If you are already a leader and lead a team or an organisation, I am pretty sure that you have at some point in time considered the questions around culture. The current discourse about culture is that this is an important element that could potentially determine a lot of things including your efficacy as a leader and the performance of your team or organisation.
There is a lot of talk about the importance of building an inclusive culture or a creative culture or an innovative culture or a diverse culture, etc. In the recent past, I have been adding to this conversation as well.
Early next week, I am scheduled to speak to a set of leaders about organisational culture, its importance, different kinds of culture and so on and so forth. When thinking about how to explain culture in a simple metaphor, I stumbled upon the metaphor of climate.
Culture is like Climate.
Just like we have a macroclimate (weather in SIngapore during November) and a microclimate (weather in Pasir Panjang road on 8th Nov at 10:00AM), we can have an organisational culture or a corporate culture and a team or departmental culture. Both of these could be the same or be contrasting to each other as well.
Climate is dynamic and is always evolving, the culture within our team is also dynamic and is always evolving.
You can predict what the climate would be like in the near term but not in the mid-to-long term. Same way, you can reasonably predict the culture within your team in the near-term but will find it extremely difficult to do so over the mid-to-long term.
You may not be able to design your climate but you can control your macro environment by use of technology (AC, heaters, fans, carrying an umbrella when it is expected to rain, etc). Similarly, though we may not be able to design a specific culture but can put in place mechanisms to control our macro-environment (who and why we promote, hire or fire, who is recognised, what actions are praised, what is the in-group or the successful group of people do for which they are praised, etc).
In conclusion, thinking of culture from within the frame of climate allows us to understand culture better and also gives us the levers that we can use to either adapt to the culture or put in place interventions to tackle the adverse effects of an existing culture.
As a leader, you can not escape the culture conversation and knowing how to think in frames like this enables us to learn more about culture in general and our team culture in particular.
Hope this was of help!
