Culture Change Refined and Revitalized: The Road Show and Guides for Pragmatic Action 

Jim Hartmann,  Anne M Khademian.  Public Administration Review.  Washington:Nov/Dec

2010.  Vol. 70,  Iss. 6,  p. 845-856 (12 pp.)

Abstract (Summary)
Despite a declining interest in the relationship between leadership, culture, and performance in the
scholarly literature, culture change is alive and well among leaders in the public sector as a means to
improve performance. This essay reviews the trajectory of culture studies and proposes a modest model
of organizational culture that sets aside many of the conceptual and methodological arguments about
culture, focusing instead on what leaders actually do to change culture. The model is examined in the
context of organizational culture change efforts in the city of Alexandria, Virginia. Several practical and
theoretical insights are offered from this pragmatic and leadership-focused approach to culture.
[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Full Text
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Copyright American Society for Public Administration Nov/Dec 2010

[Headnote]
Despite a declining interest in the relationship between leadership, culture, and performance in
the scholarly literature, culture change is alive and well among leaders in the public sector as a
means to improve performance. This essay reviews the trajectory of culture studies and proposes
a modest model of organizational culture that sets aside many of the conceptual and
methodological arguments about culture, focusing instead on what leaders actually do to change
culture. The model is examined in the context of organizational culture change efforts in the city
of Alexandria, Virginia. Several practical and theoretical insights are offered from this pragmatic
and leadership-focused approach to culture.

