Problem: Breaking Down Silos and Building Continuity in a City of Change
When Tim Kelly was elected Mayor of Chattanooga in 2021, he stepped into a government that, in many ways, mirrored the complexities of the city it served- complex, passionate, and in need of connection. Across 2,600 employees and dozens of departments, people worked hard but not necessarily together. The city’s structure, like many municipal organizations, was fragmented into silos that limited collaboration and slowed progress.
Each election cycle compounded the issue. With new leadership often came new priorities and a reshuffling of people, strategies, and energy. Institutional knowledge evaporated with each transition, leaving teams to rebuild relationships and relearn communication patterns every few years. In Mayor Kelly’s words,
“One of the real problems that government has is that we really don’t have any obvious competitors, so there is not any force to really keep the enterprise on its toes, as it were...HR completely lost sight of the notion of building a healthy workplace culture and building functional teams”
Nowhere was this challenge clearer than in Human Resources, which had become a largely clerical operation that focused on compliance rather than creating culture. Employee engagement lagged, team morale fluctuated, and departmental cooperation felt more transactional than collaborative.
City leaders knew something had to change. They needed a system that could survive beyond political cycles, a cultural framework that would allow people from vastly different teams to understand each other, communicate effectively, and maintain consistency through transitions. What they lacked was a shared language; a way to name and navigate the invisible dynamics that shaped how people worked together.
Solution: Establishing Birkman as a Common Language
Mayor Kelly’s background as an entrepreneur and his time at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School gave him exposure to The Birkman Method. He remembered how transformative it had been for his own leadership journey and realized it might be exactly what the City of Chattanooga needed.
Starting with Awareness
Kelly began by addressing what he saw as the city’s most immediate barrier: a lack of self-understanding among its leaders. “Know yourself as a leader, and if you don’t, you can’t hope to manage other people well,” he often reminded his team. The city partnered with Birkman-certified consultant Mike Harrell to pilot the program within the Mayor’s Office.
The first sessions were met with healthy skepticism. Government employees weren’t accustomed to discussing Stress Behaviors or motivational needs in a professional context. Yet, once the team completed their assessments and began reviewing their profiles, lightbulbs began to turn on.
For the first time, senior staff could see how their different thinking styles, work habits, and needs affected communication. They realized that conflict wasn’t always personal; often, it was a mismatch in expectations or a misunderstanding of motivation.
What had started as an experiment quickly became the foundation for a new way of operating. Birkman offered something rare in government: a mirror that reflected how people truly worked and communicated, not just what their job descriptions said.
Scaling the Approach
Recognizing the success of the pilot, Kelly turned to Chief Operating Officer Mande Green, who had been serving as Chief Human Resources Officer at the time, to scale the program. Green understood the opportunity immediately: by expanding Birkman into cohorts, cross-departmental groups participating together, the city could begin to dismantle silos through shared learning.
Cohorts were intentionally diverse, mixing supervisors and staff from different departments such as Transportation, Parks and Outdoors, and Community Development. Participants completed their assessments, attended workshops, and engaged in open discussions about their communication preferences and Stress Behaviors.
It wasn’t always smooth. Some groups took longer to warm up than others; one cohort, Green admitted, “didn’t go as well as we’d hoped.” But even those sessions provided value. Employees began to recognize patterns in themselves and others, learning that disagreement did not have to mean dysfunction.
Melody Wingfield, who succeeded Green as Chief Human Resources Officer, became one of the strongest champions of the program. She integrated Birkman into everyday HR operations by hanging color-coded team maps, referencing profiles in performance discussions, and using Birkman insights to guide onboarding and everyday office culture. Birkman is not just a tool; it is the language for how her team works together.
Introducing MyBirkman
To ensure the initiative had lasting power beyond one administration, the city implemented MyBirkman, a digital platform that makes individual and team insights accessible in real time.
Through MyBirkman, leaders could:
- Review communication tendencies before meetings.
- Navigate interpersonal challenges using data instead of assumptions.
- Help new employees quickly understand team culture.
- Retain consistency and knowledge even when staff or leadership changes.
For the Mayor’s leadership team, MyBirkman became what Kelly jokingly called a “management phrasebook.” Over time, that phrasebook turned into fluency. “It’s like being fluent in French,” he explained. “Once you know it, you don’t pull out the guide anymore-you just speak it.”
