What does it look like to spend nearly 30 years leading an organization built around one of conservation’s most enduring ideas—and to keep growing along with it?

Buddy Huffaker arrived at the Aldo Leopold Foundation in 1996 as a seasonal intern looking to get his hands dirty doing restoration work. Three years later, at just 30 years old, he stepped into the role of Executive Director.

In this episode, Buddy talks about that unlikely leadership journey, the evolution of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and what nearly three decades of carrying Leopold’s legacy forward have taught him about leadership, conservation, and impact.

The conversation explores not only Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, but what it means to actually live it—from managing private lands and restoring ecosystems to building organizations capable of creating change at a much larger scale.

Key Takeaways:

• Leadership means accepting that you cannot advance everything—and choosing what matters most.
• Trusting people with expertise is essential when leading work you cannot possibly master yourself.
• Conservation organizations need sound business and financial practices if they want to grow their mission and impact.
• As organizations grow, leaders have to grow with them. Buddy has held the same title for decades, but says the job itself has changed every few years.
• Good leaders sometimes have to serve as the “shock absorber,” helping their teams work through disappointment while keeping the organization moving forward.
• Success builds on success. Find what is working, celebrate it, and keep building.
• Leopold’s land ethic ultimately challenges each of us to see ourselves as part of the ecological community—and to become positive agents of change wherever we are.

Buddy also shares stories from major Aldo Leopold Foundation projects, including construction of the Leopold Legacy Center and production of the award-winning documentary Green Fire, and explains why conservation leaders need imagination, persistence, curiosity, and the willingness to make decisions with the best information available.

Learn more about Buddy, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, the Leopold Shack and Farm, Green Fire, Land Ethic Live, and other resources at aldoleopold.org.

Pair this episode with episode 24: The Land Ethic is Rooted in Iowa with Steve Brower from the Leopold Landscape Alliance. Steve and LLA have purchased and are actively preserving the Leopold family homes in Burlington, Iowa.

Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join the Next Level Leadership Community at www.parksandrestoration.com for leadership insights, conversations, resources, and a growing network of parks, conservation, and natural resource professionals committed to becoming better leaders.

About Parks & Restoration
Better leaders. Better parks.

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology — for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is built for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical lessons on culture, growth, impact, and what it really takes to lead well.

Find out more and join the movement at www.parksandrestoration.com

What if the secret to excellence isn’t reaching the goal—but learning to love the work required to get there?

Ryan Hawk has spent more than a decade studying leadership and high performance through more than 700 conversations on The Learning Leader Show. He’s interviewed some of the most respected thinkers and leaders in the world, written four books, and built his career around a simple question: What helps people keep getting better?

In this episode, Ryan joins Chris Lee and Teli Van Rycke to talk about the daily practices that compound into excellence, why great leaders stay curious, and why the work itself has to become the win.

The conversation ranges from hiring and interviewing to parenting, competition, difficult conversations, and what Ryan has learned after hundreds of conversations with remarkable people.

Key takeaways:

• The work has to be the win. Outcomes can motivate us temporarily, but lasting excellence comes from developing a love for the craft itself.
• Push your edges every day. Ryan shares three questions he uses to reflect each evening: Did I get wiser? Did I push my edges? Did I add value to someone else’s life?
• Leadership is caught more than it’s taught. Whether you’re raising kids or leading a team, people pay attention to the standards you model.
• Competition doesn’t have to be zero-sum. Seeing excellence up close can raise our own standards without requiring someone else to lose.
• Bad news doesn’t get better with age. One of Ryan’s earliest leadership lessons was learning to stop avoiding the difficult conversations that come with management.
• Learning should make us less certain, not more. After 700+ interviews, Ryan says the more he learns, the more aware he becomes of how much he still doesn’t know.

For parks and conservation professionals—many of whom move into leadership because they were excellent at the technical work—Ryan’s lessons are especially relevant. Leadership is its own craft, and excellence comes from the same place restoration does: intentional practices, repeated consistently, over time.

Ryan Hawk is the host of The Learning Leader Show and author of four books, including his newest, The Price of Becoming: The Compounding Practices of High Performance. Learn more at LearningLeader.com.

Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join the Next Level Leadership Community at parksandrestoration.com for leadership insights, conversations, resources, and a growing network of parks, conservation, and natural resource professionals committed to becoming better leaders.

About Parks & Restoration
Better leaders. Better parks.

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology — for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is built for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical lessons on culture, growth, impact, and what it really takes to lead well.

Find out more and join the movement at www.parksandrestoration.com

How do you grow an organization without losing the culture, relationships, and local ownership that made it successful in the first place?

Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever have undergone extraordinary growth. What was once an organization of roughly 150 employees has grown to more than 600, including more than 400 private-lands biologists working across the country.

That kind of growth requires new systems, new layers of leadership, and more organizational structure. But it also creates a challenge familiar to leaders everywhere: How do you add the infrastructure necessary to grow without creating so much bureaucracy that you lose the connection and agility that made the organization work?

In this episode, Chris talks with longtime friend and Pheasants Forever Director of Communications Jared Wiklund about what PF has learned while navigating that growth.

They explore the organization's efforts to create career paths for employees, strengthen internal communication, maintain connections across a geographically dispersed workforce, and preserve the local chapter model that has defined Pheasants Forever from the beginning.

The conversation also gets practical as Chris and Jared wrestle with a challenge facing volunteer organizations everywhere: burnout. Jared shares what he has seen work for chapters trying to attract new volunteers, including moving beyond meetings and banquets and instead inviting people into meaningful, hands-on work.

Key themes from this episode:

• How to preserve culture as hierarchy and bureaucracy inevitably increase
• Using coffee chats, town halls, and internal communication to maintain connection
• Creating career pathways so good employees can grow without immediately leaving
• Why leaders need to understand where their people want their careers to go
• The danger of treating people simply as resources for accomplishing the mission
• How hands-on projects can create stronger engagement than another committee meeting
• Moving beyond the traditional fundraising banquet to build community and participation
• Why shared work creates connection and belonging
• How small personal relationships can eventually become major conservation partnerships

One of the simplest lessons in the conversation may also be one of the most important: people can't say yes to an opportunity they've never been invited into.

Whether you're trying to develop an employee, recruit a volunteer, build a partnership, or revitalize an organization, leadership begins with relationships—and often with making the ask.

Take your leadership to the next level

If you're ready to grow as a leader while making a greater impact on your organization, your community, and the places you care about, join the Next Level Leadership Community.

Learn more and join us at https://www.parksandrestoration.com.

About Parks & Restoration

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform exploring leadership through the lens of ecology—for the land, via the people who serve it. Each episode is built for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical lessons on culture, growth, impact, and organizational resilience.

Learn more at www.parksandrestoration.com

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