Organizational culture holds great promise for practitioners and scholars as the key to improving
performance in the public sector, yet the conceptual and practical challenges associated with studying
and employing the concept have tempered enthusiasm for it in recent years. This essay focuses on the
utility of culture as a concept and a tool, and attempts to revive interest in the relationship between
leadership, culture, and performance by introducing a modest model of leadership and organizational
culture. The model is modest in that it sets aside many of the conceptual and methodological arguments
about culture, focusing instead on what leaders actually do to change culture, or to make changes in the
context within which members of an organization make decisions, feel motivated or not, innovate or
stagnate, and so on.
The attempted revival draws on the practice of culture change in the city of Alexandria, Virginia, and a
refinement of extensive research and writing on culture that boils down to commitments or guides for
pragmatic action. One coauthor, Jim Hartmann, has directed the effort to change the culture of the city of
Alexandria; his direct experience is the primary focus in this essay. The other coauthor, Anne Khademian,
has been involved in the research and study of culture, and has followed and observed Hartmann's efforts
to influence the culture in Alexandria. We start with Anne's observations of one of many episodes of the
"road show" presented in a city department in the pursuit of culture change in a city government.
The "Road Show"
The auditorium is bustling with conversation, people finding their seats, jokes between friends about
"fancy clothes" for the occasion, last-minute checks of e-mails on handheld devices, and the general
pleasure that comes from a change of pace in the middle of the workday. Some people work their way to
the front of the auditorium, encouraged by the promise of door prizes or a good seat, while others look for
seats in the back so they can leave discreetly to get to another appointment. A speaker kicks things off by
introducing the committee that is leading efforts to bring about change in the department, which is
responsible for organizing the assembly. The focus is on excellence and professionalism, individual
responsibility as well as teamwork, and improved service to the community.
Before the new director of the department is introduced, a number of door prizes are given away with a
professional football theme. Individuals with a ticket or flyer on the seat in front of them win some
Washington Redskins memorabilia, run to the front to cheers and taunts from the audience, and give a
tJiumbs up from the stage. Clearly, the committee thought of everything, including the need to hold the
audience's attention and keep enthusiasm high. The recently appointed department director receives a
warm introduction that highlights his previous accomplishments in another state, and his goals for the
department. Applause is polite, but more robust and heartfelt when friends and coworkers from the
committee are at the microphone.
The main event is the "road show," City Manager Jim Hartmann's term for a central part of his effort to
change the culture in the city of Alexandria, Virginia. After a brief introduction, Hartmann stands at the
front of the auditorium, the camera rolling, with a lapel microphone before frontline service providers and
middle-level managers. After thanking everyone for attending, he opens with a story of management
failure - his own. The ethanol transloading facility in Alexandria's west end, owned by Norfolk Southern
and operated by RSI, began operating in 2008 in the vicinity of an elementary school. Transloading
facilities are the transfer points for chemicals such as ethanol from a railcar to a tank truck for delivery to a
bulk fuel distributor. When the facility began operating, many in the city were surprised, including the
mayor and city council. The line was drawn between city efforts to regulate land use and ensure the
safety of residents, and Norfolk Southerns right to move ethanol or other potentially dangerous materials
across America and through communities (Pope 2008). Hartmann and the city attorney were held
responsible by the mayor and city council for the communication breakdown that resulted in the opening
of the facility before appropriate notifications and preparations were made (Hagee 2008).
The auditorium is quiet as Hartmann says, "Decisions were flawed, the organization made errors, I made
mistakes, I was responsible." It gets a little more quiet when he tells the audience what he did to
understand the mistake: he pulled together the city's information technology and police forensic
specialists and had them search and evaluate every single city e-mail that mentioned the words
"transloading facility," "ethanol," and "Norfolk Southern" over the previous two years. Thousands of e-
mails were gathered, and the entire chain of e-mails was posted on the Alexandria city website. The e-
mail chain was what Hartmann terms "management forenscis" to diagnose what went wrong in the
process and to share it with every interested resident of the city, and especially his employees.
Three points stand out for the observer in this opening. First, Hartmann, as the city manager of
Alexandria, is taking full responsibility for a mistake that occurred on his watch. Second, he and his
leadership team learned how to improve communication and decision making by making the relevant
information transparent and accessible, and the learning process very public. Third, there are broader
lessons for the entire organization (the city of Alexandria) about the importance of transparency,
responsibility, and the effort to improve the work of the city each day.
As he moves into his "Road Map for Organizational Change," Hartmann emphasizes that mistakes
happen, that we can learn from those mistakes, and that there is always a better way to run an
organization and serve the public. Part of the answer is connecting and communicating across a city of
organizational silos, pushing responsibility for operations downward to adjust for years of
micromanagement, and giving middle-level leaders and top executives more responsibility for
improvement efforts and creating the future. In many respects, this is a familiar formula for improving
performance. The challenge, as in any management effort, is to bring the formula to fruition in a
sustainable manner. What makes the Alexandria effort useful in this regard is the perceived use of culture
by the city manager to bring about these changes, and the steps taken to achieve the culture change.
The point of this essay is not to demonstrate or assess the effectiveness of the change efforts, but rather
to identify the ways in which Hartmann understands culture as a focus of his leadership efforts, the means
by which he goes about engaging organizational culture, and the conceptual leverage the study of culture
can gain from that perception to better understand the relationship between culture, leadership, and
performance. Leadership efforts to practice culture change, in short, may provide insights on these
theoretical relationships.
The Promise and Problems of Culture as Scholarship
Organizational culture is a curious concept. Similar to the popular term "network" today, "organizational
culture" throughout the 1980s and 1990s promised conceptual inspiration, practical applications, and
methodological innovation (Frost et al. 1991; Martin 1992, 2001; Ott 1989; Trice and Beyer 1993). Culture
presented an alternative means to consider the work of organizations, drawing attention away from formal
processes and structure to the "basic assumptions," "values and beliefs," and "artifacts" that motivated
the work of organizations (Schein 1985). In other instances, culture helped illuminate variation and
resistance across organizational units or professions, each with a "subculture" that often clashed with an
overarching organizational or management culture (Hofstede 2002; Jermier et al. 1991).
Resistance to change or improvements could be understood as the consequence of a problematic culture
and perhaps resistant subcultures, and outstanding performance was buoyed by a "strong" or "deeply
held" integrating culture (Kotter and Heskett 1992; Peters and Waterman 1983). Employee motivation and
innovation, or the lack thereof (McLean 2005; Van de Ven, Angle, and Poole 1989), was attributed to
culture, and the capacity of an organization to learn was analyzed in both organizational and individual
terms through the lens of culture (Cook and Yanow 1993; Mahler 1997). As organizations were examined
in the context of networks working on complex problems, the collaborative capacity of an organization
across government and the private sector was attributed to the anchoring cultures of organizations
(Beyerlein et al. 2002). Perhaps most critically, culture came to be understood as the interface between
leadership and organizational performance, and the creation, maintenance, and change of an
organizational culture became identified as the most vital job of a leader (Nadler and Tushman 1990;
Schein 1985, 1993).
This conclusion was not surprising, given several prominent books early on detailing the importance of
culture for leadership and organizational performance. In 1938, Chester Barnard wrote about the need for
executives to understand the relationship between the "informal organization" and the work of the formal
organization: "Informal organizations are found within all formal organizations, the latter being essential to
order and consistency, the former to vitality. These are mutually reactive phases of cooperation, and they
are mutually dependent" (286). The informal organization was "embodied in states of mind and habits of
action which indicate the capacities of memory, experience, and social conditioning" (114-15). The
Functions of the Executive introduced culture, or the informal organization, as central to effective
communication and hence performance in an organization.
Similarly, Herbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger (1960) engaged the relationship between leadership and
performance by focusing in part on the culture that facilitated cohesion rather than dispersion among
rangers as "executives in the field" far away from the Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D. C.
(see also Tipple and Wellman 1991). And Philip Selznick drew on "organizational commitments" in
Leadership and Administration (1957) to explain, in part, the transition of an organization to an institution,
"infused with value." Facilitating and sustaining the commitments, Selznick argued, was key to the
longevity and value of the institution, and central to the work of the leader.
These authors varied, however, in the connections or relationships portrayed between leadership, culture,
and performance. For Barnard, the relationship was somewhat linear: leaders influenced the informal
organization, which was crucial for the vitality of the organization and hence performance. For Kaufman, it
was more complex. The culture was influenced by leadership, but also by the history of the organization,
the pursuit of professional success, the nature of the work, and efforts to ensure accountability throughout
the organization through compliance with rules, policies, and practices. "There is a striving on the part of
many," Kaufman wrote, "to demonstrate they fit into the approved pattern" (1960, 182). While the
"approved patterns" represented leadership influence, the desire to progress within the forest service
profession reinforced the culture. Ultimately, the culture of the organization was vital for performance, but
the culture was the product of multiple variables, not the leader alone. Finally, for Selznick, the culture, or
organizational commitments, preceded leadership; commitments reflected what was valued about the
organization, preservation of the commitments was an essential responsibility for the leader. Performance
was tightly wound with the value and macy of the organization, again, preserved and protected by a
Not surprisingly, the linear relationship held out by Barnard had most appeal to management and
leadership scholars interested in organizational performance. With the publication of Ouchi's Theory Z
(1981), Deal and Kennedy's Corporate Cultures (1982), and Peters and Waterman's In Search of
Excellence (1982), the connections between leadership, culture, and performance became a prescription
for organizational change. While the details varied, advocates for this understanding of culture argued
that the strength of a culture and the values the culture embraced, in large part, provided context for
creativity, longevity, and profitability. Edgar Schein pushed the prescription to theory with his three
concentric circles, or layers of organizational culture, transitioning from the least visible and most deeply
held "basic assumptions," to the more evident "values and beliefs," and finally to the visible and symbolic
