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Resiliency Practices… the Essential Skill Set for All Public Leaders

The Public Sector Consortium is working on building the first of six competency models (Public Health and Wellness in Municipal Government) as well as focusing on the resiliency skills needed by public leaders to successfully pivot in a rapidly changing landscape. 

More than ever resiliency skills and practices are an essential skill set for all professions but most importantly for Public Leaders.  Unlike any other profession public leadership competencies are what we all depend on to thrive.  It is important to note that resiliency can mean something very different in tenured work- places like government and educational institutions that were designed and structured for continuity and stability. This differs significantly from the private sector where innovation and new products are often the source of their revenues.

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Embracing the Current Reality: A Leadership Key to Achieving Greatness

This month we focus on the important role of Public Leaders to educate and gain agreement on the unvarnished facts about the current reality.  A leader’s willingness to confront the current reality with co-workers and citizens is an act of respect. It is the only way to focus on the gap between where you are and where you want to go. Without this collective understanding and agreement achieving shared goals and making shared decisions is impossible.

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(Thrive Global) – Embracing the Current Reality: A Leadership Key to Achieving Greatness

Public Leaders educate and gain agreement on the unvarnished facts about the current reality.  A leader’s willingness to confront the current reality with co-workers and citizens is an act of respect. It is the only way to focus on the gap between where you are and where you want to go. Without this collective understanding and agreement achieving shared goals and making shared decisions is impossible.”

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Celebrating Service and Preemptive Public Leadership on this Fourth of July

Independence Day 2020 is nothing like what we may have collectively planned or imagined. We have experienced a renewed respect for the importance of skilled public leaders, educators and professionals during this world-wide health crisis. The professionals on the front lines have made tremendous personal sacrifices on our behalf. Reported levels of exhaustion from the four months of long workdays, rapid learning curves and critical decision making have left many public leaders ready for a time-out which we hope they can take.

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Reactive Technology Choices and Unintended Consequences

“There is no question that we are learning daily as we reach for technology platforms to conduct distance meetings and teach the millions of students who would normally be in classrooms.  We are all learning through trial and error that each platform has different levels of security, architecture and ease in usage.

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Making Technology Choices and Avoiding Unintended Consequences in Times of Crisis

There is no question that we are learning daily as we reach for technology platforms to conduct distance meetings and teach the millions of students who would normally be in classrooms. We are all learning through trial and error that each platform has different levels of security, architecture and ease in usage.

When we find ourselves in crisis the speed of reactive decisions is often staggering. With the current public health crisis, we experience daily results of a technology laboratory fully open for business. The technology you select for a meeting with people you know well may be different than a platform you select for people you have never met before. Many of you already use different platforms for different groups in your communities.

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Public Service Appreciation Week May 3-9, 2020

Public Service Appreciation Week! was established in 1985 and is in its thirty-sixth year. During these worldwide public health and financial crises, we are witnessing the testing of public leadership and public service as we have never seen before. The Public Leadership competencies needed to effectively address daily decisions during this crisis have become the essence of our personal sense of well-being and trust in governance systems. There could be no better time than May of 2020 to celebrate and thank our public servants who are on the front lines working to keep us safe.

This crisis has also exposed the critical interdependencies between public leaders and their citizens, public leaders in different levels of governance systems (local, state, federal), leaders in different countries, and finally leaders in different sectors (private, public and nonprofit). These relationships have become transparent as never before. Our hope is that these interdependencies will result in strengthened partnerships, and greater invests in hiring and developing highly skilled public leaders who can meet the challenges today, tomorrow and in the future.

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The 50th Anniversary of Earth Day

This April we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin believed that we all share one earth, so we need to take care of it. He was disturbed that an issue as important as the health of our planet was not addressed in politics or by the media, so he created the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970. 20 million people nationwide attended festivities that day. It was a truly astonishing grassroots explosion, leading eventually to national legislation such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, The Toxics Control Act, Clean Water Drinking Act, Insecticide, Fungicide & Rodenticide Act, Endangered Species Act and several others.

Fifty years later, despite all the efforts to protect and restore our environment, we find ourselves facing new national and international challenges that are the result of our collective human choices and their long-term impact.

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