Land Records Leadership Series: Professional Excellence Principles

August 22, 2025

Posted By: Adam Dorn in Land Records Leadership,

This is the final article in this series. We have enjoyed writing the articles and hope that wherever your journey finds you, they have helped along the way. We also encourage you to keep learning and growing, as we are. Take advantage of conferences, networking, and professional organizations like WLIA. Our hope is that in the years to come you will revisit this series and add to it with your experiences.

Professional Excellence Principles

Throughout this leadership article series, we have discussed many concepts. However, in practice, leadership and professional growth are not abstract concepts; they are the lived experiences of adaptation and strategic decision-making. Drawing directly from the experiences of leaders in our association, this article explores the five core principles of leadership and professional development.

1. Adaptive Action

Your career journey will undoubtedly have unexpected turns. Learn to be flexible and seize opportunities that can lead to great professional achievements.

Jim Landwehr went…”from SEWRPC to Waukesha County in 1996. At the time, the prospect of getting in at the ground level for building a County’s GIS was fairly daunting to me… So, to leave the comfort of being told what to do, into an environment where I was given free reign to do whatever tasks I felt were necessary to build a successful GIS, was fairly refreshing.”

Jim’s example shows the power of autonomy, which leads directly to our next principle, leadership rooted in empowerment.

2. Leadership Is Empowerment

Leadership isn’t about control; it is about allowing others to reach their full potential with accountability. Amplify your impact by unleashing the unique skills and natural abilities of those around you.

Jim Landwehr shares, “At the start of my tenure at Waukesha County, there were just two of us, myself and my manager, Don Dittmar. As a small division, his leadership style was simply to empower me as the systems analyst, trusting I knew the path forward… The autonomy I was granted was a practice I then applied during my own time as the Land Information Systems Supervisor. Let smart people do their jobs while applying the guidance gained by your years of experience, and leadership becomes much simpler.”

Larry Cutforth echoed Jim’s perspective, “In my experience, people respond the best to peers. Train/support leaders who help others achieve project goals… Many people seem to believe that leadership requires a supervisory role. This is false. You can lead in any role by taking initiative and influencing people in a positive way.”

Empowering others is vital, but it is equally important to reflect on your own successes and missteps to keep developing as a professional.

3. Reflect & Grow

Setbacks aren't something you can control. How you handle them is. Embracing challenges is a powerful way to sharpen your skills and strategies and to gain a deeper understanding of your unique strengths.

When Nancy von Meyer worked on the technically ambitious project to build the first County Coordinate Systems, seeking to eliminate distortions and simplify data movement,the practical application revealed unexpected complexities. Through this experience, she gained a crucial insight, saying, "In the end the spatial data sets are so much easier to intake and combine and vertically align and track over time if we just use some basic projections and coordinate systems... It just makes more sense to keep the digital representations as easily combinable as possible and to not add the mystery of another projection.”

Brad Blumer discovered that replicating outdated processes with complex new solutions can lead to fragility. His key takeaway was “Don’t customize a functional solution to emulate a poor one because it’s what people are familiar with. Evaluate your processes, workflows, and question all your assumptions... Sometimes it’s simpler to change your process to match the solution than vice-versa.”

Personal reflection and growth are critical to developing your abilities. However, as you apply those lessons, it may become necessary to broaden your perspective and work more closely with others.

4. Collaboration

Significant achievements rarely happen in isolation. Collaboration can amplify your impact, extend your reach, and achieve results that individuals cannot achieve alone.

Andy Faust states, “My most significant successes, I believe, stem from the approach of "Collaborative Leadership." I concentrated on initiatives that fostered robust relationships and partnerships, ultimately propelling substantial projects forward.”

Brad Blumer advises, “Find champions …It’s easy to assume that if you build it, they will come. Who wouldn’t want to use a shiny new app to replace an antiquated manual or paper process? Well, a lot of folks. Developing and testing large-scale apps and solutions in a vacuum is a risky strategy… How do we avoid this? Find a champion at the top… and find a champion at the bottom.”

Extending the collaborative effort beyond individual projects to a broader community provides a lasting foundation for stability and growth.

5. Grow Through Community

Your professional network can be a powerful source for stability and growth. Actively engage with your community for mentorship, invaluable advice, and consistent support, especially as you transition into new roles or face unique challenges.

Eric Damkot advises, “Find a mentor. Be a mentor. Many of us work in very small teams or even in a one-person office. It can be hard to find the resources internally and there isn’t a manual for much of what we do.”

Jim Landwehr suggests, “Get Involved with WLIA at some level early on in your career. Don’t just be a session-sitter. Get on a committee, run for the board, submit maps to the map contest, do something! The success of WLIA is driven by its volunteers. Involvement will help propel your career forward, and you will make some great friendships along the way.”

Nancy von Meyer underscores the dynamic nature and foundational strength of the WLIA community: "It was always fun to visit other places and states... evangelize on the Wisconsin experience, and bring home good lessons and neat ideas... The foundation of the program and the association is the people who built it. It gives me great satisfaction, and yes joy, to see the next and the next generation build on the foundation and make it all their own. Grow it in new directions. Bring in new constituents. The program is unique. The WLIA has persisted. You are all special. Trust me. It is the friendships you make through all this that matters the most.”

These five principles are not just theoretical concepts; they are based on the experiences of your peers. Now it is your turn. Share your knowledge, become a mentor, join a committee, create a special interest group, write another article. How can you use your strengths to empower people to use Wisconsin's critical land information to make our future better?

Contributors to this article include:

Brad Blumer – GIS Coordinator, City of Waukesha

Larry Cutforth - GIS Section Chief, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Eric Damkot – IS Manager/LIO, Washington County

Andy Faust - Senior GIS Analyst, North Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission

Jim Landwehr - Independent Contractor, Cloudpoint Geospatial and formerly, Waukesha County

Nancy von Meyer - President, Fairview Industries

Authors of this series:

Jennifer Borlick - Rock County

Adam Dorn - Winnebago County

Kim Meinert - Waukesha County

All images from The Noun Project: