Organizational Culture · JCIG Insights
Before You Announce Another Culture Initiative, Ask These Five Questions
Municipal leaders want employees to be responsive, professional, accountable, collaborative, and service-oriented. Those are reasonable expectations. They are also easy to put in a strategic plan, presentation, or employee handbook.
The harder question is whether people experience those values when they interact with the organization.
A culture is not what leadership announces. It is what people repeatedly experience.
An uncomfortable lesson in leadership
During an earlier leadership role at Laurus Technical Institute, JCIG founder Xavier Johnson encountered an institution struggling with student attrition and negative feedback about student-faculty interactions.
He responded with urgency. He made expectations clear and famously told instructors, "We pay you to be nice." He was trying to protect students and improve the culture. But over the following month, he received a series of HR complaints—including seven complaints he later recalled—from faculty who felt they were not being heard.
The turning point came when Johnson recognized a contradiction: he had asked instructors to listen to students, while he had not invested enough time listening to the instructors themselves.
That did not make the student concerns less important. It made the change process incomplete.
He began listening more deliberately, demonstrating difficult student conversations, and connecting expectations to actual behaviors and results. His eventual lesson was simple: "The culture changed because I did."
Municipal organizations face a similar risk when leaders announce desired behavior without examining how leadership itself shapes the workplace.
Question 1: What promise are we making to residents?
"Excellent service" sounds good, but what does it mean in practical terms? A resident may define it as a returned call, a clear timeline, a repaired streetlight, a safe park, or a respectful explanation when a request cannot be fulfilled.
Define the promise from the resident's perspective. Different departments may deliver different services, but every employee should understand the experience the organization intends to provide.
Question 2: Do employees understand the same definition of success?
Leadership, frontline workers, and residents can each pursue reasonable—but different—goals.
A department may focus on closing work orders. An employee may focus on following the correct procedure. A resident may focus on whether the underlying problem was solved and clearly explained.
Those goals do not automatically align. Leaders must make the shared outcome explicit, then clarify how procedures and individual responsibilities contribute to it.
Question 3: Have we demonstrated the behavior ourselves?
If leaders expect respectful communication, how do they speak when someone makes a mistake? If they expect accountability, do they accept responsibility for missed commitments? If they ask supervisors to listen, do they listen to supervisors?
Employees pay attention to what leadership tolerates, recognizes, repeats, and models. A culture initiative that does not change leadership behavior is unlikely to change much else.
Question 4: What practical systems support the value?
A customer-service standard may require an acknowledgment process, an escalation path, and a follow-up owner. A collaboration goal may require shared handoff expectations. A coaching culture may require supervisors to conduct regular one-on-one conversations.
Without tools, training, and defined routines, a value remains a statement rather than a practice.
Question 5: What evidence tells us whether the experience is improving?
Look for patterns, not only isolated complaints or one impressive performance number. Review response time, repeated service concerns, employee turnover, work-order outcomes, and whether similar problems cluster in particular processes or teams.
The purpose of measurement is not to find someone to blame. It is to discover where leadership, support, or systems need to change.
What happens Monday morning?
Choose one value your municipality already claims. Ask a department leader and a frontline employee to describe what that value looks like in a routine workday. Then compare both answers with the experience a resident should receive.
If those descriptions do not line up, you have found useful work for leadership to do.
Good intentions are a starting point. Alignment turns them into a dependable experience.
Build culture through behavior, not slogans
Johnson Civic Impact Group supports municipal leadership development that connects values to standards, coaching, communication, and day-to-day implementation. Our programs are intended to help supervisors understand not only what the organization expects, but how to put those expectations into practice.
Schedule a leadership strategy conversation to discuss the culture and supervisor-development priorities facing your organization.