Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times

by Diane Kalen-Sukra

PAC would like to express their deepest thanks to Diane Kalen-Sukra for this exclusive excerpt from Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times.

A Leader’s First Task: Know Thyself

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

Lao Tzu, Tao

Over the years, I have been invited to speak on a wide range of topics from civility, good governance, and civic resilience to the future of our cities. Most often, the invitation is framed around civic culture challenges. Increasingly, however, it is framed around technology: data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and how these tools promise to transform municipal governance by optimising systems, enhancing efficiency, and improving service delivery.

There is a growing belief that our many complex civic challenges will be solved primarily by technological systems. This view has been articulated most clearly in works such as The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies. The title is an intentional play on Plato’s Republic, which has shaped governance thought for 2,400 years, with a telling inversion. While Plato located the fate of the city in the wisdom, character, and moral formation of its leaders and citizens, the technological republic places its faith in systems, speed, optimisation, and the race to out-compute rivals. Human judgment is increasingly treated as the liability; technology is cast as the solution.

Whether this represents a drift toward technocracy, and what that would mean for democratic self-government, is a debate for another time. What matters here is the deeper question that civic leaders have always asked: What is the future of municipalities, and how are we to lead in times of uncertainty?

When I was asked to deliver a keynote on this precise question at a city managers’ leadership conference, I was struck by how modern the anxiety felt, and yet how ancient the question truly was. We are surrounded by predictive models and tools, but uncertain how to orient ourselves within them. Alexis de Tocqueville captured this disorientation with characteristic precision in Democracy in America when he warned that when “the past no longer illuminates the future; the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”

So instead of rushing ahead, I invited the auditorium of leaders on a journey back in time for clues.

I shared that for more than a thousand years of human history, when leaders wanted to understand the future of their city, especially in times of upheaval and uncertainty, they went to the city of Delphi, regarded as the sacred centre of the world, to consult the oracle located in the Temple of Apollo.

The journey was arduous, yet from roughly 1500 BCE through late antiquity, leaders from across the known world, including the Greek city-states, Lydia, Persia, and Rome, would line up for their turn. Civic leaders were given priority, based on the belief that the fate of a city and civilisation depended on the wisdom and foresight of those who governed it.

Inside the temple sat the Pythia, a woman appointed to serve as the oracle for a season of her life. Seated above a fissure in the rock, she uttered prophetic responses to questions asked by visitors.

Respected ancient historians such as Herodotus and Plutarch later described her words as uncannily accurate. It is still a mystery what accounted for the power and precision of her prophecies; some modern researchers point to naturally occurring gases rising through fault lines beneath the temple, which may have induced a trance-like state. Yet what mattered to the ancients, and what still matters, is not the chemistry but the record: cities rose and fell, wars were launched or averted, laws were written, and leaders appointed on the authority of the words spoken there.

One of the most famous visitors was Croesus, king of Lydia, immensely wealthy, admired, and confident. He asked whether he should attack Persia. The oracle replied: If you cross the river, you will destroy a great empire.

Croesus heard what he wanted to hear. He never paused to examine how his fear of Persia, ambition, or hunger for glory might be influencing his interpretation. Instead of treating an ambiguous warning as a prompt for deeper inquiry, he treated it as confirmation, and so he crossed, he attacked, he lost. The great empire destroyed was his own.

The oracle at Delphi’s reputation for riddles often distracts us from the real lesson. This was not a failure of prophecy; it was a failure of humility and self-knowledge. Carved into the stone at the temple entrance was a warning and simple instruction every leader passed before seeking guidance: Know thyself.

Because who we are shapes what we hear and what we perceive. If we are not self-aware of our fears, desires, blind spots, and unexamined assumptions, we will not discern how they influence our judgment. In modern terms, our reality-testing will be off and so will our decision-making.

And when you are a leader, your inner life does not only determine your fate; it determines the destiny of others. Whatever we carry within, whether it is anger or patience, contempt or curiosity, does not stay private. It leaks into meetings, councils, and neighbourhoods, setting the emotional temperature of our civic life.

This is the uncomfortable starting point of civic renewal: incivility begins with us.

In a conversation I had with Philadelphia Citizen editor Larry Platt on his podcast, he called this phenomenon “trickle-down incivility,” a phrase that captures how leaders’ bad behaviour spreads through a system. The point is not that leaders are the only problem, but that their conduct sets norms and carries outsized weight in shaping the civic environment. (See Introduction: Turning the Cultural Tide, The Responsibility and Influence of Leaders on Civic Culture.)

In other words, if leaders are reactive, reactivity spreads. If leaders model contempt, contempt is licensed. If leaders perform outrage, outrage becomes currency. When leaders fail to govern themselves well, they quietly surrender the conditions that make good governance possible.

The reverse is also true. When leaders lead with civility, they invite civility. When they model patience, they make space for reasoned disagreement. When they practise courage without contempt, they show that firmness and respect can coexist. Culture does not change in the abstract; it changes because we model changed behaviour intentionally and consistently.

Today, we often describe this inner work as emotional intelligence. The ancients called it self-mastery. The language differs, but the insight is the same: a leader who lacks self-awareness cannot see clearly, no matter how advanced the tools at hand. This is why civic leadership, then and now, begins not with better predictions, but with knowing oneself.

No algorithm can save us from the condition of the human heart. If we attempt to outsource judgment, courage, and restraint to machines, we do not escape ourselves; we simply give our unexamined selves more power, at greater speed, with fewer brakes.

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Diane Kalen-Sukra was recently named a global Top Thinker in Local Government by the United Kingdom’s leading civic policy and practice institute (LGiU) for "catalysing a movement to renew civility and trust in public life." She is the founder of Kalen Academy, an interactive online school for civic leaders and engaged citizens, which she launched after retiring as a city manager. She is also an acclaimed author, speaker and coach. Diane’s most popular book Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community & What To Do About It takes readers on a successful journey from Bullyville to Sustainaville, which includes a visit to classical antiquity, calling for a renaissance of civic values and civic education as vital to fostering the type of culture that can sustain us, our democracy and our planet.