Author's note, March 2026: I'm republishing this piece because the conversation it describes keeps coming up. In recent months, several board leaders have reached out during leadership transitions, and the instinct is almost always the same: move quickly, fill the vacancy, get back to business. My advice, counterintuitively, is to pause. Here’s why. In March 2024, I got a call from MRSC—the Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington, a statewide organization serving local...

If you think you're having more meetings than you did a few years ago, you're absolutely right. Since the pandemic, meetings have multiplied in frequency, in length, and in how they bleed into evenings and weekends. In every city I work with, the calendars tell the same story: back-to-back meetings, each one an opportunity to advance your priorities, solve problems, and make decisions that matter. Yet many of you tell me you're spending more time in meetings than actually doing the work that...