Parks and Restoration

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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What if the outcome went badly—but you still made the right decision?

Leadership rarely gives us complete information or guaranteed results. We make the best call we can, something unexpected happens, and hindsight makes it tempting to judge the decision entirely by how things turned out.

In this episode, Chris talks with keynote speaker, author, former actuary, and champion poker player Steve Fredlund about making better decisions in an uncertain world.

Steve shares lessons from his “Safari Way” framework, including why leaders need to get clear on the experience they’re trying to create, surround themselves with the right “peeps in the Jeep,” and sometimes have the courage to do the “unright” thing—the choice outside the normal, expected path.

The conversation digs especially deep into the difference between a good decision and a good outcome. A leader can make a sound decision and still lose because of circumstances outside their control. Conversely, a poor decision can occasionally produce a great result. If leaders fail to recognize that distinction, they can unintentionally create teams that become afraid to take risks or make decisions.

• Why good decisions can still produce bad outcomes
• How hindsight can distort the way we evaluate ourselves and our teams
• Why leaders should evaluate the decision-making process—not just the result
• How outcome-focused leadership can create risk-averse employees
• Why incomplete information is an unavoidable part of leadership
• How to recognize when gathering more information has become a way to avoid making a decision
• Why a close decision sometimes simply needs to be made
• The value of surrounding yourself with people who challenge your thinking and still support the final decision
• Why hiring for alignment, purpose, and values can matter more than simply hiring the strongest résumé
• How better interview questions reveal more than standard yes-or-no questions
• Why we have more agency than we often realize over the people, choices, and direction of our lives
• Steve’s challenge to leaders: stop trying to control every outcome and embrace the adventure

Steve Fredlund is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author of Do the Unright Thing: Memoir of a People Pleaser, former actuary, nonprofit founder, entrepreneur, and leader of African safaris.

Learn more about Steve and his speaking at SteveFredlund.com and explore his broader work at TheSafariWay.com.

Join the Next Level Leadership Community and find more leadership resources at ParksandRestoration.com.

Better leaders. Better parks.

Parks and Restoration is a podcast and leadership development platform for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, natural resources, and outdoor recreation. Through conversations with leaders from inside and outside the profession, we explore practical lessons about leadership, organizational culture, growth, resilience, and the people behind great parks and healthy lands.

Learn more at ParksandRestoration.com.

What if protecting the parks and natural areas we still have simply isn't enough?

Dr. Doug Tallamy has spent decades studying the relationships between plants, insects, birds, and the ecosystems that sustain them. His conclusion is both sobering and empowering: our remaining parks and preserves are too small and too isolated to carry the entire burden of conserving biodiversity.

We have to put nature back everywhere else, too.

Doug is an entomologist, professor at the University of Delaware, bestselling author of Bringing Nature Home and Nature's Best Hope, and cofounder of Homegrown National Park — a movement encouraging people to restore ecological function to the landscapes where they live and work.

In this conversation, Doug and Chris explore what restoration actually looks like at scale, why native plants matter so much to food webs, how conservation professionals should think differently about protected land, and why individual landowners have more power than they may realize.

Key takeaways:

• Why Doug believes parks and preserves alone cannot prevent continued biodiversity loss
• How restoring his own ten-acre property resulted in 62 breeding bird species and more than 1,300 moth species
• Why invasive species management may be one of conservation's biggest challenges
• The case for combining voluntary incentives with meaningful conservation policy
• Why reducing lawn doesn't mean eliminating lawn
• How native landscaping can work within cultural expectations instead of fighting them
• Why Doug compares targeted herbicide use to chemotherapy
• Practical ways to restore prairie, savanna, roadsides, farms, and private property
• Why oaks are ecological powerhouses for wildlife, water, carbon, and food webs
• Doug's message to people working professionally in parks and conservation: “You are literally saving life on planet Earth.”

Learn more about Doug Tallamy and Homegrown National Park at HomegrownNationalPark.org.

Join the Next Level Leadership Community

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 ParksandRestoration.com.

About Parks and Restoration

Better leaders. Better parks.

Parks and Restoration LLC helps parks, conservation, natural-resource, and outdoor recreation leaders build healthier teams and stronger organizations. Through the Parks and Restoration Podcast, speaking, writing, and consulting, we explore leadership through the lens of ecology—turning lessons from land stewardship into practical tools for workplace culture, public service, and organizational resilience. Our goal is simple: better leaders, better parks.

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What can 100 conversations teach us about leadership, conservation, and the people who make meaningful work possible?

