What if the most powerful thing you can do to lift your team's performance isn't to add more, but to remove what's getting in the way? And what does a sheep meat trade ban in Mexico have to do with how one CEO is building a high-performing city?

In this conversation, David MacLennan and I get into what 15 years of diplomacy teaches you about leading without authority, a trade crisis that became his most formative leadership moment, and a framework he's built his entire organisation around. We land somewhere worth sitting with: the job of a leader might be less about what you add and more about what you remove.

David MacLennan is the CEO of the City of Vincent in Perth, Western Australia, named the second most livable city in Australia last year. He is also Chair of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre at the University of Western Australia. He spent 15 years as a diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, fluent in Spanish, with postings to Papua New Guinea, Mexico City, Lima, and London. During his time in Lima, he was awarded the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services, Commander Grade, by the President of Peru for his contribution to Peru's hosting of the 2008 APEC Leaders Summit. Before joining local government, he was Assistant Director General at the WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from UWA and a Master of Management from ANU and has been at the City of Vincent since 2018.

We get into:

• How a trade ban on Australian sheepmeat became the leadership lesson David still draws on today
• Why the CEO's job is best understood as pain management: finding and removing what stops people doing their best work
• How the City of Vincent gave a whole community permission to lead their own streets, and what that says about leadership at scale
• What it looks like to get an entire organisation into flow state, and how David accesses his own
• Why the problems in your work life never go away, and what that actually means for how you grow

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:40) - From small-town WA to diplomat: David's unlikely career arc

(06:52) - The Mexico sheep meat crisis, and what no one saw coming

(11:55) - The lesson that stayed: step up when no one else will

(17:24) - Clever, creative, courageous: running a city with limited resources

(21:11) - Town Teams and giving a whole community permission to lead

(24:52) - Performance equals potential minus interference

(29:41) - Getting an entire organisation into flow state

(30:56) - How David accesses his own flow state

(32:30) - From individual performance to a culture of high performance

(37:44) - Reflections and where to find David

You can find David MacLennan at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-maclennan-35724334/

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