Municipal WinsLeadership Program
Helping municipal leaders identify their biggest wins, learn from their biggest losses, and create a positive work culture where success becomes repeatable.
Why Municipal Leaders Need More Wins
Municipal leadership is demanding.
Leaders are expected to deliver exceptional service, manage limited resources, navigate change, support their teams, and maintain a positive culture—all while facing increasing public expectations.
As a result leaders can burn out and feel like they are losing all the time.
Which is why training your leaders a repeatable way to get more wins is so important.
But most leadership training only teaches theory and it rarely gets applied.
The Municipal Wins Leadership Program is different.
We begin by discovering the wins and losses already happening in your organization.
Then we teach you a proven system to help you use those stories to celebrate success, learn objectively from setbacks, and create a positive leadership experience that lasts long after the workshop ends.
This isn’t just leadership training.
It’s a systematic approach to help you build a winning workplace culture.
What would happen...
What would happen if every leader across your municipality:
- Focussed on generating wins, instead of always being caught up on problems
- Learned how to authentically celebrate big wins and small wins
- Understood how to objectively deal with a loss, instead of pointing fingers and avoiding responsibility
- Shared winning stories that inspired other departments and your rate payers
- Created a winning workplace culture that improved retention and made everyone excited to go to work
The Municipal Wins Leadership Program
A systematic approach to help your leaders build a winning culture at work.
Step 1: Discovery
Interviews
Months before the workshop we meet with your leadership team and Human Resources to understand your goals and culture.
Then we interview leaders across your municipality and ask a simple but powerful question:
“Tell me about your biggest wins and losses.”
The answers reveal:
- Leadership strengths
- Hidden successes and failures
- Team accomplishments
- Culture builders
- Service excellence
- Stories worth sharing
These interviews become the foundation for the entire experience.
Robust Agenda
- We work with you to customize a Robust Agenda that will inspire your leadership team on the training day
Municipal Wins Playbook
- We build the 1st draft of the Muncipal Wins Playbook to record all the wins and losses that are discovered throughout the entire process – which ensures that your stories will be preserved and shared
Executive Winning System
- We introduce you to the Executive Winning System, a proven 5-Step approach that will help you get more wins (and avoid more losses) in the future
Step 2. The Experience
Training Day
Next comes the workshop experience.
This is not a lecture.
It is an energetic, interactive leadership experience designed to educate and inspire municipal leaders.
During the workshop participants explore:
The Anatomy of a Win – a practical 5-Step framework that helps leaders understand the Strategy, Work Plan, People, Operations and Results behind every win and loss.
After mastering this proven framework, municipal leaders will objectively understand:
- What created a success or failure
- The choices that mattered
- Lessons worth repeating
- How to intentionally create future wins and more
Learning from Wins
Leaders will learn how to document and celebrate progress throughout the year.
The result?
- More confidence
- Better perspective
- Stronger morale
And leaders who will be able to clearly communicate their value and impact.
Learning from Losses
Using the Anatomy of a Loss framework, leaders will learn how to objectively unpack a loss.
The result?
- No more finger pointing
- The team and the organization takes full responsibility for a loss
- Participants can separate emotion from learning
- They’ll be able to turn difficult experiences into future success
And leaders will also know how to conduct ‘lessons learned’ in a psychologically safe way.
Build a Wins/Losses List
Leaders will learn how to build ‘Wins List’ to document and celebrate progress and setbacks throughout the year.
Wins and Losses from the training day will also be included in the Municipal Wins Playbook.
Celebration
Workshop participants will learn how to authentically celebrate wins and losses.
This will empower them to inspire their teams throughout the year.
Group Photo in Front of the Wins Wall
Throughout the day participants will be encourage to post notes on the ‘Wins Wall’ – and at the end of the day everyone will do a fist pump in front of it during the group photo!
Step 3: Follow-Up and Accountability
Within a month of the training day Gord will facilitate a debrief to ensure that the training has been implemented.
He will also be available to do Executive Coaching sessions with internal champions who want to go deeper.
Why Work With Gordon Sheppard
Gord brings clarity, energy, and structure to every leadership program he facilitates.