The platform transformed what could have been a one-off training initiative into a sustained cultural practice, embedding self-awareness into daily operations and creating continuity that extended far beyond election cycles.
A Framework for the Future
As departments and teams grew more fluent in the Birkman language, they began applying it to practical, day-to-day challenges. The tool became integral to project planning, team alignment, and resolving conflicts. Miles Huff, Director of the Office of New Chattanoogans, noted that the shared vocabulary fundamentally shifted the tone of collaboration, helping teams recognize their common goals and communicate more effectively.
This language transcended roles, titles, and politics. Whether an engineer, HR director, or communications manager, everyone could point to a color or need pattern and immediately understand the underlying message. The city, once marked by misalignment, was developing its own organizational dialect of empathy and efficiency.
Result: A Connected, Self-Aware, and Sustainable City Culture
The transformation didn’t happen overnight, but it was measurable. Over months of workshops, coaching, and digital reinforcement, Chattanooga’s workforce began to operate differently. Centered around being more intentional, more empathetic, and more aligned.
1. From Silos to Systems
Departments that had once worked independently began to coordinate more smoothly. Instead of competing priorities or parallel efforts, teams now approach challenges with shared understanding. When conflict arose, employees could articulate it in neutral, constructive terms: “I need more structure,” or “I process information differently.”
This ability to translate behavior into language shifted communication from emotional reactions to mutual problem-solving. Projects accelerated, meetings became shorter and more focused, and cross-department initiatives ran with greater consistency. Managers who once felt isolated discovered a network of peers within the organization they could rely on for support and permission to do so.
2. Strengthened Leadership Continuity
One of the city’s greatest long-term wins was continuity through change. As elections and internal promotions reshaped leadership, the Birkman framework provided a cultural through-line that remained constant.
New department heads inherited not just staff, but a shared understanding of how people worked best. MyBirkman helped ensure that this knowledge was retained despite inevitable turnover, allowing for consistent and collaborative productivity and alignment. For a government that used to reinvent itself every four years, this approach was revolutionary.
As Mayor Kelly put it,
“If Birkman outlives me, I’ll have left a great legacy ”, a high-functioning city that understands itself.”
3. A Shift in Management Mindset
Before Birkman, HR decisions often relied on observation and departmental experience. Birkman replaced guesswork with insight, giving managers a data-driven approach for their teams and the foresight to recognize and resolve conflict before it escalated.
Melody Wingfield’s HR department became a model of applied psychology in the public sector, using Birkman insights to foster psychological safety, role alignment, and coach leaders to adapt their communication styles.
Even skeptics came around. As one manager admitted during a debrief, “I thought this would be touchy-feely. Now I use it every time I prepare for a tough conversation.”
4. Emotional Intelligence as a Competitive Advantage
Although the city doesn’t face competition in a market sense, Birkman gave Chattanooga a competitive edge in effectiveness. The workforce became more emotionally intelligent, capable of navigating stress and collaboration with ease. The lessons from The Arbinger Institute’s book Leadership and Self-Deception, which Kelly recommended to his team, resonated even more deeply when paired with Birkman Insights about personal blind spots and self-management.
This internal growth translated outward: citizens experienced a government that communicated more clearly, responded more consistently, and worked together more effectively.
5. A Sustainable Culture of Understanding
Perhaps the most profound result was cultural sustainability. With Birkman woven into the city’s HR processes- onboarding, leadership development, and conflict resolution—it became part of Chattanooga’s DNA.
Turnover, once a destabilizing force, no longer disrupts organizational rhythm. Each new employee entered an environment fluent in a language of clarity, empathy, and accountability.
Conclusion: The Legacy of a Shared Language
The City of Chattanooga’s journey with Birkman demonstrates that transformation doesn’t always begin with sweeping policy or technology. It begins with people learning to understand each other.
What began as a simple assessment evolved into a cultural backbone, bridging the gaps created by silos, turnover, and inevitable change. Through The Birkman Method and the MyBirkman platform, Chattanooga replaced fragmentation with fluency, a common language that connects employees across tenures, roles, and administrations.
Today, whether discussing a budget, planning a park, or coordinating emergency services, Chattanooga’s leaders speak that same language—one grounded in self-awareness, empathy, and shared purpose. And in doing so, they’ve proven that even in government, where change is inevitable, continuity is possible when people truly understand themselves and each other.
