the midst of “fog”—you and your team cannot perceive a pathway forward. 

What is the “Fog”?

The “fog” is when there is so much uncertainty that you don’t know the way forward. The fog freezes the team and saps energy and engagement. Team members hesitate, endlessly seek more data, second-guess each other, and are scared that any decision is irreversible and will be criticized. (Peter Behrens, “How Great People Managers Lead When the Fog Rolls In,” SmartBrief e-newsletter, Jan 30, 2026.)

The Leadership Challenge

As the fog rolls in, the leader may withdraw, becoming less engaged and energized, or alternatively try to exert more control, enforcing more rules and allowing less debate. Both reactions do not work. (Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg, “Leaders Feel Their Agency Eroding—and They’re Starting to Withdraw,” hbr.org, March 23, 2026.

The leadership challenge is three-fold:

• One, how do you as a leader keep focused on purpose and keep your head in the game?
• Two, how do you help the team stay grounded and engaged, gain a bit of clarity, and become willing to take a few positive steps to build momentum and learn what works?
• Three, how do you involve the stakeholder groups, engage them in conversation, and generate their ideas on a few action steps?

It’s not about eliminating the fog. It is about learning how to lead through the fog. (Peter Behrens, “How Great People Managers Lead When the Fog Rolls In,” SmartBrief e-newsletter, Jan 30, 2026.)

Ten Approaches to Navigate the Fog

To figure out how to proceed, I suggest considering some of these approaches:

1. Pause, listen, reflect, and get feedback. Amid all the relentless distraction and demands, you need to pause, acknowledge what you are hearing (even if you disagree), and reflect. Ask yourself:

• Why is this issue or problem important to me (or the organization or community that I serve)?
• What drives these demands for different kinds of action?
• What do we know?
• What don’t we know?
• What do we control?
• What don’t we control?
• Who has experience in this realm and can give us feedback?

• What is potentially a first step?

  To promote reflection, you need to create some time and space to take a walk and ponder the challenge, write in a journal, and/or schedule time with a trusted colleague or two (or a coach). Then you can conduct the first of several leadership team meetings to solely focus on brainstorming positive action ideas. (See Scott Eblin, “Leading in the Age of Non-Stop VUCA,” eblin.com e-newsletter, Feb 4, 2025.)

2. Don’t pretend that everything is okay but do express confidence. Don’t shield the team from discomfort. Make it safe for team members to talk about their concerns and fears. Acknowledging discomfort is honest, and with your guidance may lead to growth. (Peter Behrens, “How Great People Managers Lead When the Fog Rolls In,” SmartBrief e-newsletter, Jan 30, 2026.)

   Team members don’t expect that you have all the answers and everything is ok. They do expect honesty, integrity, and transparency. Amid all the fog, tell them what you know and what you don’t know. Express your confidence. As the leader, you can say: “I don’t yet know the right response, and it will be difficult to figure it out. However, I do know that we will find our way through this together.”

   As Napolean famously stated, “Leaders are dealers in hope.” According to Gallup research, hope is the No. 1 attribute that followers want from their leaders. (See Jon Clifton and Benedict Vigers, “What Do People Need Most from Leaders?” gallup.com, Feb 11, 2025.)

   Hope is not just an optimistic feeling. “To hope” is an action verb. Followers must perceive that their leader believes that hope can be achieved and will take the necessary actions with them to realize hope. (See Career Compass No. 119 “How to Create Hope in Scary Times.”)

3. Engage stakeholders in conversation. While public hearings are required by law, they are the worst mechanism to engage stakeholders. Community meetings and workshops for all the diverse stakeholders may just be bringing feuding camps together and thus exacerbating the conflict among the stakeholder groups.

   To initiate the engagement effort, I suggest one-to-one conversations with different stakeholder representatives. In these conversations, you need to ask questions, listen more than talk, and acknowledge what you hear. In the process, you can uncover their true needs and values, discover their fears and concerns, and explore what could possibly minimize those problems. For example, could added parking lots offset lost street parking for small businesses if the city were to widen the roadways and/or install protected bike lanes? 

   You, of course, need to incorporate at least a few of their ideas into any initial plans.

4. Find your anchors—values, principles, commitments. When fog engulfs you, you must rely on your values, principles, and commitments. For instance, are you and/or your team committed to “safety first” or “climate protection” or “equity”? If so, how do these values or principles inform your thinking and guide your actions?

   Amid uncertainty and disruption, “you make principled decisions, not business decisions.” (See Simone Stolzoff, “Leaders, It’s Time to Build Your Tolerance for Uncertainty,” hbr.org, Jan 13, 2026.)

5. Ask provocative questions to widen your lens. If your transportation planning team has always focused on a singular approach to traffic congestion (such as road widening), you need to ask some provocative or catalytic questions to widen the perspectives of the team.

   These questions may include:

• Where are we blindly committed to one path?
• What decision today will still make sense five years from now?
• Is this a slight breeze or a full storm?
• What’s the cost of waiting?
• Is this possible decision aligned with our mission and values or a reaction to pressure?
• What could we stop doing to add some capacity to try a different approach?
• Who would bear the cost of this approach? How can we minimize the burden?
• What’s missing?
• Who’s missing?
• What voices aren’t being heard? How do we change that?
• What would make this new idea acceptable?
• What would eventual “success” look like?

