In a provocative presentation, leadership consultant Hon. Rev. Dr. John Unger told 54 Georgia mayors that leading a community isn’t something that can be automated, outsourced, or optimized, and that no amount of technology can substitute for the trust a leader has to earn.
Speaking at the Mayors Leadership Academy* in Athens on August 28, his presentation, titled “Leading the Future Before it Arrives,” made the point that the challenge facing city leaders isn’t about being a smart city. Instead, it’s about leading wisely.
“Technology can increasingly answer questions of capacity and capability,” Unger said. “Leadership must answer the questions of meaning.” The distinction between those two questions was the focus of his remarks.
In his presentation, he outlined four forces he said are converging on local leaders all at once: intelligence, automation, connectivity, and the lack of trust. The first three are technological changes while the fourth, he argued, is a leadership challenge.
Four Shifts in How Leaders Must Operate
He went on to discuss the four shifts he believes are shaping leadership.
The first is the power to influence. Unger noted that city leaders only have direct authority over specific functions, yet a community’s most difficult challenges are not something one leader or one organization can tackle. He cited Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” as the old symbol of authority. Instead, he said that a new leadership mantra needs to be “we do not have to agree about everything in order to accomplish something specific.”
The second shift is from efficiency to wisdom. While technology can optimize monitoring and actions, Unger said that leadership has to discern. While better monitoring and greater efficiency in operations are positive gains, they are not the point of governance. “People do not live in spreadsheets,” Unger said. “Neighborhoods have memories, Places have identity. Citizens have dignity. History matters.” He went on to say that in this age of focusing on increased optimization, leaders “must become guardians of something older and deeper” — wisdom.
The third shift is from delivering projects to shaping the culture. He made the point that while ribbon-cuttings are visible to the public, the real work is getting to the place where residents feel heard, newcomers feel welcomed, and where a community can tolerate failure along with success. And while that kind of civic culture is hard to measure, it’s what allows a community to solve problems together.
The fourth shift he addressed is from expert to learner. Unger said to the mayors that the old model of leadership, where the leader knows something others don’t, has passed. “Your job is to become chief learners. The leader who creates a culture capable of asking what is changing here in our community.” He went on to add that chief learners are the ones that ask “what should we try, what should we protect, and what remains human.”
The Real Test Isn't Technology
Unger closed his remarks with five capacities he said the current moment is asking of local leaders: adaptability, discernment, trustworthiness, stewardship, and hope, which he said is very different from optimism. “Optimism says everything will probably work out. Hope doesn’t say that,” he said. “Hope says whatever happens, we still have agency. We can still build. We can still repair. We can still become better neighbors.”
He left the mayors with five questions to think through in the decisions they have to make: What is actually changing? What should technology serve, not replace? Who is missing from the conversation? What happens after the thing we expect takes place? And what will build trust even in those situations when people disagree with the outcome?
While technology is changing what cities can do, declining trust is shaping what leaders must do to lead in the first place. And no amount of intelligence, automation, or connectivity will replace the art of leadership.
*The Mayors Leadership Academy is offered through the Harold F. Holtz Municipal Training Institute, a partnership between GMA and the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government.