His style has been described as ‘assertively kind’, which means he helps leaders get to the point quickly and confidently.
The result?
Leaders feel energized and focussed so they can get back to making their organizations more profitable!
What You Get
Trusted by Executives and Industry Leaders
Notable Clients
Case Study
Municipal District of Greenview Leadership Wins Training & Alignment Project
Highlights
- 20 Pre-Interviews to discover ‘wins’
- Interactive 1-Day Training with 43 leaders and a wall of wins
- Municipal Wins Playbook Creation
- CAO featured on the Executive Wins Podcast
- Positive feedback and implementation of key concepts
Erin Klimp, Manager of HR for MD Greenview, hired Gordon Sheppard to deliver the ‘Leadership Wins Training and Alignment Project’.
The project included doing pre-interviews with 20 leaders, providing a full day of ‘Wins’ Training for 43 Managers, Supervisors and members of their Senior Leadership Team, and delivering the Municipal Wins Playbook (14 pages of wins gathered from their leaders throughout the entire procees).
The Process included a before/during/after approach.
Before
- Gord met with Erin Klimp and Nicole Perry to go over the engagement
- Gord conducted 20 pre-interviews leaders to learn about their ‘wins’ at work
- He also built a robust agenda and designed and delivered a customized workbook
- He interviewed Stacey Wabick , MD Greenview CAO, about his big culture win on the Executive Wins Podcast (episode 61)
During
- Gord facilitated a highly interactive full day of training
- Training day highlights included examining wins, losses and learning the Anatomy of a Win
After
- Gord helped to build and deliver the Municipal Wins Playbook, that now contains 14 pages of wins that were gathered throughout the process
- Follow up meetings were held to get feedback and learn about implementation of key concepts
This project was a significant contributor to the overall efforts that MD Greenview is making to build a positive work culture (that now has a retention rate of more than 90%!)
Senior leaders now have a ‘Wins List’ (the Municipal Wins Playbook) that they can refer to, and add onto in the future to drive more positive behaviours.
Some leaders are already implementing the Wins List approach in their departments.
Overall, the CAO and HR team felt that it was worthwhile – and because the process helped to surface really authentic wins, the overall impact of this project was very positive.
The Executive Winning System
Gord’s work is based on the Executive Winning System, a proven 5-step approach that will help to fully align your leadership team so they can achieve more profitable results.
Define the vision, mission, values, and goals that will drive your business forward.
Create a clear, action plan to move from strategy to execution.
Bring the right people on board—those with the skills, mindset, and attitude to drive success.
Establish the systems, processes, and policies that enable seamless execution.
Measure the quantitative and qualitative data you need to get more wins in your business.
About Gordon Sheppard
Gord Sheppard is a people-centred Executive Coach, Consultant, and Facilitator with over 25 years of experience and his mission is to “empower Executives so they can positively impact themselves, their teams and their entire organization.
He combines an MBA with a Bachelor’s Degree in Drama, and Prosci Change Management Certification to deliver a unique, people-centred approach that helps leaders to succeed.
He’s helped thousands of leaders grow through workshops, strategy sessions, and coaching – across Canada and the U.S.
What Executives Say
About Working With Gordon Sheppard
FAQ
Common questions about the Municipal Wins Leadership Program
Three to six months including interviews, pre-work, training day and post-work.
- Municipal leaders will learn how to reverse engineer past wins and losses, so they can pull out best parts to get more wins in the future
- Leaders will also learn how to build a Wins List and how to authentically celebrate wins
- Leaders will gain the tools and confidence to build a winning work culture
CAO, Directors, Managers, Department Heads, Senior Leadership Teams and more
You Facilitator is Gordon Sheppard, a highly experienced meeting leader who has successfully led strategic planning, conflict management, innovation sessions and more
Yes! Because the pre-work interviews and documentation review will surface important issues that will be addressed during the session.
Your leadership team will deepen trust, communicate openly and be in a significantly better position to build a positive culture at work
Confidentiality is addressed in our legal contract, and Gordon Sheppard upholds the highest ethical standards.