Today we’d like to introduce you to Ron Holifield.
Ron, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in Plano and graduated from Abilene Christian University with a Bachelor’s in government and went from there to Texas Tech to work on my Master’s in Public Administration.
An internship in the Lubbock City Manager’s Office made me fall in love with the profession. The Lubbock City Manager opened a door and I went directly from being an intern in Lubbock to being the youngest city manager in the nation in Sundown, Texas. From there I came back to DFW as city manager in Farmersville.
While there, I was asked to return to my home town of Plano as Assistant City Manager. Later I was asked to become City Manager in Garland and then in DeSoto.
After spending almost two decades in city management, I decided I no longer had the patience to put up with all of the craziness that city managers have to endure, so I bought a small company that represented companies who do business with government.
But I missed the sense of making a difference with public service, so I sold that company in 1999 and started my current company which helps local governments recruit, assess and develop leaders. Today, SGR is the 3rd largest local government executive search firm in the nation, trains over 800 local government employees in live training classes each month, and we have tens of thousands of local government employees in our online learning management system. We also conduct over 60 governing body and executive team leadership workshops annually.
SGR helps recruit, assess and develop leaders for almost 500 local governments in 46 states. We truly believe that if we walk the talk of the golden rule in our relationships with our clients and if we consistently deliver excellence, the business will grow organically, and that has proven to be true. Over the life of the company, we have averaged over 35% per year annual growth rate, with no sales people, and no advertising.
Recently I published “4th Dimension Leadership: A Practical Strategy for Creating an Authentic Servant Leadership Culture” that is available on Amazon. I also publish a weekly free newsletter for people who want to be authentic servant leaders. I have over 65,000 subscribers and people can sign up for it on our website.
Has it been a smooth road?
The road is never smooth… that is the nature of life! The question is whether we have the strength of character to rise to the challenge when things get bumpy. I got fired as City Manager in Garland and that was a very difficult time. But I got fired for reasons that I was proud of then and am proud of now. Ultimately, it was a blessing that created the circumstances which gave me the courage to step out on my own and start SGR. Had I not gotten fired, I would never have launched SGR.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the SGR story. Tell us more about the business.
SGR uses the acronym RADICAL to describe our focus on Recruiting, Assessing and Developing Innovative, Collaborative and Authentic Leaders… as well as our underlying leadership development philosophy. The old Latin word radicallis means “back to the roots” and healthy relationships are at the root of all great leadership. But in the modern vernacular, radical has come to mean at the leading edge of change and great leadership also demands dynamic change to thrive in our VUCA world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Great leadership resides in this constructive tension between healthy relationships and dynamic change. If a leader is so oriented towards relationships that they allow people to stay in their comfort zone and not change, slow decline and decay occurs. If a leader is so oriented towards change that they leave people behind, rapid decline and decay occurs. But in both cases, the outcome is failure.
Like a guitar string where beautiful music only occurs in the constructive tension of being stretched between two opposing poles — great leadership only occurs in the constructive tension between dynamic change and healthy relationships. Servant Leadership provides the right philosophy for leading in this sweet spot of constructive tension.
I am most proud that SGR is known for being a company that is authentically committed to the values of servant leadership and is known for being a “servant leadership provocateur.”
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
A recent study reported that 7% of Americans believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows! Increasingly the 7% that are the least connected to fact based reality are the loudest voices trying to shape the future of our communities in directions driven by their narrow ideology without regard to who it hurts. Too many of the thoughtful and rational voices in our communities have chosen to avoid being involved in civic leadership because the 7% have become so vicious. The more hateful civic discourse becomes, the more mainstream citizens withdraw to avoid conflict, and the more the vacuum is filled by the 7%.
The biggest change in the next decade will be authentic servant leaders working to develop new strategies for doing a better job of listening to the community as a whole instead of letting the 7% act like they speak for all of the people. They don’t.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.GovernmentResource.com
- Phone: 817-337-8581
- Email: ron@governmentresource.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strategicgovt/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/strategicgovt
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/strategicgovt
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ron-holifield-6b8298/
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