By Katya Spear, Mayors Innovation Project
It’s a well worn adage that culture eats policy for lunch. No matter how long you’ve served in office, how you, your council, and staff work together will drive your local government’s ability to advance your greatest priorities regardless of your city’s size or form of government. Why? For three primary reasons:
First, council culture is a perennial issue, and local government does not have the luxury of dysfunction; if local government doesn’t do it, it won’t get done! Vague communication, council controversies, and uncivil discourse make it harder to attract and retain qualified staff, increasing costs to taxpayers and reducing service delivery. At the other end of the spectrum, a high functioning team of civil and collaborative council members and a professional staff that is properly managed and directed will make your community a true leader in your region.
Second, a sharp team demands regular investments. Wise city leaders invest in professional development for their staff all the time, often including a line item in their budgets for technical training, professional conferences, and similar activities. Training events and workshops, convened by state leagues and other organizations are a good place to start and cities quickly see the value in workshops curated and customized to specific needs.
Finally, community resilience is more important today than ever, so when tragedy or controversy hits your community, having a collaborative and healthy culture of a high performing team in your city government will go a long way to minimizing negative impacts and maximizing your response and recovery.
At MIP’s 20th Winter Meeting in DC in January 2025, Karen Freeman-Wilson, the former mayor of Gary, Indiana and former St. Louis Park, Minnesota mayor Jake Spano led a discussion on this topic. The mayors, who represent two different forms of government and bring different skill sets and leadership styles to their role, shared their top recommendations and reflections for creating a local government culture that delivers value to the community:
- Invest in your culture with intentionality by taking a leadership role in setting and evolving your city’s culture. All councils have an existing culture. The leadership opportunity here is to be explicit, by holding recurring meetings of the council to focus less on what you do and more on how you do it. Through his time as a mayor, council member, senior staff, and as a the president of his own culture consulting practice with other cities, Mayor Spano shared four key pillars of organizational culture that will drive your success:
- Governance – does everyone on the team know what their job is and more importantly what their job is not?
- Norms – does your team have an agreed upon set of operational and behavioral norms that fill in the gray areas between the charter, council rules of procedure, etc? For example, who speaks on behalf of the city to the press? Do you assume each other’s best intentions?
- Relational Learning – Are members of the team data driven, compromisers, do they lead with their heart? There’s no “right” way but knowing how colleagues think about these issues will help ensure your team makes the best decisions possible..
- Systems and processes – In other words, how does the machine work? Are your processes and procedures clear and transparent so everyone (especially the public) understands how things get done at the city?
Mayor Heidi Lueb of Tigard, OR, attended the session in DC. She shared that the City has worked with an outside facilitator to help them create a general agreement of how they will work together, which generated a list of ground rules agreed upon by Council. “The agreement gave us the opportunity to discuss, off the record, things that don’t come before council, but provided us the opportunity to have real conversations and was extremely helpful in putting together a council that can work together,” Lueb shared recently. “It doesn’t always work perfectly and there are still many challenges with so many personalities, but I think it’s been a good use of our time and money to have outside help. I’d also recommend doing it off site and casual so people are more comfortable.”
- Lean into your leadership role. Mayors play a critical role in creating the culture of their Councils in every form of government. Whether you’re a full-time mayor in a strong mayor system or a mayor with another full-time job working in a Council-Manager form of government, the mayor is often accountable to the people and to the Council in a way that other local government players are not. This brings an enormous amount of pressure to this unique and challenging position – and also a great opportunity to show the benefits of authentic leadership.
“Leadership must set the tone for the organization, so an understanding of how to inspire trust from the top down is essential,” Mayor Sangeetha Rayapati of Moline, IL shared. “By creating clear expectations which I call ‘Operational Guideposts,’ everyone knows what direction the organization is going in.” Early in her time in Moline, the Mayor established three Operational Guideposts including:
- Communication
- Process
- Don’t point fingers, point to solutions.
These principals framed her leadership and management style and helped reverse a slew of resignations that stemmed from staff being undermined, undervalued, and chastised publicly. “Four directors had left. It took us 18-24 months but we filled all our director positions and now we have stability, which is the key to the organization moving forward and accomplishing its goals. The public and the electeds need that stability, whether they realize and appreciate it or not.”
This importance of using your leadership role to create a culture of respect applies to Council, too; especially when you disagree. Karen Freeman-Wilson emphasized the importance of open communication with the entire Council and the public in a strong Mayor system. “Being a strong Mayor means communicating at all times with Council members to facilitate a culture of mutual respect,” Freeman-Wilson shared. “It is important to understand that council members and the Mayor are all elected and the public wants a sense that all of their elected officials are well-informed and conducting business with the best interests of citizens in mind. I never proposed anything that I was not comfortable explaining in detail to Council members.”
In the end, culture – and your investment in your team – is the single most important thing that can transform your community from being a place to live and work to being a “destination” city for employees and your neighbors. If you’d like to know more about this topic or get contact information for the mayors, please reach out to me, Katya Spear.