representations of culture, "artifacts." Schein's conceptualization of culture has been widely utilized across
the public administration and public management literature.
If research attention and publications are an indication, the curiosity about culture as a tool or means to
achieve organizational performance has petered out. With few exceptions (e.g., Cameron and Quinn
2006; Khademian 2002; Martin 2001; McClean 2005; Rainey and Steinbauer 1999), there have been
minimal efforts in the past few years in the public administration and public management literatures and in
the business management literature to conceptualize the manifestations of culture, its manageability, and
its utility in revealing the characteristics and qualities of organizational life; instead, a general acceptance
that leadership, culture, and performance are connected in some fuzzy way sets the tone in the public
administration and management literatures.
Many explanations for the declining scholarly interest in leadership, culture, and performance come to
mind. Part of the challenge rests with the broad promise attached to culture by a wide range of scholars.
Culture has served as a catchall for what we do not understand about organizations, for the complex side
of performance, or for what is empirically tough to demonstrate; if culture is the key to everything, it is the
key to nothing. Given the breadth of expectations, culture is a murky concept - where do we look to see
culture, to understand its implications? Surveys of individual values, perceptions, priorities, and concerns;
qualitative studies of individual relationships, groups, and departments; and efforts to conceptualize
culture as individually or collectively developed, held, and engaged have all been applied in an effort to
see the manifestations of culture, the variables that impact the development of culture, the levers for
culture change, and the importance of culture for performance. Not surprisingly, there is a great deal of
conceptual variation and variation in the empirical findings (Khademian, 2010).
The declining interest also rests, however, with the peril that other scholars have long associated with
trying to manage or utilize culture in some way. In contrast to the literature linking leadership, culture, and
performance, a second stream of literature with a significant history has focused on culture as a dominant
characteristic of organizations heavily influenced by the task at hand, the economic and political context,
history and the power of previous decisions and actions, and resource availability (Ban 1995; Ingersoll
and Adams 1992; Warwick 1975; Wilson 1989). Where the first literature seemed to ignore the influence
of environmental constraints, the significance of engrained procedures and accepted patterns of behavior,
and the roles that multiple participants play in bringing about alternative cultures, an alternative literature
reveled in the complexities of each of these sources of influence. Whereas the former emphasized the
leader as primary in shaping, sustaining, or changing culture, the latter emphasized the environment, the
task, and history as contributing to a culture beyond the reach of an individual leader. Whereas one
imagined a single common culture as the goal for organizational performance, the other focused on
multiple cultures and subcultures, or a culture frayed by inconsistencies and complexity that inhibited the
pursuit of articulated goals (Feldman 1989; Hummel 1994; Martin 1991).
It is the nature of theory building to push toward simplification in explanation, often leading to dichotomies
and classifications that tilt toward one set of variables or conditions to the exclusion of others. Yet it is the
nature of practice to find approaches rhat work, that are pragmatic, and that can make sense on the
ground (Feldman and Khademian 2007). Earlier research approached the study of culture through the
practices of several leaders facing complex public problems In this research, leaders engaged complex
problems such as community violence, systemic poverty, failed disaster management, and international
port security in strategically fluid, comprehensive, and purposeful ways (Khademian 2002; Khademian
and Berberich 2009). Fluid, in the sense that the leadership efforts were receptive to broad participation,
new ideas, changing politics, and the dynamic use of resources. Comprehensive, in that their focus was
not only inside an organization or program, but also on the environment, the public, elected officials, other
institutions and partnering organizations, past practices, and so on. And purposeful, in that the leaders
were focused on accomplishing tasks in ways that effectively engaged public problems.
From these strategies, alternative ways of understanding the work of an organization or program were
enacted that influenced not only the way members of an organization approached the work, but also the
way people outside the organization understood the work of the organization. A police force practiced in
responding to violence with force learned to work with the community to prevent violence and address the
consequences; faculty members who received money for research projects aimed at identifying ways to
revitalize a community learned to work with residents in individual neighborhoods to engage planning
from within; agency employees held accountable for organizational failures and limited organizational
capacity learned to build capacity through reorganization, individual responsibility for service, and
relationship building across cities and states served by the agency (Khademian 2002); and skeptical
international and domestic participants in developing port security policies who were focused on individual
security concerns of countries, shipping companies, and ports learned to engage security collectively by
agreeing to performance goals for all players (Khademian and Berberich 2009). As we will see in this
essay, employees in a city accustomed to micromanagement by executives are encouraged to take
initiative for day-to-day operations, improving operations, and envisioning the future of the city.
Here, we attempt to reengage the relationship between leadership, culture, and performance by drawing
two lessons from these leadership examples. First, think of culture in pragmatic terms. Second, pay
attention to the details of what leaders see and do. We take each in turn in die next section.
A Pragmatic Approach to Culture: Ways of Knowing and Attention to Detail
Chester Barnard recognized the complexities of the informal organization, but he also realized its utility for
effective or problematic communication. Herbert Kaufman also recognized the multiple factors and
sources of influence on organizational culture, but he saw its potential for bringing about coherence and
central focus. And while Philip Selznick understood the multifaceted points of influence on the evolution of
organizational commitments, he also boiled the role of the leader down to sustaining and enriching those
commitments to ensure the value and integrity of an organization or institution. These authors, in short,
were pragmatic about culture. In each case, culture was the context amid which people made decisions,
implemented programs, engaged the public, learned, and carried on. While Barnard, in particular,
explored the individual and collective cognitive dimensions of the informal organization, the bottom line
was that it was a context to prompt, cue, persuade, and condition behavior.
We propose adopting this pragmatic approach to culture. Here, "pragmatic" suggests three things. First,
culture as a concept should be useful and understandable as a means to pursue organizational goals. We
do not dismiss the vast literatures that explore the complexities of culture, the resistance to change, and
the multiple subcultures that may populate any given organization; rather, we focus on what leaders may
see when they look to culture as a means to improve organizational performance, and the options for
influencing culture. We propose Selznick's concept of "organizational commitments" as a means to
represent culture that is relevant to leadership - a concept we develop further later.
Second, "pragmatic" suggests that culture can be understood not as a quality or characteristic of an
organization, but as a process that is continuously practiced or enacted. Decision making and action take
place in situated, dynamic contexts of "knowing" (Feldman, Khademian, and Quick 2009). We often think
of knowledge as something that individuals or organizations have - a result, a noun, or a thing that can be
measured, applied, and stored. Here, we build on efforts to develop and apply "ways of knowing" as a
concept for managing inclusively (Feldman et al.; Feldman, Khademian, and Quick 2009) and consider
how people "know" in an organizational setting as a process.
Knowing materializes from social and collective processes and regular action and interaction (Nicolini,
Gherardi, and Yanow 2003; Orlikowski 2002). The daily accounting for expenses, interaction with
constituents, application of guidelines, and conversations at lunchtime, for example, are processes rhat
enact knowing. How someone knows the application of guidelines in a public program to determine
eligibility, for example, emerges through the daily practice of the activity, watching others practice, talking
with colleagues about the practice, incorporating changes from above, and so on. If we consider culture
as a form of knowing, we can understand the emergence of commitments, or rules of rhumb that
individuals know from the day-to-day engagement of specified tasks, with various resources, in the path
of previous decisions and actions, and in the context of politics, the economy, and community attention.
As a way of knowing that is continuously enacted, the potential for culture change and the influence of
leadership is evident.'
We also propose focusing closely on the details of the ways in which leaders perceive and engage
culture. What do leaders "see" when they look for culture, and what might leaders "do" to influence
organizational culture? In order to develop this point, consider a simple model of organizational culture
and leadership. Again, the term we use to describe this model is pragmatic: it is simple, purposeful, and
portrays culture as a continuously enacted dynamic process. First, in this model, culture is manifest as
commitments, or guides for action that are regularly engaged to reinforce or to change the way work is
done in an organization. Second, the ways in which members of an organization engage or enact
commitments in this model depends on the incentives people face for action, and the consequences of
those actions over time. Leaders can influence both the incentives for enacting a commitment, and the
consequences of a decision or an action. Consider figure 1.
In this model, leaders draw on the nature of the task, the available resources, and the circumstances and
conditions of the environment to shape incentives for employee action or decisions. These may be quite
common, such as a paycheck, the promise of promotion, or simply keeping one's job. Or the incentives
may be more complex, such as the promise of greater decision-making discretion or the satisfaction of
contributing to a vital mission. Following any organizational action or decision, large or small, there are
consequences: business as usual, improved operations, recognition, punishment, advancement, and so
on. The consequences may be felt internally as well as externally: a letter from a member of Congress,
following a particularly contentious regulatory decision; an e-mail from a superior congratulating an
employee on a job well done; a story in the New York Times highlighting the smooth response of a fire
rescue; an inquiry from another agency to share best practices surrounding a form of program
management. The model proposes that the way in which members of an organization come to know the
work of the organization rests in this ongoing cycle of incentives, actions, and consequences.
As an example, consider the work of the U.S. Coast Guard. Central to the work of the Coast Guard is a
commitment to ongoing training. Members of the Coast Guard start training when they begin boot camp at
Cape May, for example, or the Coast Guard Academy, and continue to train throughout their career. The
training is mandatory in some instances, and encouraged in others; the training advances specializations
in some instances, and reduces the risks of accidents in others; and the training is focused on advancing
new mandates and missions, or facilitating reorganization in others. There is no finish line with training in
the Coast Guard; it is part of being in the Coast Guard. Multiple incentives are in place to encourage
training, from commands to promotion, to pay raises, to a deeper commitment to the service.
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Figure 1 A Pragmatic Model of Leadership and Culture

