Once you start talking about climate in an organization, people want to know what this “climate idea” is good for.  Because if you turn it over a couple of times, it may just look like a theory.  What is climate thinking good for?

Climate is not really about happiness

Climate…

• Objectively reflects what people experience at work.  So first, it’s information you can only guess at today.  And you really do want to know what’s inside your team’s heads.
• Measures six dimensions of work that directly relate to people’s motivation and performance.  You don’t need a decoder ring to figure out what to do next.
• Measures the way leaders and managers are creating “the experience of work here.”  You don’t need to look somewhere else.  You can change climate.

Side note about leadership and managing

While managers should lead and most leaders also manage, they’re not the same capabilities.  I’m cribbing from John Kotter.  Leaders address and chart a course through complexity to achieve a set of objectives.  That means adapting to constant change.  Managers bring order and consistency to work so that it achieves those objectives.  That also means adapting to constant change.  This is not a caste distinction.  The organization needs as much of both as it can get.  But when we talk about climate, I’ll say “managers” and mean everyone who leads and manages.  Because they’re the ones who create climate, change climate, and are responsible for what it’s like to work around here.

Climate dimensions make sense

The power of climate lies in the way it readily makes sense.  People tend to be motivated by their work along these six dimensions (6D):

• Structure and clarity
• Standards
• Responsibility
• Recognition
• Teamwork or support
• Commitment

Even before I describe what these might mean, it’s not hard to see that giving people the right degree of responsibility for their work could be motivating, especially if you’ve recruited people who are motivated by a sense of autonomy.  Right away, ideas about how to give people still more responsibility as a reward for their growing expertise come to mind.  That leads to envisoning ways to make sure the standards for greater responsibility are clear, stated objectively, and then offered to anyone who will strive to meet higher standards of performance.

Remember that the first use of climate is to measure what it’s like “around here” today.  Low scores aren’t indicators that people aren’t happy.  (You’ve read survey results like those.  Do you really want to spend your time on making people happy?)  Climate scores show what to focus on.

But it is managers’ responsibility to exercise expertise and judgment to determine the right tactics.  They decide how much is enough of, say, teamwork and pressure to achieve high standards.  The objective is not to make people happy, but to help them be effective, and ensure that they can expect to be effective.  You may make them happy as well.

If you were given the list above and told to manage your people using only these six dimensions as tools, what would be left out?

So for example, focus on responsibility.  Where would the work and the experience of work improve if your people could exercise more autonomy and take responsibility for it?

Before I try to interpret the idea and uses of climate in the culture I work in, I need to give credit to the thinkers and practitioners who uncovered and developed the idea.

First, my colleague and a mentor, Michael Maginn.  When I told Mike a story about how challenging it is to face change constructively, we sound found ourselves discussing motivation and leadership.  Those themes pointed him toward my new favorite thinker and synthesizer of big ideas, Robert Stringer.

With George Litwin, Stringer measured types and characteristics of motivation.  They identified what would become six “dimensions,” the social science term for what you and I would call buckets.  In each bucket is a set of perceptions about the organization that describe subjective experience.  They then developed a survey that uncovers those perceptions.  It gets what people feel out in the open.  With enough data, it’s possible to express how strongly people feel about “what it’s like to work here” on a relative scale.

But the purpose of uncovering people’s feelings is not to help them feel better about working here.  The subjective experience of work is predictive of a number of important features that are effective:  ability to recruit strong candidates, ability to retain the best people, the extent to which people will engage with the work and make a commitment to the organization.

If you’ve been following the popular literature on employee engagement, you’ll know that the biggest difference between engaged and disengaged employees are:

• Whether motivation is triggered by the objectives set out for them and by the experience of trying to acheive them.
• Whether they are committed to the organization, which ripples far beyond work in what they say about the organization, whether others should join, whether people should do business with the organization, and whether it is on the right track.

What’s thrilling about Stringer (and his precursors and colleagues – more on them later) is that they have researched issues of motivation and identified many of the causal influences on it for more than forty years.  Engagement is just the current word for it.  (“Motivating employees” still sounds like thank you luncheons with the boss, attaboys, and at worst, a sophisticated psychic cattle prod.)

Undoubtedly there’s value in recognition and much has been learned since the first studies were carried out.  In fact, Stringers Leadership and Organizational Climate is only a few years old.  But the ideas have been tested and have stood up.  I hope they never become as catchy and popular as “engagement,” which will suffer under the weight of expectations placed on it.  I can easily see how climate is the thing you forget about once you’re factored its dimensions into the way you measure, manage, and lead the organization.

I started my job as a training guy, but I’ve become interested in making the place a better place to work.  I’ve been invited to play a role in projects that, if brought to conclusion, really have the potential to do that.  They are:

• Changing the weather (tag: climate)
• Certifying specialists’ skills (tag: certification)
• Setting high performance standards through training (tag: training->performance)
• Redefining work as performance (tag: measure_performance)

(You should be able to follow these stories by watching out for the tags.  My goal is to reflect on each of these efforts week in and week out to learn from experience and make sense of it if I can.)

Except for training, where the project is squarely on my desk, the most important fact about about these projects is that someone else is leading them.  I respect these people and what they are trying to accomplish.  I also do not think they’d describe those efforts as I have.  They may not recognize yet how challenging the projects will become.  However, they’re right to think that this work can solve problems. By persisting, they’re also right to think they’ll have impact on the way we work that could be felt for many years.

Everyone talks about it but no one does anything to change it

Changing the weather is code.  But you knew that.  I mean “climate” which is how industrial psychologists since the 1960s have distinguished organizational culture from something more local and subjective.  Culture is slow-moving and conservative. It might compare with the changing surface of the earth.  Change, yes, but day to day, it’s imperceptible.

Climate, or to make it still more accessible, “the prevailing weather around here,” attempts to capture how people exerience work.  People who make up the organization are likely not aware of many aspect of culture.  But if you ask them, “What’s it like to work here?  How does it compare with last year?” they are sure to have a perception to share.

The only reason to try to change the weather is that a little more sun, or a little more snow might trigger people’s inner motivations and harness them in ways that make the work better and the experience of it more rewarding.