What’s the Difference Between Climate and Culture?

Working with a global financial services company presently, we are helping their leaders drive change in a rapidly changing, highly complex industry.

Their leaders know they need to do two things exceptionally well in order to steer the titanic-sized organization in the desired new direction:

1. Understand and mitigate their own individual response to change
2. Help both their teams and customers navigate change and buy in to new products and services

At an enterprise level, the culture must change to one that optimizes and enables the new business strategy. For an entire system of diverse human beings, this takes time, time that most organizations don’t have. How to do this efficiently?

First is to make a clear distinction between climate and culture. Leaders influence culture. Collectively though, they can change it. Just communicating this distinction reduces the overwhelm and increases the perception of influence and success for many leaders.

Next is to provide clear and practical tools and learning for creating a high-performance climate. In our work, we refer to this ideal set of conditions as Neurosafety. Leaders who keep a pulse on and fine-tune the climate on their own teams every single day can make a big difference in transforming the organization’s culture. A sustained effort in that direction, along with regular positive recognition of those who do this promptly and consistently, will inoculate an organization with higher capacity to navigate the treacherous waters of transformation and change.

Key Team Climate Questions

The following questions will help determine your own team’s climate:

1. How engaged and productive are our meetings?
2. How would I rate our information sharing on a scale of 1 – 10/10?
3. How excited are people about their goals?
4. How often are people contributing new ideas and solutions?
5. How well do I understand what each person on my team is most passionate about?

The best news in all this: Optimizing team climate so everyone feels safe is not dependent on any expensive system upgrade or technology. It’s a skill set. And every leader can learn how to strengthen it.

Noesis delivers neuroleadership consulting and training to organizations handling everyday change and major transformation initiatives. We help our Fortune 500 clients scientifically improve leadership.