Abstract
A single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day is that most of its people are spending time and energy to cover their weaknesses, managing other’s impression on them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics and hiding their uncertainties. Kegan and Lahey through this book pose the question as: “[W]hat does it cost you to live a double life at work, every day, knowing you are not the person you present yourself to be?” Even worse for the organization is that, when people are hiding their weaknesses they have less chance to overcome them, and then the organization need to pay the cost of these limitations literally every day.
What is the alternative? Let’s imagine for valuing the importance of developing people’s capabilities that can design a culture which immersively sweeps every member of the organization into an ongoing developmental journey in the course of working every day. Imagine, finding oneself in a trustworthy environment, one that tolerates—even prefers—making one’s weakness public so that colleagues can support in the process of overcoming them. Well! the book An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organisation is the provocative recasting of human and organizational potential to transform how people visualize the work and work culture in the twenty-first century. Kegan and Lahey has devoted a good amount of their professional lives to the study and advancement of adult-developmental theory that illuminates the gradual evolution of deriving meaning from the work one does and the usage of psychological capabilities to derive happiness out of their job. Developmental practitioners have known for years how to provide expert support to individuals on a one-to-one basis. However, little attention has been given to applying these principles and methods to an entire organization. This book is much about realizing organizational potential as it is about realizing human potential. Through this book, authors have prescribed a new model of people development for the way each person can contribute to the other by becoming resources for development to themselves, and thus making an organization flourish as an organization. Precisely, Kegan and Lahey pushed the limits of the people development through offering the concept of “deliberately developmental organization (DDO)” as a new standard to tackle the increasing complexity employees face today, as an individual.
In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, today’s organizations naturally need to expect more, and not less of themselves and the people who work for them. The distinctive quality of business challenges in a VUCA world is that they are as often adaptive as technical. Technical challenges are not necessarily easy, but they can be met by improvements to existing mindsets and organizations designs. Adaptive challenges can only be met by people and organizations exceeding themselves. Authors have cited three vibrant organizations tagging them as DDO as they are organized around the simple, but radical conviction that these organizations have prospered as they are core aligned with the people’s strongest motive, that is to grow. Kegan and Lahey believe that DDO may be the single best means for meeting adaptive challenges. The three leading organizations cited in the book embody this breakthrough approach. Sheltered with seven chapters, the book reveals the design principles, concrete practices and underlying science at the heart of DDOs—from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles.
Chapter 1 drops the reader into a ground level experience of a DDO suggesting that DDO can come in many flavours. DDO is not about developing employees’ skills better than one’s peers. Basically, it is about integrating deeper forms of personal learning into every aspect of life in the company. Kegan and Lahey raised a set of assumptions that runs in all DDOs: (a) enthusing the value of graciously growing during adulthood, (b) ways of structuring people’s growth directly in their work and (c) creating ways for empowering people to give and receive feedback. Authors have cited three DDOs—Next Jump, Decurion and Bridgewater—wherein they have a seamless integration of two pursuits as if they were a single goal: business excellence and the growth of people into more capable version of themselves through the work of the business. Next Jump’s culture puts helping others explicitly at the forefront, including the central importance of coaching as a way to grow while serving others. Decurion builds the strength of next generation learning communities as a way to create conditions for people to both grow as individuals and seize business opportunities fully. Bridgewater stands for the pursuit of what is true, no matter how inconvenient, both as a business necessity in the financial markets and as a path for personal evolution and cultural integrity.
One of the important takeaway is that each company cited in the chapter has their own distinct approaches, but interestingly what each emphasizes can be found in others as well. South Asian managers are basically found for allowing gaps to form between people, between plans and actions, and even between parts of “ourselves” so as to keep ourselves safe in the workplace. Rather than remaining aligned around a shared vision for the execution of an important project, for example, we may allow participants to each go their own way; we may quietly hope to deliver a less than full effort and not be called on it and so on. Whereas, members of a DDO engage in continuous efforts—in nearly every setting and form of communication—to achieve interpersonal and cognitive immediacy (rather than allowing members to hide themselves or their thinking in order to stay safe). Beyond merely setting goals and monitoring progress towards them, DDOs take a more fundamental approach to keeping collective work on track, despite the discomfort doing so may cause individuals. For example: at Decurion, every meeting is seen as a chance to “align intentions,” and at Bridgewater, the most valued state in the organization is to hold a common detailed “visualization” of how value will be created and then to work to stay “in synch” continuously with one’s colleagues.
