Localizing Culture to Drive Team Performance

Cityscapes recognizes that even within a unified organizational culture, individual teams and departments have their unique realities and ways of working. Like neighborhoods within a city, each area has its own personality, rhythm, and priorities.
 Cityscapes enables teams to articulate their local culture and align it with the broader organizational vision.

Why Cityscapes?

● Makes culture relevant and actionable at a team or department level.

●  Identifies subcultures within an organization and aligns them to the overall vision.

●  Creates ownership and engagement by recognizing localized needs and dynamics.

Who’s It For?

  • Subcultures that are at odds with the broader organizational culture.

  • Teams struggle to connect their work to the company’s bigger vision.

  • Departments or teams experiencing friction due to competing priorities.

  • Employees who feel burned out or skeptical about top-down initiatives.

“Organizations and teams with these symptoms are the ones Cityscapes was designed for.” —

Fault Lines

Are any of these visible in your organization?

  • Departments or teams operating in isolation, leading to inefficiencies, lack of cooperation, and missed opportunities for synergy.

  • Areas or teams within the organization where engagement and morale are significantly lower than average, often due to feeling overlooked, undervalued, or misaligned with the organizational culture.

  • Internal conflicts or misalignments due to diverse subcultures within the organization, impacting overall harmony and effectiveness.

The Process

Discover Your Cityscape
Facilitated workshops to guide teams through identifying their cultural persona using the 5 Cityscape templates.

Select Your Symbols
Teams choose visual symbols that reflect their current state and aspirations.

Build Your Cityscape
Create a customized “cityscape” that defines team identity and priorities.

Align with the Skyline
Integrate the team’s Cityscape with the organization’s broader cultural vision.

step-by-step breakdown of how Cityscapes works:

Sparks

Cityscapes addresses organizational challenges by:

  • Articulating the values and behaviors that best represent the distinct, localized cultures.

  • Fostering candid conversations to address variations and find common ground.

  • Promoting the harmonization of micro-cultures into the broader organizational culture.

  • Providing a visual shorthand for identifying opportunities for changes in values and norms.

Benefits

Localized Ownership
Empowers teams to define and take ownership of their unique culture.

Improved Alignment
Bridges the gap between team dynamics and organizational priorities.

Enhanced Collaboration
Reduces friction and improves synergy across departments.

Clarity and Engagement
Provides teams with a clear sense of identity, purpose, and belonging.

A bullet list showcasing the outcomes of Cityscapes:

Get Leadership On Board

We know bringing a new solution to leadership can be tricky. That’s why we’ve created a fact sheet to help you present Cityscapes to your C-Suite.