On School Climate vs Culture

We spend a lot of time, these days, working in schools in different parts of the world. Walking on to campus for the first time, everything is new and unfamiliar. After all, even if the component parts of school are broadly the same, the faces are unfamiliar, the wayfinding is not always straightforward, and the security protocols are almost always a little different from the last place we happened to be.

What I've started to notice, however, is how quickly it is possible to get a feeling about “how things are around here.” Almost without thinking about it, within a few hours, we've built an understanding of the place that goes far deeper than what we see and hear around us.

In his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell refers to this phenomenon as thin-slicing. “Thin-slicing,” he writes, “is the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”

But our brain's ability to experience one part of something and then act as if we've experienced the whole, making broad judgements based on a "slice” of reality, is not all good news. These inferences can be accurate, but they can also be flawed due to unconscious biases, stereotypes, or misleading cues. The trick, says Gladwell, is to understand that this is how we tend to build perceptions, recognise the limits of our cognition, and remember that there are times when we will need to slow down and look again 

So when we walk on to campus, it seems that we're picking up on the organisational climate, which is the sum of all the perceptions that we are starting to make about a place. We need to be careful, however, not to confuse these perceptions with organisational culture, as Adrian Florea explains in his new book Stell*r: A Practical Guide to Managing Organizational Culture. 

Organizational culture refers to behaviors, observable and measurable things, and relates to how things are done around here… the repeated, regular, normal, and natural behaviors  that individuals adopt - sometimes without realizing it - which we call habits and which, when combined, define organizational culture.

What Florea is helping us to see, here, is that culture is not something that I sense or perceive, but the tangible behaviours and habits that define an organisation's identity. Or, in his own words, “Organizational culture is the sum of the habits of the people in the organisation… [and] Leadership is the act of managing organizational culture.”

This move from “the way things are around here” to “the way we do things around here”, is subtle but important. And it's making me think about what it would be like to spend more time trying to articulate for prospective families and employees the habits that we are building across the organisation, if we even understand what they are. And if we don't, it might be worth grabbing a pen and starting to write down those habits and behaviours that are going to get us closer to where we need to go, starting with what’s lived: how people actually behave, how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, how praise is given. What do people do when no one is watching? What’s rewarded, tolerated, or quietly ignored?

By surfacing these habits, we start to build ways of talking honestly about culture—not just what we aspire to be, but who we are. And in that clarity lies the power to lead with purpose, not just perception.

Photo by Vladislav Vasilev on Unsplash.