These four quotes from the keynote speakers at the 101st ICMA Annual Conference in Seattle left a lasting impression on me.

If you’re a good leader, people should be able to do a good impression of you behind your back. – Patrick Lencioni

Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance. – Verna Myers

When we sugar coat our circumstances, we halt progress. – Shawn Achor

Affirm and build. Saying no is a creativity killer. The power of no doesn't just shut down new ideas, it shuts down people. – Kelly Leonard

As they do each year, the keynote speakers offered specific insights into leadership for you to take back to your communities. Here are leadership lessons from the keynoters that I found to be compelling:

Shawn Achor discusses happiness and success during conference opening.

1. Happiness and optimism drive success. The opening session keynote speaker, Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, noted that individuals and communities fueled by happiness and optimism have more successful outcomes “by every measure that we know how to test for.” He ended his presentation by sharing the behaviors that have been proven to increase happiness. Taking a few minutes every day for 21 days to practice these behaviors will create positive brain changes:

• Identify 3 news things for which you are grateful and describe why.
• At the end of a day, choose a positive thing that happened and write about it for 2 minutes.
• Perform a fun cardio activity for 15 minutes.
• Meditate for 2 minutes.
• Perform a conscious act of kindness. Make the first task in the morning a 2-minute e-mail thanking someone for something that they have done.

2. Quit pretending. One reason we need more diversity, according to keynote speaker Verna Myers, is that we’ve gone as far as we can by pretending to understand other people. It’s not what we see, but what we do with the differences that we see. We need to be able to predict what is coming our way, and understanding others can help us in our predictions. 

Valuing diversity can help local governments:

• Improve public service and satisfaction.
• Improve outreach and connection with constituencies.
• Enhance the organization’s credibility within the community.
• Decrease misunderstandings.
• Give employees a denser perception, which in turn leads to greater innovation and creativity and ensures more accurate predictions.
• Strengthen our ability to attract talent from a diverse pool.

3. To maximize potential, an organization must be both smart and healthy. According to keynote speaker Patrick Lencioni, being smart means having the strategies, marketing, finance, technology, and other systems in place in order to enable the organization to get the job done. Being healthy means having minimal politics and confusion, leading to high morale and productivity and lower turnover.

Lencioni offered these four disciplines of a healthy organization:

• Building a cohesive leadership team.
• Establishing clarity among those leaders.
• Over-communicating that clarity to everyone within the organization.
• Putting in place just enough systems to reinforce that clarity going forward.

Attendees practicing the art of improvisation during Kelly Leonard's keynote at #ICMA15.

4. Success often rests on the ability to form winning coalitions that will back a good idea. The Second City presentation featuring Kelly Leonard illustrated the seven elements of improv, as discussed in the Yes, And book, which Leonard co-wrote. Leonard reminded the audience that leadership does not thrive in a hierarchy but in an environment that encourages creativity and allows everyone to enjoy the success. 

Here are several other elements of improvisation from that could inspire you and your staff:

• Work cultures that embrace the “Yes, And” mantra are more inventive, quicker to solve problems, and more likely to have engaged employees than organizations where ideas are judged, criticized, and rejected too quickly.
• The business or organization that takes itself too seriously and doesn’t know how to question its own beliefs is at a strong competitive disadvantage.
• The care and feeding of our listening muscle is an absolute priority for anyone who wishes to create, communicate, lead, or manage effectively.

What do you think? Hear anything at the conference you can apply to your organization or community? Share your ideas below.