Chapters 2 and 3 give the reader a bird’s eye view of the deliberately developmental organization, including its conceptual underpinnings and its common features across companies. Chapter 2 basically focuses on what we meant by developmental when we speak of a deliberately developmental organization. Chapter 3 takes the reader through 12 common features of a DDO, grouped according to their developmental aspirations, practices and sense of community. If the readers want to have a look and feel of DDO before getting a conceptual and generic understanding of DDO, going through the first three chapters of the book will help them. However, if one wants to see a bigger picture of DDO, the authors have advised readers to follow a more deductive sequence of the book, that is, to start reading the book with Chapters 2 and 3 and then go back to Chapter 1 for a fuller understanding.
Chapter 4 of the book, entitled “In the Groove: Practices and Practicing to Create an Every One Culture,” prescribes specific ways how individuals in DDOs engages in identifying their weaknesses and moving past their limiting patterns of thinking and acting. Therefore, understanding a DDO’s approach to practice will provide a much better sense of how to think about bringing practices into one’s own organization. A caution for South Asian managers is that simply copying the DDO practices may not work well for their establishments as it is not sufficient to give people time, space and rules for practicing. One must pay attention to create a culture of DDO practices, helping people to adopt the spirits, the intentions and the mindset underlying the DDO practices. Authors have also cautioned that without systematic transparency and trustworthiness, and clarity about the intentions of the company and its leaders, the DDO practices could end up being meaningless charades, things people pretended to do to keep their jobs but nothing more.
A more interesting question that may potentially arise to readers after going through the four chapters is the following: Do the companies succeed despite, or because of their unusual cultures? Are their successes and their DDO-hood mere coincidences, or does being a DDO contributed to their success? Chapter 5 addresses whether the exemplar business succeeds despite the attention they give to personal development or because of it. Authors have referred Decurion Company’s first principle: “at one” as their company’s vision states whether it is the individual overcoming the divided life, or the company overcoming the choice between profit and people both meet at one place. Decurion’s Christopher Forman in this context says, “We do not see a trade-off, and the moment we consider sacrificing one for the other, we recognize that we have lost both.” South Asian managers need to imbibe the culture of integrity, oneness, pursuing profitability and employee growth as one thing, indivisible as these features are emblematic ways of DDO. Kegan and Lahey recommended that, “if you care deeply about people, this might be the most powerful way to organize your culture—and it is possible to do so and still run a very successful business.”
Chapter 6 of the book provides a direct experience of one’s own growing edge. Authors have entitled this chapter as “uncovering your biggest blind spot” and included immunity to change (ITC) exercise as a method of overcoming individual blind spots. Answering a series of questions included in the ITC exercise may reveal how one is unconsciously getting in the way of achieving personal and professional goals and becoming one’s best self. Before undergoing the self-assessment exercise, Kegan and Lahey have recommended to receive inputs from superiors, colleagues, friends and families on few questions like the following:
[W]hat improvement would make the biggest difference in your evaluation of me and my potential in this organisation? What contribution could I make that would have the most impact? What would I need to get better at in order to make that contribution? What would enable me to serve you better? What would I need to get better at to do so?
An organization that can not only free their workers from the fear that accompanies being a continuously imperfect human being, while offering them an opportunity for personal development, will have a considerably more engaged, energized and efficient workforce. That is because, not only will workers not have to spend their time and energy hiding imperfections or managing others’ impressions, they will be actively improving on the job, which will improve the overall organization. Simply put, the best way for an organization to realize its full potential is by unleashing the previously untapped potential of its people. The authors call this kind of enterprise a DDO. One of the takeaways for South Asian HR practitioners that the authors have advanced in this book is the proposed model for organization-wide development incorporating three dimensions: aspirations, communities and practices. Aspirations are to develop a culture that relentlessly pushes people to grow, not only as employees but also as people. The idea of communities means, according to the authors of the book, that people must not only want to grow, but must be enabled to grow in safe and trustworthy communities. The concept of practices, as explained in the book, includes the actual organizational development practices and routines of an organization. Authors have called “edge” for aspiration, “home” for communities and “groove” for practices in advancing the concept of DDO.