On September 11, 2009, a Coast Guard training exercise near the Memorial Bridge in Washington, DC
was misinterpreted by the news network CNN as a potential terrorist attack near the motorcade route of
the president headed toward the Pentagon for a ceremony of remembrance. The false alarm triggered
criticism of the Coast Guard as well as CNN, but Vice Admiral John Currier of the Coast Guard told
reporters, "I am not issuing an apology, because, although it's unfortunate that it escalated to this level,
what you're seeing here is the result of a normal training exercise" (Potter 2009).
The decision at some level in the Coast Guard to conduct training exercises near the memorial site of the
9/11 attacks had definite consequences outside the Coast Guard - anger expressed by families of the
victims of 9/1 1, media chaos tracking down a story that was not, fear and anxiety for members of the
public - but the Coast Guard leadership shaped the relevance of those consequences for members of the
Coast Guard: it was a "normal training exercise." One of the Coast Guard's missions is security, requiring
high levels of readiness; opportunities to train and the equipment and setting required are limited. By
assigning a standard training session meaning to the incident, the Coast Guard leadership buffered the
impact of the media and political response for the personnel preparing for the next training session on the
Potomac or elsewhere. A response that backed away from the importance of training, or that escalated
the risks of scheduling and enacting such training activities in the future, would have sent a very different
message about the importance of continuous training, and would have been reflected in the ways in
which personnel engaged the ongoing rounds of training. Instead, while the Coast Guard was clearly
learning from the timing of the exercise and the sensitivity of the event, the response of Vice Admiral
Currier also fortified the incentives members of the Coast Guard have to exercise and train.
This conceptualization of culture as a set of commitments that are continuously enacted suggests a very
purposeful role for leaders in utilizing culture strategically, or as a means to strengthen and improve
organizational performance by influencing the continuously produced guides for action or ways of
knowing. Focusing on the integration of task, resources, and environment that create incentives in the
cycle of actions and consequences provides members of an organization with guidance in anticipation of
routine and novel situations (Alterman, Wolf, and Carpenter 1998).
Culture Change in Alexandria
Jim Hartmann was appointed by the city council of Alexandria, Virginia, to be the city manager in January
2005. Alexandria is a mid-sized, very densely populated city of 150,000 residents, a budget of more than
$500 million, and 2,500 city employees. As city manager in a council-manager form of government,
Hartmann oversees the implementation of city council directives; prepares the budgets, annual reports,
and other required reports on the financial and administrative state of the city; oversees the day-to-day
operations of the city; and appoints department heads (see http://alexandria.gov). Alexandria is located in
the National Capital Region, across the Potomac River from Washington, D. C. Homeland security,
emergency response, and other regional metropolitan issues such as transportation and planning are also
central to Hartmann's responsibilities, including membership on the Chief Administrative Officers
Committee in the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
The city of Alexandria is complex. Alexandria is steeped in a history that draws tourists by the thousands.
Located a few miles up the road from Mount Vernon, various buildings and establishments in Old Town
predate the American Revolution and boast affiliations with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John
Adams, and James Madison. Part of the city's complex history is the legacy of slavery and racial tensions,
as well as the distinction of the first sit-in of the civil rights movement in 1939 when five young men
working with Samuel Tucker challenged the whites-only policy of the city library. Today, Alexandria is a
vibrant cenrer of civic engagement, open government, and robust development, with vestiges of the racial
divisions of the past evident in neighborhood schools and housing.
During his early tenure, Hartmann assessed the city departments, structure, and staff by drawing on his
past experience as county administrator in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and Eagle County,
Colorado; his work experience in Orange County, Florida; and, interestingly, his service in the Coast
Guard. He spoke directly with city employees and community stakeholders to find out what was going well
and what was not. A number of themes emerged from these discussions that drew Hartmann's curiosity
and pointed him to a number of cultural characteristics obvious in the organization.
First, the city government was risk adverse. Employees and department heads did not make decisions or
take actions that exposed them to scrutiny. While caution is a virtue in the public sector, it can also be
paralyzing if decision making is slowly passed through various layers. Second, the city was heavily
"siloed," a metaphor that Hartmann uses to describe the lack of communication across the city
government organization. Third, departments in the city prioritized rule compliance and procedures, rather
than a customer focus. This emphasis on rules and procedures, in turn, limited transparency in decision
making. It was difficult for residents to understand how or why decisions were made the way they were.
These characteristics operated in a cyclical manner: risk avoidance meant that decisions for action were
passed up the hierarchy, slowing decision making and drawing the time of executives to operations rather
than to improvements and the strategic emphasis on the future. Focusing up the hierarchy rather than
across the departments resulted in siloed communication and preoccupation with the rules and
procedures, as a means to reduce risk, and shifted the focus away from residents as customers in city
departments. A primary consequence was limited transparency of decision making. As Hartmann
summarizes, there was so much control exercised from the top and center that accomplishments were
slow and meaningful communication within and between departments was limited.
Put into the context of organizational commitments, regular oversight of day-to-day operations created
incentives to seek approval for routine actions or to avoid making decisions altogether. The
consequences were an overworked and misfocused city manager's office, slow or ineffective service on
the front lines, and missed opportunities to educate middle-level managers through the exercise of
authority in order to move to higher leadership positions in the city. This prompted more
micromanagement - with administrators focusing more resources on tasks more appropriately conducted
by middle-level managers and frontline employees - more cumbersome operations, and more missed
opportunities. The lack of communication between departments and offices enhanced the dependency on
centralized decision making, and the incentive to pass decisions up the hierarchy again limited cross
department information sharing. Table 1 presents the commitments identified by Hartmann as prominent
in the organization, and the commitments Hartmann sought to develop.
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Table 1 Established Organizational Commitments in the City of Alexandria and Alternative
Commitments