6. Get everyone’s fingerprints on the initial solution. To move forward, you need some measure of shared ownership from the team members and key stakeholders. The way to get that shared commitment is to listen intently to their interests, goals, concerns, and fears and then intentionally incorporate some of their ideas into the initial solution.

   If some of the stakeholder groups see their interests and concerns addressed in the initial project effort, you may be able to turn stakeholders into partners. As partners, these groups may occasionally disagree with you, but they will struggle with you to find a solution. 

   In addition, after a series of conversations, it may be possible to identify some common ground for several of the stakeholders, thus creating the potential for a coalition. For instance, can bike advocates and transit supporters find common ground? 

   Moreover, it is more difficult for elected officials and other groups to attack you if you are standing with some allies, such as businesspeople, neighborhood leaders and/or bike advocates. In effect, you are spreading the risk.

7. Manage upward through the fog. To try out some ideas, it is necessary to buy some time from council and planning commission members as well as the city manager. Let the city manager and council and commission members know that you are reaching out to key stakeholder groups; update them on what you discover; attempt to set realistic expectations on near-term efforts; and negotiate space to experiment rather than deliver a finished plan.
    

8. Think big, act small, and pivot as you go. You may be bold in your thinking and know what eventual success will look like; however, you want to act small. 

   So, with your team, forget five-year plans. Rather, conceive a pilot project (such as a temporary traffic circle) to test out one or several possible solutions. Take a few steps forward, see what works and what doesn’t, fix things up as you go, and figure out the next step. Most importantly, learn as you go. 

   Then experiment some more. You are experimenting your way to success.

   As you proceed, you must debrief with staff and partners along the way. Don’t just conduct a debrief after the pilot is completed. Shorten the cycle of debriefs to make course adjustments.

   An experiment or two may not only provide additional data and promote learning, but experiments lessen the risk for you and your team. Of course, there may be missteps and even failure—it’s an experiment! Moreover, experiments are reversible.

   In the fog, you need clarity. You cannot get clarity before you act, only after you act. “Action creates clarity.” (Dan Rockwell, “Forging Clarity in the Fog,” Leadership Freak blog, March 2, 2026.)

9. Focus on progress. Our local government projects typically take too long to implement. We lose momentum. Staff energy and engagement falters. Consequently, you must break projects into “chunks,” identify milestones, and then celebrate progress (including learning) along the way.

   Continued energy, engagement, and momentum are critical to the longer-term success of the evolving project.

10. Make relationship and connection a core strategy; enhance the emotional capacity of the team. Due to the overload of “priorities,” overwork and exhaustion, many staff people don’t have the emotional bandwidth to focus on new challenges and creative problem-solving.

    In the midst of fog, “team performance depends as much on emotional capacity as on operational or financial strength.” (See Deepa Purushothaman and Colleen Ammerman, “What Authentic Leadership Looks Like Under Pressure,” hbr.org, March 10, 2026.)

    To enhance the emotional capacity of team members, leaders must engage in building relationship and connection as a core strategy. Relationship, connection, and belonging are not “soft”—they are key to success. (Career Compass No. 107 “The Business Case for Promoting Workplace Belonging.”)

    Connection and belonging are critical for several reasons:

• Enhancing followership. You can’t force people to follow. People tend to follow if they feel connected to you.
• Promoting collaboration. Internal and external stakeholders are more likely to partner with you if they are in a positive relationship with you and thus are more open to your ideas and are more trusting of you.

• Mitigating distress. A sense of truly belonging mitigates the ongoing stress and overload of our jobs.

  “Workplace belonging is now a performance requirement, not a perk.” (Peter Behrens, “How Great People Managers Lead When the Fog Rolls In,” SmartBrief e-newsletter, Jan 30, 2026.)

11. Bonus tip—Make it playful. Under threat and a lot of scrutiny and criticism, leaders often resort to more rules and control. The problem is that control creates a sense of deadly seriousness that suppresses curiosity and creativity. Leaders must incorporate some playfulness or what I call “serious fun” into the work process. For instance, conduct an ice-cream social and ask people to sketch rudimentary “vision cards” of a successful transportation future. (See Career Compass No. 72 “How Do We Generate Creative Ideas?”)

Row Through the Fog

Imagine yourself on a foggy lake in a large rowboat with a few colleagues. You can’t see the shore or know where you’ll end up. As a leader, you have two jobs: One, believe you can eventually reach the shore and instill that faith in others. Two, stay calm and keep rowing. (See Simone Stolzoff, “Leaders, It’s Time to Build Your Tolerance for Uncertainty,” hbr.org, Jan 13, 2026.)

Sponsored by the ICMA Coaching Program, ICMA Career Compass is a monthly column from ICMA focused on career issues for local government professional staff. Dr. Frank Benest is ICMA's liaison for Next Generation Initiatives and resides in Palo Alto, California. Read past columns at icma.org/career-compass.

If you have a career question you would like addressed in a future Career Compass, e-mail careers@icma.org or contact Frank directly at frank@frankbenest.com. 

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