For the 100th episode of Parks and Restoration, Chris Lee is joined by past co-host Jeremy Yost, with Teli Van Rycke turning the tables and facilitating the conversation.

They look back at how the podcast started as a simple effort to capture the institutional knowledge of retiring conservation leaders, how it nearly ended, and how it eventually evolved into something much bigger: a platform focused on developing better leaders throughout parks, conservation, and natural resources.

Along the way, Chris and Jeremy revisit some of the lessons and conversations that have stuck with them most. More importantly, they reflect on how those ideas have changed the way they lead, build teams, approach their careers, and think about the work of conservation itself.

Key takeaways:

• Behind every successful park, conservation project, or restored landscape is a coalition of people who made it possible. Ultimately, this work is about people.
• Leadership development isn’t about finding one perfect framework. Learn broadly, take the pieces that fit your situation, test them, and leave behind what doesn’t.
• A difficult season in a career is just that—a season. Taking the long view can provide perspective when budgets, politics, personnel, or projects get difficult.
• What gets recognized gets repeated. Specific, personalized, fast, and frequent recognition can have an outsized effect on culture and performance.
• Sustainable work should be built around energy whenever possible. Teams become more powerful when people are able to spend more time doing work that energizes them and less time grinding through work that drains them.
• You don’t have to wait for a title or position to begin developing as a leader. Leadership is something you can study, practice, and intentionally build.
• Parks and Restoration began as a podcast, but the larger vision is becoming a leadership-development platform capable of helping people throughout parks, conservation, natural resources, and outdoor recreation become better leaders.

After 100 episodes, the lesson may be simpler than expected: be a student of leadership. Keep exposing yourself to new ideas. Pay attention to what resonates. Apply what works to your particular ecosystem, your team, and your circumstances—and keep getting better.

Want to keep developing alongside other parks and conservation professionals? Join the Next Level Leadership Community for continued conversations, leadership resources, and opportunities to learn with others working through many of the same challenges. Learn more at parksandrestoration.com.

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 one of the best ways to prevent burnout is not reducing the work—but changing how people experience it together?

Nonprofit leaders and volunteers often enter the work because they want to make a difference. But when every solved problem is replaced by another, even deeply committed people can lose sight of the progress they are making.

Jordan DeGree, executive director of the Iowa Nonprofit Alliance, joins Chris for a wide-ranging conversation about nonprofit leadership, volunteer engagement, organizational culture, creativity, and the surprisingly significant impact of better meetings.

Jordan explains why nonprofit organizations must periodically look beyond the problems immediately in front of them and reconnect people with the change they are working to create. He and Chris explore how small practices—expressing gratitude, sharing personal and professional highlights, creating space for quiet reflection, and intentionally strengthening relationships—can produce meaningful cultural change.

The conversation also examines how leaders can structure meetings so that ideas, rather than titles or personalities, become the focus. Jordan shares practical methods for reducing hierarchy, hearing from quieter participants, framing problems more effectively, and helping groups produce ideas they can actually implement.

Along the way, Jordan describes his unconventional path as an entrepreneur, artist, nonprofit leader, real estate investor, and founder of several ventures designed to help people bring ideas to life.

• Why nonprofit work can create burnout even among deeply committed people
• How reconnecting people to purpose can counter a constant problem-solving mindset
• Why maintaining the status quo can sometimes represent a meaningful victory
• How relationships and a sense of community help sustain volunteers
• Why small cultural practices can generate an outsized return
• How to structure meetings so quieter participants have an equal opportunity to contribute
• Why leaders should separate individual thinking from group discussion
• How better questions produce better ideas and more practical solutions
• Why respect and relationships are prerequisites for understanding another person’s perspective
• How Jordan built a career around creativity, experimentation, and helping others see beyond their perceived limit

Learn more about Jordan and all his ventures at jordandegree.com

It's time to wage war on crappy meetings! Download your free Field Guide to Better Meetings when you join the Next Level Leadership Community.

Learn more and sign up at ParksAndRestoration.com.

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 organizational resilience.

Learn more at ParksAndRestoration.com.

What changes when you treat leadership as a privilege instead of a position?

Matt Doty has spent decades studying leadership in places where trust, accountability, and performance matter. After a 20-year career in the Iowa National Guard—including service as a first sergeant and command sergeant major—he carried those lessons into senior operational roles in the corporate world.

In this episode, Matt joins Chris and Teli to explore what values-driven leadership looks like in practice. They discuss why employees watch a leader’s actions more closely than their words, how senior leaders can stay connected to frontline work without becoming a distraction, and why earning a promotion is only the beginning of the work.