In order to change the commitments, or the context of operations, Hartmann targeted the incentives and
consequences that conditioned the practice of day-to-day operations. The goal was to push decision-
making responsibility for operations to the front line in order to free up time for improving the system and
creating new programs and opportunities among middle-level leaders and top executives. Hartmann
presented a visual of this redistribution at various talks around the city, presented in figure 2. The visual
presents an ideal distribution of effort devoted to operating the system, improving the system, and
creating the future, where operations are concentrated among frontline service providers, and time
devoted to improving operations and creating the future is concentrated with middle managers and
executives. The most obvious difference between the goal of time allocation and reality was the large
amount of time executives spent on operations, rather than improvement efforts or creating the future.
Hartmann emphasized that regardless of the position someone has in the organization, each has
responsibility for these major areas of effort, only in different degrees. Hartmann viewed the way in which
individual employees distributed valuable time and the role each played as critical to organizational
performance. Hartmann also understood the distribution of time on task as key to changing the
organizational commitments that defined the work of the city.
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Figure 2 Where We Should Spend Our Time in the City of Alexandria?

Hartmann took on the redistribution of time by engaging the incentive and consequence patterns in city
government operations using several resources to do so: structural reorganization of key decision-making
processes, application of the road map and guiding principles, leveraging crisis as a resource, the road
show, and building a leadership team. These various management tasks and leadership strategies
resourced Hartmann's efforts to engage the process of culture, in some cases by providing a direct focus
for altering the incentive and consequence cycle, as in the case of the budget process, and in other cases
by providing a platform for discussion, focus, and elaboration of the ways in which incentives and
consequence cycles may change. This understanding of tasks serving as a resource, and the elaboration
of resourcing builds on other conceptual work in this area (Feldman and Quick 2009; Feldman and
Khademian 2007; Feldman, Khademian, and Quick 2009), and will be discussed later in the paper.
Reorganizing Decision-Making Processes: The Budget
One of the first challenges Hartmann presented to the city organization was a new budget process and
document. He gathered together senior and middle managers and all financial staff and introduced the
Managing for Results Initiative as the centerpiece of his new administration (MFRI 2007). The entire
budget was developed and presented by programs and activity levels, each reflecting the program's
consumption of resources, as well as outputs and outcome measures. While the approach is a common
refrain in the reform literature, the city pulled it off and fully implemented the process within one year; from
Hartmann's perspective, implementation of the new budget process furthered efforts to change
organizational commitments. Most importandy, the emphasis on programs and activity levels engaged
employees on the front lines and in middle management to contribute to the process. The exercise of
programmatic expertise in working groups or teams at the operational and middle management levels,
coordinated centrally, has been modeled in other city decision-making situations, including preparation
and response for the massive snowstorms of February 2010, and implementation of the American
Response and Recovery Act of 2009. The process also produced a more transparent budget that
residents could comprehend. By highlighting programs and activity areas, along with outcome goals,
expenditures and results were more apparent.
The Road Map and Guiding Principles
With the help of organizational development consultants and his management team, Hartmann also
developed a "Road Map for Change" that he uses in discussions with city employee groups. The road
map details seven phases of change and the steps required to engage each phase (figure 3). From the
articulation of the philosophy to the building of organizational systems and leadership capacity, as well as
systems of accountability and results, each phase presents specific tasks that require attention. This
broad road map provides top executives and middle-level leaders with a plan change and a means to
understand Hartmann's goals. For example, phase 2, "Build Organizational Systems and Processes," lists
several tasks, including improving meeting management and improving the civic engagement processes
of the city. The tasks are initiated and engaged during a particular phase, but the tasks are ongoing. most
instances, there is no clear finish line for the tasks identified the phases, but rather active efforts to move
toward the goals of phase.
Perhaps more importantly, the association of specific task with phases of change provides a focus for
talking about and engaging in the change effort. Members of an organization can come to know the work
of the organization through a common lens or common point of focus. Consistent steady movement
through the road map provides Hartmann and his leadership team with a common language and initial
tasks to bring about the more decentralized performance focused organization. The
incentive/consequence needs to be in place for Hartmann's leadership team as well, and the steady
march through the process creates a forum for accomplishment that is vital to the team's way of knowing
organizational change. Specifically, discussions around the tasks of the road map engage the leadership
team in discussions about improvements and creating the future, foster communication across the
different departments through members of the leadership team, and encourage transparency about the
change process.
The road map has become a management tool for the entire leadership team in Alexandria. Many items
are actively under way, some remain works in progress, and Hartmann's emphasis on time constraints to
move the tasks of the road map forward sets a tone of urgency. A new road map for fiscal year 2012-14 is
currently being developed, and Hartmann plans to begin discussions with employees as he also presents
the fiscal year 2012 budget in the spring of 201 1. In addition, many employee groups have been formally
appointed to develop the tasks in the road map, and self-convening groups have developed to propose
plans, programs, or enhancements to the items identified in the road map.
Following the creation of the road map, the leadership team began work on guiding principles for the
organization. A collaborative process was undertaken to identify, define, and debate how each principle fit
the work and direction of the organization. Just as the road map provides a point of focus and a series of
activities that structure the work of the leadership team, development of the Alexandria Guiding Principles
provided a point of focus and discussion around with members of the leadership team began to know the
change efforr and the future for the organization. The principles are presented during the road shows and
at monthly new employee orientation sessions, which Hartmann attends. The guiding principles (table 2)
are also integral to die new employee performance management system.
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Figure 3 Alexandria's Roadmap for Organizational Change

