Recognizing the need for enriching local government leadership, a team of six Illinois local government managers partnered with a business psychiatrist to develop and pioneer a human motivation and leadership program.

The objective of the program is to encourage leadership development in the critical areas of emotional competence. This will be accomplished through the awarding of a certificate indicating the mastery of the concepts surrounding human motivation and leadership.

The certification program focuses on the emotional competence of leadership, including human behaviors, relationships, communication, conflict, coping, power dynamics, and prejudice.

The program was inspired by the work of David Morrison, M.D., founder and chief executive officer of Morrison Associates, who has a decades-long track record of collaborating with local government managers on the impact of emotions on government leaders. The program is designed to improve leadership and effectiveness through enhanced emotional competence.

While the original six municipal managers have worked to pioneer and test the program, we anticipate an official launch of it in early 2017.

Local government managers and administrators are typically trained and skilled at handling both impersonal and interpersonal activities. We learn these skills through hands-on work, public administration programs, and attending educational conferences and professional development programs.

While technical training may focus on such issues as finance, planning, zoning, staffing, infrastructure, and similar policy development, we all know there is more. It's the human side of being a manager that the certification program seeks to address.

Mindful of Emotions

Although managers all work to develop our "hard" skills (e.g., local government expertise, technology skills), many times little attention is paid to developing the emotional side of individual leaders or the leadership team. In reality,our soft" skills are far more difficult to identify, learn, understand, and master than many of the technical skills. These soft skills include what is known as emotional competence.

The April 28, 2015, Harvard Business Review published an article entitled "How Emotional Intelligence Became a Key Leadership Skill." This key skill" is necessary in the private sector, and it is also necessary in the government sector.

Understanding emotional responses and behaviors is critical for leaders today. Managers, including myself, probably have all experienced this lesson firsthand. While we seek to master the technical requirements of our specific local governments, we also need to understand the psychology of our offices, team members, and community.

Human emotions can easily complicate decision making and problem solving. Understanding human motivations can be the difference between driving exceptional team performance and stagnating team outcomes.

Unchecked emotions lead to negative behaviors that create difficulties in teamwork, as frequently evidenced by dysfunctional, unproductive, or counterproductive meetings. Negative emotions, brought from any home to the office, can certainly have adverse impact on outcomes at work.

As Dr. Morrison explained to us most eloquently: In most all respects, public sector leadership is about people. A leader who has a healthy, well-grounded knowledge regarding how to work with people makes better decisions and acts more effectively."

At its core, leadership success depends upon good judgment—leaders making timely, sound, and reasonable decisions. Good judgment is derived from collecting and evaluating data and acting to make effective data-driven decisions.

As managers strive to improve their results, they must be mindful about how emotions have favorable, neutral, or negative impacts upon their ability to enhance performance. A local leader must consider the emotional state of the team as well as his or her own emotional state when analyzing the data and making decisions.

Moreover, elected councilmembers, participants in a neighborhood group, authors of Facebook posts, and others bring forward their own emotionally laden concerns. As quickly as possible, emotional affects—the most primitive building blocks of such emotions as shame, anger, fear, and disgust that are shared by all people regardless of culture—need to be identified and understood.

These negative affects are contagious and will negatively impact a team or community. If not addressed, they add complexity that can upend the ability of leaders to implement sound decisions.

Self-awareness Is Key

A leader also must be personally self-aware. That is the ability to identify his or her own feelings, question why those feelings exist, and decide how to proactively and productively address them. Personal emotions are data points for exploration, reflection, and decision-making support.

More than ever, it is imperative for local government leaders to understand emotional affects in nearly all matters they influence and to develop essential skills for identifying and responding to them. On the whole, this emotional competence enrichment process leads to better, more mature decision making and better overall outcomes for each community we serve.

As far as I know, this is the first such program in the nation for municipal managers," said Michael Cassady, ICMA-CM, and village manager, Mount Prospect, Illinois. "Overall, the program has increased my personal effectiveness at work in two communities and also at home. I am grateful to have been certified in this pioneer program."

The inaugural program consisted of 12 classes lasting three hours each, taught in a lecture-and-discussion style. Here are the class topics:

 

• Framing the issues of working with people.

• Leadership is a function, not a person.

• Judgment.

• The power of the leader: power and authority.

• Affects: a tool to understand emotions.

• Managing negative emotions.

• Dealing with shame.

• Coping and defenses.

• Understanding and managing conflict.

• Understanding trust.

• Psychological contracts.

• Leadership presence: a double-edged sword.

 

As we seek to refine the program, an additional 16, three-hour programs have been created to center upon the development of a local government manager's emotional competence.