11/25/2022
Five years into the group meeting, Reynaldo Iglesias, a successful real estate developer, began joining the group’s weekly conversations. Seeing market opportunities in the growing community and Mayor La Salle’s support of entrepreneurs like Esther and Clark, Reynaldo was excited to be a part of growing opportunities.
With a growing list of successes under his administration, the mayor’s popularity grew in the community, but it wasn’t long before some small but vocal groups in the village began to challenge the Mayor’s collaborative leadership model with their own demands for what Snow Village needed to grow. The ideas were rarely backed by resources or action beyond creating noise in the community.
Initially the small factions of dissenters were largely ignored as Snow Village continued to expand. But as national economic headwinds began to limit growth opportunities across the country, Mayor La Salle grew nervous as his re-election loomed. Village news outlets became the Mayor’s key constituency as he began to chase headlines and priority broadcasts with reports on the volume of new businesses grown, jobs created, or investment captured. Impatient for projects that seemed to be taking too long or with unclear advantages, the mayor deployed Paul on individual projects, eliminating any time to spend at the coffee shop in casual conversation with Esther, Clark, Reynaldo and other entrepreneurs. As a result, the emerging community learned important but hard lessons like:
- Measuring the wrong results that grab headlines, but don’t value the relationships that underpin success.
- Focusing on individual parts of the community rather than strengthening the interactions among their leaders (further) limits opportunities for growth, especially during times of limited resources
One morning, shortly after the mayor narrowly won re-election, Paul returned to the coffee shop to visit with the stalwart entrepreneur leaders of Snow Village. He immediately remembered how much he enjoyed the camaraderie and bias to action among the group, and was also delightfully surprised to discover the next generation of Snow Village leaders had become regular attendees.
Timing was serendipitous as the group was on the cusp of identifying an exciting new partnership. With capital from a collection of investors organized by Reynaldo and a partnership with the University of Winter Valley, Snow Village, Dickens Village, and the federal government; Liberty Manufacturing, prepared to launch a new fabrication facility for manufacturing critically needed semiconductors. The group knew that such a collaboration could set Snow Village on a transformational growth path, attracting a wide array of citizens with diverse skills and interests...
