Climate change (at work): Managers hear and respond

Making climate the managers’ agenda

The Boss, with support from two senior managers who have teams of three to five managers  each and therefore will have the most responsibility for driving climate results, agreed to present the climate idea to all managers.

The first discussion was intended to be an introduction, overview, and an opportunity to recognize our role – I’m a manager, too – in creating climate.  To make the case that we should do introduce another set of concepts for working together now, the Boss began with a restatement of negative staff feedback (that is, survey results from August 2009 and confirming input from a December 2009 focus group with all staff).  Using that information as a statement of the problem, she introduced climate as a way to focus on changing the experience of work in our group through disciplined management practice.  I summarized where the climate idea came from and why it’s a fit for the group’s needs.

Specifically, climate is the right framework because t’s research-based, but practical, flexible, and measurable.  We will be able to evaluate whether manager’s actions affect climate.   Climate allows us to focus on a manageable number of dimensions (only six).  On the face of it, those dimensions reflect values we all want and would like to produce in the workplace.  Because we suspected that ours is a climate with a low sense of individual responsibility (and a high sense of collective responsibility), prescribing how managers should manage was likely to take away their responsibility for identifying and putting solutions in place.  Climate places responsibility, accountability, and action squarely on a managers.  We wrapped this part of the meeting by discussing the climate dimension definitions, which I’d pared to a simple statement for each that, in spite of being subject to interpretation, were easy to understand.

Then I led the “climate Rohrschak test” by asking:

What do you think our climate profile looks like?

Introduction, then integration

Integration is what a friend calls “appropriating” the idea:  you mull it, restate it in your own terms, test its limits, imagine applying it, and inevitably, doubt it.  This is where people’s sense of possibility and closely held assumptions come to light.

A small group loudly represented what can only be called the status quo.  (No judgment intended.  After all, what if they’re right that breaking a fragile system may make it impossible to repair?)  Here’s what I heard them say:  our priorities are set by others, primarily by deadlines that neither we nor our clients can influence; as a manager I don’t have much control over circumstances, work, or the way people on my team work; that’s “the nature of our work.”  That’s all true, unless we do have control over more than these assumptions permit.  That is the work of the next few months.

Let’s do a survey

One surprising result of the meeting was that many people wanted to take a baseline reading and learn the climate profile of the organization.  This is great news.