KnowledgeBrief clients were joined this month by Andy Wilkins, Cass Business School, to explore how leaders can immediately improve innovation and high performance in their organisation through strategically using the power of climate.
All leaders within all organisations are at all-times creating a climate. This is whether they do it deliberately or not. However, for various reasons, climate is often poorly understood and neither developed effectively or used sufficiently.
First, although the terms culture and climate are often used interchangeably, it’s important to distinguish between the two:
- Culture: The values and beliefs that reflect the deeper foundations of the organisation.
- Climate: The observable habits that characterise life in an organisation.
According to Andy Wilkins, Visiting Fellow at Cass Business School, changing the deeper foundation of an organisation is a long-term transformation process that, even when successful, can take up to 10 years to implement and embed. Changing the observable habits that characterise your organisation, on the other hand, can be implemented and measured immediately.
Leaders need to understand that 60-80% of the perception of an organisation’s climate is greatly influenced by local leadership behaviours. Leaders must consider what types of behaviour may be influencing the climate, positively and negatively. The good part is that it is easy to change behaviour, in order to trigger creativity, growth and innovation.
Research suggests that organisations should focus on nine dimensions of climate to better understand and strategically attend to climate. These are: challenge and involvement; freedom; idea time; idea support; trust and openness; playfulness and humour; (reducing) conflicts; debates; risk-taking.
Here are some key recommendations taken from this month’s Innovation Day to develop climate:
- Make fostering climate an organisational priority
- Develop leadership competencies to support climate awareness
- Equip management with skills and knowledge to foster climate
- Measure (formally or less formally) the climate for innovation in the organisation or teams
- Assess the potential inhibitors to implement climate
- Consider what behaviour may be driving the wrong climate.
Next month, Innovation Programme clients – including Virgin Media, Devon Air Ambulance Trust and Cafcass – will explore what we can learn from those that have successfully transformed their capabilities from ‘product-centric’ to ‘service-centric’ solutions, and the pathways they have taken to achieve this transformation. For more information, please view the Innovation Day page.