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Make Civility a Public Practice
Lead with Civility presents civility not as politeness or conflict avoidance, but as a leadership discipline grounded in dignity, truthfulness, justice, self-mastery, and the common good. What changes have you observed in civic institutions and public discourse that made this book feel especially urgent?
Over three decades in civic leadership, I have watched incivility become increasingly normalized in public life—in council chambers, school boards, workplaces, social media, and the wider political culture. But what made this book feel especially urgent was not simply the rise in incivility; it was the recognition that leaders have a disproportionate influence on the culture around them.
Those who hold public authority help establish what becomes acceptable. Their language, conduct, decisions, silences, and responses to misconduct send powerful signals about the norms of an institution and, over time, the political culture of a community. When leaders model contempt, manipulation, humiliation, or indifference to truth, those behaviours spread. When they demonstrate courage, restraint, dignity, fairness, and concern for the common good, those qualities can spread as well.
That is why the word lead matters so much in Lead with Civility. Civic leaders are not simply participants in the culture; they are among its principal stewards. They tend the garden of community, the civic environment. And tending a garden is active work: noticing what is growing, pulling what is choking out healthy life, protecting what is fragile, and deliberately cultivating the conditions in which people and institutions can flourish.
In a period of declining trust, polarization, and increasingly corrosive public discourse, leaders have to fully inhabit that responsibility. We cannot control every force shaping civic life, but within our spheres of influence we can decide what we will model, what we will tolerate, what we will interrupt, and what we will cultivate.
That is the central leadership challenge of this moment: not merely surviving an uncivil culture, but helping to shape a better one.
How did you develop the Civic Braid Leadership Model?
The Civic Braid Leadership Model grew out of a problem I kept seeing in leadership: we often rush to action before we understand what is really happening, or we become very good at analysis without ever turning insight into change.
I wanted a learning model that would resist both tendencies.
The model has three interconnected strands: Perceive, Prepare, and Practice. It echoes an ancient Greek rhythm of learning: theoria, phronesis, and praxis.
- Perceive is our version of theoria: stepping back, looking honestly at what is happening, and seeing beneath symptoms to patterns and causes.
- Prepare corresponds to phronesis, or practical wisdom. This is where we develop the judgment, language, knowledge, and self-mastery necessary to discern what wise action requires in a particular situation.
- Practice is praxis: putting what we have learned into action through conversations, decisions, policies, civic education, interventions, and the everyday habits that shape institutional culture.
I chose the image of a braid very deliberately. Each strand is distinct, but the strength comes from their being woven together. When Perceive is missing, leaders rush in without really seeing. When Prepare is missing, they may recognize the problem but misjudge what to do. When Practice is missing, wisdom remains an abstraction.
The Civic Braid is therefore less a three-step technique than a discipline of leadership: see clearly, develop practical wisdom, and act well. Then keep doing all three.
How can leaders begin repairing trust once an institution or community has developed a deeply unhealthy culture?
The first task is honest diagnosis.
Leaders often want to move immediately to a new code of conduct, training program, values statement, or communications campaign. Those things may have a place, but you cannot repair a culture you are unwilling to see truthfully.
Start by asking what has become normalized. What behaviour is being tolerated? Where is dignity being violated? What are people afraid to say? Where have stated values and lived experience separated? And perhaps most importantly: how has leadership itself contributed to the culture?
Next, stop the ongoing harm. This may require what I call a civic intervention: a deliberate, principled action—or sustained series of actions—that disrupts a destructive pattern, sets healthier boundaries, and allows trust to begin rebuilding.
But trust itself cannot be commanded. It is earned through repeated experiences of trustworthiness.
People watch what leaders do when it is inconvenient: whether they tell the truth, apply standards fairly, admit mistakes, keep commitments, protect dignity, listen to criticism, and act consistently with the values they profess.
That is why culture renewal takes time. You are not merely repairing relationships; you are changing patterns, norms, habits, and sometimes systems.
My shorthand would be: tell the truth about the culture, stop reinforcing what is harming it, and begin giving people repeated reasons to trust again.
If every civic leader adopted one practice from Lead with Civility tomorrow, which practice do you believe could make the greatest difference?
I would ask leaders to stop letting incivility pass without a thoughtful response.
One of the most damaging habits in civic life is normalization. Someone humiliates a colleague, dehumanizes an opponent, spreads misinformation, bullies staff, or repeatedly violates the dignity of others, and everyone in the room quietly adjusts. Eventually the abnormal becomes normal.
That is why I place so much emphasis on the civic intervention.
A civic intervention does not mean escalating every disagreement or policing every imperfect word. It means developing the judgment and courage to recognize when a destructive pattern is taking hold and stepping in—early, proportionately, and without becoming uncivil yourself.
