As dramatic changes to US federal policies prompt uncertainty for both workplace policies and individual workers, many leaders are wondering how to define a culture that stays strong through such turbulence. Randall Woodfin, mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, is no stranger to those challenges.
After taking office in late 2017, he led the city through the first Trump administration, the Covid pandemic, and months of protests following the murder of George Floyd. Seven years in, he points to his team’s strong culture as a major factor in their success—providing a case study in codifying culture for workplace leaders hoping to do the same.
“My administration has five core values that have been drilled into our team since the day I walked into city hall,” Woodfin writes in his recent memoir, Son of Birmingham. Those are customer service, efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, and accountability, or CEETA for short. We spoke to Woodfin about how they’ve translated that acronym into tangible results. Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
How did your team decide on your five core values when you came into office?
If you are a corporation, small business, if you are a government, if you are a church, if you’re for-profit, nonprofit, any form of entity that is in the business of people—because all those organizations I named are—it’s extremely important that you have a set of core values and those core values kind of serve as your north star, your guide, your compass on not just what you’re trying to achieve but how you’re trying to achieve it. Our core values are the how of our why.
I discussed them during the transition period between winning the election and being sworn in with the people who would eventually become my chief of staff, my chief of operations, my chief strategist, and senior advisors. We literally sat at a living room table and asked, ‘What are we trying to accomplish?’ Then, ‘How are we going to accomplish it?’ So we came in with those values on day one.
We have to do our work with great customer service. I bagged groceries as a kid, so I learned at age 15, nothing’s more important than taking care of the customer. Efficiency and effectiveness are very important core values because, with public tax dollars, we provide services in how we pick up trash, answer 9-1-1 calls, and maintain other infrastructure like sidewalks and streets. Those things have to be done in the most efficient way and the most effective way with public tax dollars. The transparency piece is easy too. It’s not my money, it’s the public’s. So what we do and how we do it should be overtly transparent. The accountability piece feeds back into all four of the other core values. We hold ourselves accountable internally and externally. We are responsible for how we show up and we’ve got to be held accountable.
How did you make sure new hires and everyone coming onto your team knew these values?
I thought it was important that I not only surround myself with people who are smarter and more capable than me, but also people who love people. In the work we do, you have to genuinely like and love people. All we do every day is literally the people business. We are in the business of helping people, serving people, whatever that looks like. During our onboarding process, we overemphasize our core values, but it’s easier to get people to value them if they already genuinely like and love people. So that’s where I start.
We overemphasize these core values and make everyone say them out loud in unison at the beginning of our big team meetings—mayor’s meetings, department head meetings, staff meetings, or any other meeting we have. Seven years later, we still do that.
Everybody moves differently in their private life, but we’re really attempting to charge uphill and change a culture and make a culture better. That requires human buy-in. So we overemphasize and repeat those core values weekly. We make sure people see them embedded everywhere. You see them in the elevators when you walk in. You see them in photos around city hall and on our website. These five values are intentionally in everyone’s face so they can remember the how of what we do—not just the why.
When it comes to evaluating your team’s work and understanding what they’re doing, what do you point to and how do you evaluate if they’re living by those five values?
In the business world, you talk about KPIs and ROI. We talk about being CEETA certified. Everyday, team members want to be living the CEETA way. We base some of that on the intangibles—what we call ‘caught doing good.’ If you’ve ever been involved in city government, most of the people who engage you have a complaint. Rarely is it a thank you or a compliment or a ‘Job well done!’ What we find is if we move with good customer service, efficiency, and accountability, you start getting letters, emails, and texts from residents and evaluations from department heads that are full of compliments or references to one of those core values we’ve leaned in on.
We’re always trying to catch people doing bad, but with CEETA, we have ‘caught doing good.’ When someone is caught doing good, we share that in various channels. It’s verbalized in meetings. It’s in the all-user emails, so everybody knows. Sometimes they get certificates, a call from me, or an in-person meeting. Other times we invite them to share what happened in their own words during a team meeting or public meeting.
Order Woodfin’s memoir, Son of Birmingham, on Bookshop or Amazon.
Download Charter’s playbook, “Keeping Culture at the Center,” for more best practices in maintaining strong cultures amid uncertainty and change.