The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative has published a new guide: City leader guide on organizational culture change: creating conditions for innovation, collaboration, and high performance in city hall. The guide supports city leaders in systematically evaluating and transforming organizational culture to better align with their administration’s vision and values.
Organization culture, as defined by the guide, is the set of rules, formal or informal, written or not, that determine how work gets done. This guide equips city leaders and their teams with practical tools and frameworks to strengthen problem-solving capacity, foster innovation, and bridge the gap between academic research and real-world best practices.
Download the guide here.
What’s inside the guide
The guide offers:
- An analytic tool to diagnose and remedy cultural challenges
- City case studies and good practices
- Insights from academic and practitioner literature
- Approaches to assessing organizational readiness
- Supporting materials for exploration, deliberation, and decision-making
The culture cascade framework
A centrepiece of the guide is the culture cascade framework, which helps cities create and sustain cultures that align with their vision and values. It outlines nine key steps across three stages: leadership alignment, communication and decision-making, and human resources and data management. A diagnostic tool further enables self-evaluation and goal-setting tailored to each city’s stage of progress.
About the initiative
The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, part of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, is a collaboration between Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. It equips mayors and senior city officials with knowledge and tools to address complex challenges and improve the quality of life. The new guide builds on insights from interviews at the 2019 Bloomberg Philanthropies CityLab, where city leaders identified organizational culture as vital to performance and innovation, yet lacking practical means to achieve meaningful change.