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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