Crisis as Opportunity
Hartmann has sought to resource die culture change process in a variety of ways. Most recently, he has
relied on the urgency of the recession of 2008-9 to bring about change. The financial crisis had a severe
impact on local governments. As reported by the International City/County Management Association,
budget shortfalls have resulted in cutbacks in city operations across die country, requiring adjustments by
county and city managers that will likely become permanent (ICMA 2009). Hartmann begins many
meetings with staff and organizational employees by emphasizing the need for change; Alexandria cannot
afford to exist in the future as it does today, and it must recreate and define our future through
organizational change. Without the financial resources, adjusting the way work is done in the city is no
longer an option.
The Road Show
Hartmann's road show, separate from the road map, is also vital in changing die incentive/consequence
cycle. As noted earlier, the story of the transloading facility, told before frontline workers in the Parks and
Recreation Department, middle-level managers, staff members of the Office of Management and Budget,
or the Police Department, holds the audience attention in a particularly rapt manner. The story is, for the
observer, permission to fail as long as one is responsible about learning from the mistakes and making
the learning process an accessible one. With discretion comes responsibility, and fiondine employees
often may not want responsibility. Changing the incentives to take the initiative means changing the
consequences when things go wrong. Hartmann's road show is central in the effort to adjust the ways in
which employees understand the risk associated with initiative.
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Table 2 Guiding Principles for the City of Alexandria

