Robert Kegan - AnEveryone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

I n an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other peoples impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding.

We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: it prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.

The organizations you will meet in this book, taken together, point the way to a qualitatively new model for people development the single most powerful way we know of, as developmental psychologists, for an organization to unleash the potential of its people.

And with what result? These exemplar organizations, taken as a whole, show us a picture of the following benefits:

• Increases in profitability, improved employee retention, greater speed to promotability, greater frankness in communication, better error detection in operational and strategic design, more effective delegation, and enhanced accountability
• Reductions in cost structures, political maneuvering, interdepartmental strife, employee downtime, and disengagement
• Solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as: how to convert the familiar team of leaders (each looking out for his own franchise) into the more valuable, but elusive, leadership team; how to anticipate crises no one in the company has experienced previously and to successfully manage through them; how to invent and realize future possibilities no one has experienced previously

In short, this book is as much about realizing organizational potential as it is about realizing human potential. Most of all, this book describes a new model for the way each can contribute to the otherhow organizations and their people can become dramatically greater resources to support each others flourishing.

Now lets return to the ordinary organization where everyone works a second job of hiding imperfections. Consider it from the employers point of view. Imagine youre paying a full-time wage for part-time work to every employee, every day. Even worse, consider that when people are hiding their weaknesses they have less chance to overcome them, so you must continue to pay the cost of these limitations as wellevery day.

Consider the second job from the employees point of view. What does it cost you to live a double life at work, every day, knowing youre not the person you present yourself to be? As human beings were set up to protect ourselvesbut it is just as true that were set up to grow psychologically, to evolve, to develop. In fact, research shows that the single biggest cause of work burnout is not work overload, but working too long without experiencing your own personal development. Now consider the drag or cap on personal development we create by hiding our weaknesses rather than having a regular opportunity to overcome them.

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (the so-called VUCA world)a world of new challenges and opportunitiesorganizations naturally need to expect more , and not less, of themselves and the people who work for them. But our familiar organizational design fails to match that need.

How did we come to this observation about everyone in the ordinary organization doing a second job? Was it by staring hard at the ordinary organization? No. When youre staring very hard at the normal organization, its hard to see anything but normal.

Normal began to look strange to us only after we stared hard at organizations where no one is doing the second job. Different as the companies in this book are in their look and feel, they share a striking commonality: they are the most powerful settings in the world we have found for developing peoples capabilities, precisely because they have created a safe enough and demanding enough culture that everyone comes out of hiding. This is what we call the deliberately developmental organization: the DDO.