Sometimes that intervention is as simple as saying, “We can disagree strongly, but we are not going to speak to one another that way.” Sometimes it means changing a meeting process, enforcing a boundary, challenging misinformation, protecting a staff member, or confronting behaviour that everyone else has learned to tolerate.
Civility must be more than a private virtue; it must become a public practice.
If more leaders learned to interrupt toxicity without reproducing it—to combine courage with restraint, truth with dignity, and conviction without contempt—I believe we would change the culture of many institutions surprisingly quickly.
Culture is built in moments, and so is its renewal.
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In an age of performative outrage, misinformation, and rising authoritarianism, Diane Kalen Sukra challenges the myth that might makes right. She shows how doing right by each other builds the shared strength our communities and institutions depend on.
Kalen-Sukra reclaims civility as a culture-shaping leadership discipline—a powerful antidote to toxicity. It equips leaders to hold the line, protect people and process, and make tough decisions that restore order and advance the common good.
She introduces the art of the civic intervention: using your role, procedures, and presence to interrupt harmful patterns and reset the norms of the rooms and places you lead.
Drawing on ancient wisdom, modern research, and her experience as a city manager and global civility advocate, Kalen Sukra offers a proven roadmap and practical tools for leaders determined to turn the cultural tide. Vivid portraits and guest essays from civic leaders show how incivility and dysfunction can become catalysts for renewal.
A handbook for leaders who want to change the culture—not just survive it.
Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times
Diane Kalen-Sukra’s Lead with Civility is a timely and substantial civic leadership book that treats civility as a discipline of governance amid mounting strain on civic institutions from rising polarization, declining public trust, and incivility. Written for elected officials, public administrators, community leaders, and people working inside civic institutions, this leadership book begins with a provocative idea: leaders are culture shapers, and the behavior they tolerate, reward, and model eventually becomes part of the culture around them. Kalen-Sukra builds that argument around what she calls “courageous civility,” a form of leadership grounded in dignity, self-mastery, truthfulness, justice, and the common good. She also introduces the “civic intervention,” a deliberate action meant to interrupt destructive patterns and restore healthier norms. That gives the book a practical backbone from the start, with culture presented as something leaders can intentionally cultivate.
One of the most distinctive qualities of Lead with Civility is the way it brings political philosophy into the everyday world of local government leadership and public administration. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Erasmus, Marcus Aurelius, and other thinkers appear throughout the book, but they’re used to illuminate recognizable leadership problems: ego, fear, toxic meetings, weak civic education, public distrust, poor conflict management, and the misuse of power. Kalen-Sukra’s Civic Braid Leadership Model organizes the material around perceiving clearly, preparing wisely, and practicing what you’ve learned, while the larger Roadmap to Renewing Civic Culture moves through self-governance, culture risk, civil dialogue, civic education, and compassionate governance. The result feels part handbook, part leadership course, and part exploration of the civic traditions that shaped democratic life.
The book becomes especially engaging when those ideas meet lived experience. The book’s practical authority is reinforced by Kalen-Sukra’s extensive experience in civic leadership and public administration. Guest essays and leadership portraits bring readers into floods, dysfunctional councils, toxic workplaces, polarized public meetings, staff teams, citizen academies, neighborhood initiatives, and deliberative processes such as citizens’ assemblies. These stories keep the civic leadership material connected to the pressures people actually face in government.
Just as useful are the book’s concrete tools: reflection questions, culture-risk exercises, dignity frameworks, civility circles, a civic intervention worksheet, and the Civic Culture Assessment Tool, which places organizations on a spectrum from toxic “Bullyville” tendencies to flourishing “Sustainaville” ones. This is clearly a leadership handbook designed to live on a desk, get marked up, and come back out when a council, organization, or community needs to address toxicity in the public square and civic culture renewal.
What I liked most is the book’s expansive definition of leadership. Lead with Civility connects personal character to institutional health, then connects institutional health to the ability of communities to flourish. Civility, in this framework, means exercising power while preserving dignity, creating spaces for honest disagreement, teaching people how democracy works, measuring trust and belonging alongside conventional performance indicators, strengthening neighborhoods, and bringing compassion into public decisions. Even its discussion of the “digital garden” extends the same logic into social media and online civic life.
That makes Lead with Civility a rich, distinctive, and urgently needed contribution to civic leadership, public administration, and political philosophy with a remarkably consistent message running through its many examples and tools: the culture surrounding public life is shaped through repeated choices, and leadership is the work of making those choices with courage, wisdom, and care.
Pages: 344 | ISBN : 1834384893