The road show is also a means to build communication across the city departments and with the city
manager's office. While the door prizes in the story that opened this essay were important for attendance,
individual employees and the change committee were excited to have the city manager on site in the
department and the chance to ask questions, share information, and get to know the leader at the top.
Just as Hartmann works at building relationships across the national capital region for homeland security
and emergency management, he also works to build relationships across the departments that can
enhance and improve information sharing.
A Leadership
The winter of 2009-10 tested the flexibility and responsiveness of the city of Alexandria. Several heavy
snowstorms clobbered the area and shut down the National Capital Region and the seat of U.S.
government. For Hartmann, the storms tested the capacity of his leadership team. In the fall of 2009, in
preparation for the possibility of an HlNl flu pandemic, Hartmann asked the senior management of the city
to undergo National Incident Management System (NIMS) training to provide a common footing for any
type of an emergency. Although many of the attendees did not normally have a role in emergencies,
Hartmann wanted depth and flexibility in his team - the fundamental reason for being in local government
is to protect the community.
When the first big storm hit in December 2009, the response was not particularly good. The city was
overwhelmed by 20 inches of snow, and it had too little equipment and too few people on hand to
respond. The city had prepared as it would have for smaller snow events that were more typical. When
the next storms hit back to back in February 2010, well over 30 inches fell on Alexandria and paralyzed
the National Capital Region. Having learned lessons in December, the team was better prepared and
organized. They began by staffing the Emergency Operations Center before the snow event and fully
operationalizing the Incident Command System. This added structure was critical. Hartmann also brought
in many of the managers trained in NIMS but working out of their normal roles, while he served as the
incident commander. The effort was sustained 24 hours a day for 12 days.
The efforts of the leadership team in the storms reflected Hartmann's team-building efforts from day one
on the job. He had numerous opportunities to develop a team because of normal attrition. The selection
process focused on finding team members with a similar vision of time and energy allocation, with strong
communication and relationship building skills, the confidence to delegate within their departments, and
initiative to take responsibility as a top executive. Once on the team, Hartmann continues to support and
mentor team members by providing educational opportunities, for example, or sharing reading material
and insights that he finds useful.
A leadership team matters because the members can enact the incentive/consequence cycle changes
from different vantage points in the organization. Department leaders who delegate, who encourage
employees to figure out an answer, and who support their efforts - even when those efforts proves
unsuccessful - can begin to alter the commitment to practice government work through continuous
approval processes to greater exercise of discretion, greater knowledge of the work, and more
responsibility for the outcomes.
Culture as a Way of Knowing Organizational Work: Practical and Theoretical Applications
Anecdotal indicators suggest culture change in the city of Alexandria; put differently, the
incentive/consequence cycle within the city has adjusted to promote more initiative at the operational
level, more communication and coordination across the city, and more focus on the needs of residents.
The change effort in Alexandria has been pursued over the past five years. This past year, after several
very difficult budget seasons, numerous departments in the organization sought to redefine themselves.
The Code Enforcement Office changed its name to Code Administration after starting up a one-stop
permit center and truly focusing on its customers. The Communications Office and the Office of Citizen
Assistance are consolidating to provide better coordinated and communicated assistance to the
community. Both use pieces of the road map to guide and sanction their efforts. Both are driven from
within by individuals whom Hartmann perceives as not afraid to try something new. And Hartmann sees
that there are followers from within the ranks.
The Fire and Police departments are consolidating their 911 centers and locating them together in a new
Department of Emergency Communications. They are handing over control of a critical operation, which
they helped design, to provide better outcomes and more surety of service and, it is hoped, lower costs.
Finally, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and
Substance Abuse, and the Office on Women are joining together and consolidating service delivery in
what will become the city's largest department. The idea to do this came from the directors themselves,
and it is being developed by staff at all levels.
This essay has argued that culture is an important conceptual tool for leaders aiming to improve
organizational performance. When viewed as a series of organizational commitments enacted on a
regular basis through an incentive/consequence cycle, leaders can approach the change process by
isolating and targeting elements of the cycle to bring about change. Here, we have reviewed the methods
Jim Hartmann has engaged in his efforts to change elements of the cycle and hence the organizational
commitments of the city. While an assessment of the effectiveness of the change effort is beyond the
scope of this essay, an understanding of what Hartmann and other public leaders see when they adopt
"culture" as a management tool, and the utility of die concept for their day-to-day efforts, is useful for
scholars struggling to conceptualize culture and for pracdtioners working to improve government
performance. Culture may have faded from the literature, but it is alive and active in the hands of leaders.
Its practical utility might guide its dieoretical investigation. This review of Hartmann's efforts in Alexandria
suggests some practical and dieoretical insights about the relationship between leadership, culture, and
performance.
Practical Insights
For the practicing manager or leader, this review suggests several insights.
Be pragmatic. Engage culture as a process of understanding and meaning that is continuously being
developed in an organization or program. We often discuss culture in terms of stability, and stability
usually has a negative connotation suggesting stagnation, solidification, or standardization that stands in
the way of innovation. The model presented here, and the illustration of Hartmann's efforts to change
culture, provides an alternative perspective. Even when the context of daily decision making seems
permanent, or locked in, the focus on culture as a process allows us to see the daily enactment or
reinforcement of culture resourced by an incentive/consequence cycle. The pragmatic approach, in short,
provides an alternative lens on culture that allows managers and leaders to see the ways in which cultural
commitments are reinforced and the potential for change.
Focus on what is manageable. Engage incentives and consequences as a cycle that influences
organizational commitments. This insight is not new. Culture scholars and practitioners have long focused
on the incentives facing employees as a means to build, adjust, or sustain culture. Here, what is
distinctive is the importance of the incentive/consequence cycle as foundational to the enactment of
organizational commitments, and managers and leaders can influence incentives and consequences
directly. From the framing of organizational goals, identity, and events to the support for engaging the
work of the organization, managers and leaders can resource a cycle that fosters alternative
commitments as the context for organizational work. Hartmann's use of the road show, the road map, and
the guiding principles, for example, provided platforms or points of engagement for top executives on his
leadership team as well as for employees across the city. These platforms or points of engagement
provided opportunities to engage, to take an interest in the organization, with the intent of changing the
incentives employees encountered for participating, in the first place. The challenge is finding ways to
impact the incentives and consequence cycles that address cultural commitments in a purposeful
manner.
Be a creative in resourcing the change. The creative manager or leader can resource changes in the
incentive/consequence cycle in various ways. As other research has shown (Feldman and Quick 2009;
Feldman, Khademian, and Quick 2009), leaders and managers can use a variety of tasks, techniques,
and sources of energy to resource management efforts. Incentives can be changed through opportunities
for engagement, and inclusion can resource ongoing discussions diat produce new ways of knowing the
work of an organization. Beyond budgets, staff, and physical plant, managers and leaders may utilize a
variety of resources for facilitating change. Hartmann's use of the economic crisis has provided a means
to draw employees into the conversation about the redistribution and redesign of processes and
programs, and his road show is a moving platform for discussion, debate, and programs that would not
otherwise take place. communication across
Theoretical Insights
For researchers of culture, this review suggests several insights.
Focus research attention where managers and leaders pay attention. In our efforts to conceptualize
organizational culture and our debates over how best to study culture, we often neglect to ask what
managers and leaders focus on when deciding to engage culture. Hartmann saw culture, or the
organizational context of the city of Alexandria, as central to changing the way work was done in the city,
and his focus was on the things he could manage. While we certainly should not limit our research
agenda to the manageable as defined by managers and leaders, we can learn more about the concept of
culture in the hands of a manager or leader from watching and analyzing the ways in which they engage
culture. The incentive/ consequence cycle both builds on previous research focused on the importance of
managing culture, and reduces the complexities of cultural commitments, for example, to processes of
action and reaction. Yet it drives to the point of engagement between a manager or leader and the
context of organizational activity. This is important for managers, despite the decline in interest in the
scholarly literature, and the empirical implications of this effort offer important practical guides for
theoretical inquiry.
Culture as a way of knowing. Engage culture as an ongoing process that is continuously enacted. Just as
we discussed die pragmatic value of an alternative lens for the practice of culture engagement, an
understanding of culture as an emergent quality, ongoing in its enactment, and therefore actively pursued
opens new possibilities for understanding the relationship between leadership, culture, and performance.
[Sidebar]
This essay focuses on the utility of culture as a concept and a tool, and attempts to revive interest
in the relationship between leadership, culture, and performance by introducing a modest model
of leadership and organizational culture.

