Climate, not Culture
When looking to embed high performance and change, and improve areas such as creativity and innovation, leaders should first look at the climate within the organisation.
A big challenge for organisations is to achieve real and sustainable change. One reason is that many organisations easily slip back into habits, patterns and behaviours associated with the “old way of doing things” and automatically limit the potential effectiveness of their efforts. However, according to Andy Wilkins, Partner at Perspectiv LLP, leaders can immediately improve the psychological environment for innovation and high performance in their organisation: through the power of climate.
If you as a leader learn to understand and strategically use climate, you have the opportunity to influence your organisation’s processes in almost a heartbeat. First, there are important distinctions for leaders to make between climate and culture.
Important distinctions between climate and culture:
- Culture is a broader concept than climate. To understand culture, it may be necessary to look at an entire organisation. Whereas if you attend to climate, it is much more situational and relates to individuals and their perceptions of a project, group or division, or other units of analysis.
- Culture is descriptive, meaning that one culture and its underlying assumptions and values may be no better or worse than any other culture. Climate is normative, meaning that we are looking for environments that are better suited to certain things. With climate, the more we are able to perceive certain dimensions, the better. It is quantifiable. Climate is measurable and worth measuring.
- Climate is distinct from culture in that it is more easily observable and more amenable to improvement efforts. It enables us to act our way into a new way of thinking. Climate is improvable.
Sources: Isaksen, S.G. and Lauer, K.J. (2002) The Climate for Creativity and Change in Teams, Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002; Wilkins, A. and Stuart-Cox, K. (2013) Context, Climate and Culture, Perspectiv LLP; Wilkins, A. and Stuart-Cox, K. (2013) About social context: climate, culture, context, work environment, Perspectiv LLP
Action Point
Using this distinction between culture and climate, assess whether the climate in particular areas or projects could be usefully improved.