In the many conversations I had last year with local government leaders, one word came up time and time again: resilience. It came up in interviews, phone calls in the evening after a long day, and in those moments when someone pauses before answering honestly. I think we reach for resilience because it sounds like praise. It has a stiff upper lip quality to it.
But how the word was being used told a different story. Resilience once implied a shock followed by recovery, a hit and then a return to baseline. What I hear now feels very different. It feels like permanent exposure for leaders in a world in which the old baseline has dissolved and no new one has quite replaced it.
Given my work across placemaking, it is across place directorates that I have seen this pressure show up most clearly. A stalled regeneration scheme, a delayed housing site, a failed joint venture, each carries weight beyond the project itself and becomes a high-profile public moment. When a major development falters it is not simply a commercial issue, it becomes a story about leadership.
I hear it in how regeneration directors and chief executives talk about their teams, about the strain of working in permanent visibility, about the sense that every planning decision or land deal is now contested in real time. The Local Government Association's (LGA) Debate Not Hate survey last year found nearly three quarters of councillors had experienced abuse or intimidation. That climate does not stop at the council chamber door.
If you are a would-be chief executive or corporate director watching this from the outside, you do not simply see a demanding job. You see a role that exposes your identity, your family and your private life to the temperature of the moment. And the temperature right now is very hot.
The same pattern runs through the workforce. Some 94% of councils responding to the LGA's workforce survey reported recruitment and retention difficulties. This is something I see every day in search. You can be an exceptional director and still struggle if you inherit vacancy rates, constant churn, brittle systems, and rising demand. Put those pressures together and what you get is not just stress. You get deterrence, and deterrence is now shaping who steps into senior roles and who chooses to step away.
This matters now because the system is about to become more demanding, not less. Local government reorganisation, devolution and the return of growth and regeneration agendas are all landing at once, at a moment when organisational capacity is already stretched thin. Many councils are being asked to merge, to absorb new functions or to take on wider responsibilities while also rebuilding their financial footing. At the same time, they are being asked to lead major housing, regeneration and infrastructure programmes that will define their places for decades.
These changes reshape what leadership actually means. A chief executive in a newly created unitary is not just running a council; they are negotiating political settlement, building a new organisational culture and holding inherited financial risk all at once. A director of regeneration or estates is no longer just managing assets, they are stewarding investment pipelines, joint ventures and growth strategies that carry enormous public and political weight. In search, this shows up as a widening gap between what the job asks for and what people feel able to give.
There is now a quietly growing group of professionals I meet who are not disengaged, not cynical, not coasting. They are often exactly the people you would want to run a place in five years' time: values-driven, politically literate, good with people, technically credible. But they look at the top jobs and ask a different question. Not can I do this? But do I want that life? Not because the work is hard, it always has been, but because it now feels unbounded. For councils, this is not just a future recruitment challenge; it is an immediate retention risk, as capable leaders quietly opt to stay put, step sideways, or leave the sector altogether.
This is where resilience, as an idea, starts to become complicated. Much of this has been debated in popular books about burnout. Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society suggests that modern systems no longer simply discipline us from the outside but encourage a form of self-exploitation that turns exhaustion into a structural feature of working life. Emily and Amelia Nagoski's Burnout arrives at a similar place from a different angle: you can teach coping strategies endlessly, but if stress is chronic and boundaries have collapsed, coping becomes maintenance rather than cure.
It is my opinion that local government leadership has moved beyond resilience into something closer to endurance. This reflects the reality of operating inside a system facing sustained financial pressure, rising demand, and unprecedented public scrutiny. When I speak to chief executives, directors and members, what I hear most often is fatigue rather than complaint – the quiet weight of knowing that every decision now lands harder than it used to.
You see this most clearly in the appointments councils are trying to make. Directors of regeneration, estates and housing are being asked to carry long-term investment programmes under intense political and media attention. Chief executives in reorganising or devolving authorities are expected to build new organisations while also stabilising old ones. These are not simply technical roles. They sit at the intersection of money, power and identity, and they ask a great deal of the people who take them on.
In my work in executive search, this shows up in subtle ways. Strong candidates do not walk away because they lack ambition. They pause because they are trying to understand what the job will really cost them, not just professionally but personally. They want to know who will have their back when things go wrong, how exposed they will be, and whether the organisation they are joining has the capacity to support them as a human being as well as a leader.
That is why, in a market that I believe is now shaped by deterrence as much as by demand, recruitment has to be more than a transaction. A good search process creates a space for honesty. It allows councils to articulate what a role truly involves and candidates to explore whether they can commit to it for the long term. It tests judgement under ambiguity, not just experience on paper. Handled well, recruitment becomes one of the few moments where retention can be designed in, not left to chance, helping people step forward with confidence rather than quietly step away.
If local government is to keep attracting strong leaders, these conversations matter. Not as abstract debates about resilience, but as practical discussions about what leadership now looks like, how it is supported and how organisations create the conditions for people to stay. Much of my own work now sits in helping councils and candidates have those conversations early and honestly.
The people who will shape the next generation of places are already watching closely. They are not afraid of responsibility. But they do want to know that stepping up means stepping into something sustainable. Creating that confidence, in my experience, is now one of the most important pieces of work any of us in this sector can do. So, in 2026, are we ready to do all we can to create the conditions in which the right people not only step forward, but stay?
Liam Young is senior consultant, executive search at Tile Hill
