The Toughest Fix in Urban America: Transforming Civic Culture
Source: Bloomberg | CityLabGovernment | By Neil Kleiman and Alexander Shermansong
From public health to race relations to infrastructure, city leaders’ best-laid policies won’t amount to much if they haven’t tackled their organizations’ culture.
When it comes to big urban challenges — coordinating a public health response to the pandemic, combating racism in the police department or rebuilding crumbling infrastructure — the greatest barrier may be the least understood: organizational culture.
Ask any business CEO and they will tell you that culture is everything — it defines the unwritten rules that determine how work gets done. Amazon is cost-conscious, customer-centric innovation; Disney is about storytelling. Each city has its own distinct culture as well, and the culture is what allows certain innovations to flourish while shutting down most other reform efforts.
Unfortunately, in most government agencies, the culture was set long ago, before the internet, let alone the metaverse.
Often organizational culture is a product of reforms made decades ago, modestly changed since and never substantially revamped. The culture is evident in the hiring and promotion practices that determine who's a police officer or police sergeant, as well as who is in the meetings and making decisions — big and small — that determine which programs get funded or cut, how residents have a voice and which complaints get answered first.
These days, frustration with city services and the organizational ethos behind them is boiling over. From mask mandates to race relations to inflation, people want a civic sector that is more in tune with their personal needs and more up to date with the current events shaping their lives.
Business leaders have long recognized the power of culture for corporate success. Indeed, there are shelves full of books and magazines — not to mention large consulting firms — all fully dedicated to reengineering corporate operating principles.
Mayors around the country crave such knowledge. They tell us again and again how much their culture stymies innovation. Some things have changed for the better for sure, but many civic chiefs and entrepreneurs feel blocked — and increasingly they blame the culture.
For these leaders, there has historically been almost nothing: No practical advice or university studies on how to transform organizational culture, whether within fire departments, health agencies, or city hall itself.
In a three-year research project we just completed, funded by the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, we aimed to fill some of that gap. (Michael Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.) Over the last three years, we took a deep dive into three cities committed to culture change to see how well the lessons from the business world held true and what else is needed. The lessons we’ve learned can apply not just to mayors, but to government and nonprofit institutions of all kinds that face similar constraints and opportunities.
Our first major discovery was that effective organizational reform in government is rarely called out and announced as culture change. Instead, it starts with the same basic techniques employed in the private sector: new vision, values and leadership team. Going into “stealth mode” for culture change allows civic leaders to benefit from long government tenures and avoid the fishbowl of media coverage, while focusing on specific changes to daily habits that will make a difference.
Another finding was the critical need to define how decisions get made. A leadership team driving culture change needs to establish the values and behaviors of the new culture, set standards for measuring success according to those values, and then visibly demonstrate that such values are in fact determining performance. Unlike in the private sector, it is not common practice to measure performance and make decisions based on those results. Intentionally creating such a mechanism is a crucial step in civic culture change.
If you’re not thinking culture, you’re not doing your job.
We also discovered that HR reform is even more difficult and time-consuming than in the private sector — but it is possible. Civil service regulations, collective bargaining and salary caps severely limit incentives and professional development. Yet training and incentives are critical aspects of any culture change effort, and not all that expensive or difficult to implement. Instead of cash incentives, city leaders must rely on mission-related incentives, such as publicly recognizing employees for achieving important milestones.
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The biggest stumbling blocks we found were mistaking major announcements and new initiatives for culture change, and looking for additional funding or legislation to transform organizational mores. An intransigent organizational culture dooms all such attempts to failure. There is simply no quick fix. As any private sector CEO will tell you, this work demands long-range vision, the right change management principles and strong leadership to back it all up.
Bottom line: Municipal change and transformation is possible. In our research, we observed numerous examples where culture change meaningfully boosted services for residents: better maintained parks and streets in Louisville, Kentucky; more inclusive community engagement in Somerville, Massachusetts; and a more vibrant downtown economy in Kansas City, Missouri.
Most cities have not taken on culture change in any systematic way, but there is urgency to begin now. City dwellers…
Neil Kleiman and Alexander Shermansong are professors at New York University and the authors of “City Leader Guide on Organizational Culture Change: Creating Conditions for Innovation, Collaboration, and High Performance in City Hall.”