Authors state that if the first six chapters of the book did create an interest in moving the workplace, the team, the department or the whole organization in the direction towards becoming a DDO, then the last chapter, that is, Chapter 7 would show the ways in which an organization could get started. A golden takeaway from Chapter 7 for South Asian managers is to look for opportunities to make one’s passion and thought known to top rung decision-makers of their respective organizations. “It is initially to take the stance that you should believe they could join you in your interests and efforts.” In this chapter, authors have explicitly stated to create a dialogue with the senior organizational functionaries through apprising them what excites for imagining being part of a DDO community. The seven chapters demonstrate a whole new way of being at work suggesting that the “culture you create is your strategy—and that the key to success is developing everyone.” The authors wisely resist the pressure to offer “ten easy steps” style checklists and recipes, choosing instead to articulate the rigorous scientific base on which their analysis stands, and a set of injunctions for anyone interested in investigating the viability of this new “Business DNA.”
Kegan and Lahey have engaged in a rigorous observation, incisive analysis and repeated testing on their own hypothesis throughout the book. They have laid out the templates, practices and learning tasks that anyone can take on and any organizational leader can choose to engage personally or for the organization as a whole. The book in a nutshell, not only shows how a DDO helps its people develop, but also how the DDO culture enables it to come up with original and effective means to meet its most vexing challenges (e.g., in most companies, people are found covering their weaknesses, looking their best and relentlessly tries for managing other people’s impressions instead of focusing on realizing organizational goals)—and capitalize on its most promising opportunities. The intentions of DDO leader of the three cited companies were to work hard on the culture of their organizations every day to enhance the business and the development of its employees. An important takeaway from their leadership skills is that the relationship between realizing human potential and organizational potential in those companies is dialectic and not a trade-off. It is believed that those companies have something provocative to teach about a new route to business success.
Finally, DDO raises one fundamental question that needs to be understood by learners and practitioners of HR fraternity is to understand what’s possible at work now—and what the future of work might be. The validity of the proposition made by Kegan and Lahey starts from the perspective of organizational performance and then considers the view from the individual employee’s side. Today’s organizations face more challenges than ever before and at an ever increasing pace. Meeting those challenges requires something more than smarter strategy; it requires smarter people—people who can overcome their blind spots, who are neither overly confident nor overly humble, who can stand on the field and get above it at the same time. DDO advocates for creating organizations in which people are unafraid to openly discuss their development goals, in essence creating a normative culture of learning and growth. In doing so, organizations reap immense benefits from the collective energy released when employees are encouraged to let their vulnerabilities “out of the closet” on behalf of learning and hence. Therefore, HR practitioners need to steer themselves to grow individual and collective capability and, in particular, the ability to transform their team, unit or organization. Kegan and Lahey stated that such “adaptive capacity” is not so easy to develop. It needs to be grown from within. For HR aspirants, especially the graduate and undergraduate student, reading this book will make them to experience how today workers’ search is for personal development can be fused with an organization’s pursuit of better performance. Particularly, HR aspirants seeking for specializing in the field of talent management may find this book more interesting as it may appreciate the individual and collective capabilities of people at work. DDOs seek to realize human potential, a part of which flows from the everyday act of supporting and witnessing others’ growth and flourishing, not just one’s own, from helping others become more fully themselves. The prescribed formula for success coined by the authors of the book is: “Better Me + Better You = Better Us.”
The approach of the three exemplar organizations cited in the book is interesting. Their attention for personnel development and the ways in which they have built development into their routine operations are noteworthy. We recommend HR scholars and managers to follow DDO principles for the betterment of their organization as it’s a whole new way of being at work, where the key to success is developing everyone. Albeit the merits, somehow we have found that the writing style continues to be difficult after Chapter 4, making those great ideas paralleling human individual development with our behaviours in groups somewhat inaccessible. The last two chapters seemed a bit disconnected to us and read somewhat like an advertisement for the authors’ consulting services. However, as a whole, the book is inspiring, challenging and deeply thoughtful. It provides a vision for how an organizational environment could truly support profound individual, organizational growth and the foundation for what needs to be present to do this in a healthy way.