[Sidebar]
If research attention and publications are an indication, the curiosity about culture as a tool or
means to achieve organizational performance has petered out. With few exceptions . . . , there
have been minimal efforts in the past few years in the public administration and public
management literatures and in the business management literature to conceptualize the
manifestations of culture, its manageability, and its utility in revealing the characteristics and
qualities of organizational life. . . .

[Sidebar]
One of the first challenges [Jim] Hartmann presented to the city organization was a new budget
process and document.

[Sidebar]
Anecdotal indicators suggest culture change in the city of Alexandria; put differently, the
incentive/consequence cycle within the city has adjusted to promote more initiative at the
operational level, more communication and coordination across the city, and more focus on the
needs of residents.

[Sidebar]
. . . [A]n understanding of what [Jim] Hartmann and other public leaders see when they adopt
"culture" as a management tool, and the of the concept for their day-today efforts, is useful for
scholars struggling to conceptualize culture and for practitioners working to improve government
performance.

[Footnote]
Notes
1. It is important to point out that others have written about culture as a way of knowing. Betsy
Bastien (2004), for example, has written about the ways of knowing of Blackfoot-speaking
people, focusing on the reciprocal and interconnected relationships between identity and
knowledge as culture, and Jürgen Kremer edited a two-part series on "Culture and Ways of
Knowing" in the journal ReVision (volume 14, issues 5-4). Others have applied ways of
knowing to anthropology, emphasizing "knowing as a practical and continuous activity" and
focusing on "how humans come to know themselves and riieir worlds" (Harris 2007). Still others
categorize ways of knowing for understanding different approaches to pedagogy, understanding
the distribution of power, and organizational practices.

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[Author Affiliation]
Jim Hartmann
City of Alexandria, Virginia
Anne M. Khademian
Virginia Tech
Jim Hartmann is the city manager for Alexandria, Virginia. Prior to his position in Alexandria,
he was county administrator for Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and Eagle County,
Colorado, and worked for Orange County, Florida. He earned his MPA from the University of
Central Florida and later served as an adjunct faculty member there and a visiting lecturer in the
Clemson/University of South Carolina MPA program. He is a member of the National Capital
Region Chief Administrative Officer's Homeland Security Executive Committee and co-chairs
the National Capital Region Interoperability Council. Hartmann served in the U.S. Coast Guard
from T974to 1982.
E-mail: Jim.Hartmann@alexandriava.gov
Anne M. Khademian is a professor in the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia
Tech, and program director for its Alexandria Center. She is the author of The SEC and Capital
Market Regulation: The Politics of Expertise (University af Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Checking on
Banks: Autonomy and Accountability in Three Federal Agencies (Brookings Institution, 1996),
and Working with Culture: How the Job Gets Done in Public Programs (CQ Press, 2002), and
numerous articles focused on inclusive management, homeland security, and financial
regulation. In 2009, she was named a fellow with the National Academy of Public
Administration.
E-mail: akhademi@vt.edu

Indexing (document details)

Subjects: Studies,  Corporate culture,  Public administration,  Organizational behavior,
Leadership,  Cities
Classification 9130,  9550,  9190,  2500
Codes
Locations: Alexandria Virginia,  United States--US
Author(s): Jim Hartmann,  Anne M Khademian
Publication Public Administration Review. Washington: Nov/Dec 2010. Vol. 70, Iss.  6; 
title: pg. 845, 12 pgs
Document http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?
URL: did=2274289541&Fmt=4&clientId=65085&RQT=309&VName=PQD