Matt also introduces two powerful ideas: the difference between an “I’ve arrived” leader and an “I’m still learning” leader, and the “time value of leadership”—the compounding impact of investing in your growth today.

Key takeaways

• Values give people a clear foundation for making decisions, developing skills, and understanding what success looks like.
• A leader’s behavior must match their words. Culture is shaped less by what leaders announce than by what they consistently model.
• Leaders do not need to perform every frontline task, but they should understand the work, spend time with the people doing it, and remain willing to help.
• Showing up on the front line should never be performative. The purpose is to listen, learn, remove barriers, and demonstrate that the work and the people doing it matter.
• Leadership development compounds over time. A small investment in becoming better today can influence teams and organizations for years.
• Developing young and emerging leaders is not separate from accomplishing the mission—it is part of sustaining the mission.
• Leadership is not something a person possesses because of rank or title. It is a privilege that must be earned every day through service to others.
• Leadership can feel lonely, but it does not have to be practiced alone. Mentors, peers, books, podcasts, and trusted colleagues can help leaders navigate difficult decisions.

Connect with Matt Doty

Email Matt at [email protected] or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Join the Next Level Leadership Community

Leadership is difficult work, but you do not have to figure it out alone. Join the Next Level Leadership Community to connect with other leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who are committed to learning, growing, and leading better.

Learn more at www.parksandrestoration.com.

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 we protect the places we love without forgetting the people who make that protection possible?

Most people enter parks and conservation because they care deeply about the land. But as Rachel Franchina explains in this episode, the longer you stay in this profession, the more you realize that conservation is ultimately about people. Great leaders don't just manage resources—they build relationships, develop others, and create communities that care enough to protect those resources for generations to come.

Rachel spent more than 20 years with the U.S. Forest Service before becoming Executive Director of the Society of Outdoor Recreation Professionals (SORP). We discuss the importance of developing people alongside the places they steward, the future of outdoor recreation leadership, and how SORP is helping build a stronger profession through initiatives like its new Outdoor Recreation Professional Competency Framework.

Learn more about SORP at https://recpro.org.

Key Takeaways

• Conservation succeeds or fails because of people—not just science.
• Why building relationships is the most important leadership skill in parks and conservation.
• Finding the balance between protecting natural resources and providing meaningful visitor experiences.
• How SORP is creating a stronger community for outdoor recreation professionals across North America.
• The value of mentorship, professional networks, and investing in the next generation of leaders.
• How the new Outdoor Recreation Professional Competency Framework can guide career development and organizational growth.
• Why agencies need to intentionally recruit, develop, and retain future conservation leaders.
• Practical leadership lessons for anyone responsible for caring for both people and place.

Join the Next Level Leadership Community

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, we'd love to have you join the Next Level Leadership Community.

You’ll get practical leadership insights, invites to meaningful conversations, and a growing network of professionals committed to building stronger organizations through better leadership.

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

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 https://www.parksandrestoration.com 

Why would an award-winning filmmaker move to Iowa planning to retire... only to end up making one of the state's most ambitious conservation documentaries?

That's exactly what happened to Charlie Morris.

After years producing conservation films around the world—from South Africa's disappearing great white sharks to threatened forests on the East Coast—Charlie arrived in Iowa intending to leave filmmaking behind. Then he started asking a simple question:

"Why is everyone telling me not to swim in the water?"

That question led him down a rabbit hole of water quality, prairie restoration, farming, cancer rates, and the remarkable people dedicating their lives to protecting Iowa's natural resources.

His new project, The Iowa Prairie Documentary Project, is more than just a film. It's a multimedia effort combining documentary filmmaking, podcasts, interviews, articles, and eventually a book—all designed to tell the deeper story of Iowa's landscapes and the people fighting to restore them. Find more about the project: Facebook, website, podcast, YouTube

In this episode, we explore storytelling as a tool for conservation, why asking good questions matters, and how an outsider's perspective can sometimes reveal what lifelong residents no longer notice.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why Charlie abandoned retirement to make a documentary about Iowa.
• How storytelling can change minds in ways facts alone often cannot.
• The surprising advantage of approaching conservation with a beginner's mindset.
• Why Charlie believes full interviews are just as important as the finished film.
• What he's learned after interviewing more than 100 Iowans.
• The challenges of producing a documentary on a politically charged topic.
• Why Iowa's landscapes may be one of America's best-kept secrets.
• What conservation professionals can learn about telling difficult stories with courage and authenticity.

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

About Parks & Restoration
Parks & 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 designed for current and aspiring leaders in parks, conservation, and natural resources who want practical wisdom on leadership, culture, stewardship, and building organizations that thrive.