One of the professional development training items that’s been on my to-read list was the book An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Development Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.
This post gives a quick overview of what I learned, with more details to be found in this PDF.
Overview
For deliberately developmental organizations (DDOs) human potential and organizational potential are not tradeoffs — they are a single mission. It’s possible for a company to create a culture where people can grow and thrive, yet still stay in business. The authors studied three companies that have done just that, and the result is a distillation of the aspirations, communities, and practices that make them successful.
The book stresses the importance of workplace culture and provides some background about how human development works so that those two things can align. Each of the companies studied implement things a bit differently, and the authors provide numerous examples of how those companies are successful because of rather than in spite of being more people-focused than a traditional company.
The last two chapters provide some “homework” for the reader. First is the Immunity To Change map, where you find something you want to improve and do the introspective work of figuring out why the change isn’t already happening. Second is a list of things to start considering or doing to help transition yourself (or your company) to have a DDO mindset.
An “everyone culture”
- does what human development science recommends
- takes concepts to scale so everyone can develop
- intentionally and continuously nourishes a culture that puts business and individual development front and center
Some resonating quotations:
“Because ‘the company’ is, at any given moment, the emergent result of the existing processes of people working together in communities, everyone is expected to contribute to the observation, diagnosis, and revision of the processes at the heart of the work.”
“I mean, really. Over these same fifty years have we made no similar, game-changing gains in our basic knowledge of human beings, how we learn and grow — and how we resist doing both of those things? Do we have no genuinely new ways of applying the knowledge we do have? Are we to expect that mere tweaks of the existing paradigms for people development will be enough to unleash unrealized potential? Are we left with nothing more than hoping that doing the same thing, only harder, will lead to a different result?”
“There are indeed places for labor that can transform the meaningfulness of the single greatest use we make of our waking hours of our lives.”