Robert Kegan - An everyone culture : Becoming a deliberately developmental organization

Among the deluge of books on leadership and culture that are published every year, only a few stand out as truly revolutionary. This book is one of them. It should be required reading for anyone in the field of talent management who is interested in dramatically accelerating the individual and collective capabilities of people at work. I highly recommend it!

WILLIAM H. HODGETTS , Vice President, Enterprise Coaching and Assessment, Fidelity Investments

Kegan and Laheys book Immunity to Change fundamentally improved my life when I first went through its exercises years ago, so I was eager to read their new book. It didnt disappoint. A thought-provoking and inspiring read, An Everyone Culture shows how small changes can help organizations, and individual leaders, reap huge rewards.

EMILY LAWSON , Chief People Officer, Kingfisher

This is a most provocative and challenging book in asking us to consider seriously how organizations can create workplace cultures that are effective as economic entities and, at the same time , develop all of their leaders, managers, and employees as human beings. If you want a book that will make you think differently about what an organization could be and how you could lead people differently, this book is for you.

EDGAR H. SCHEIN , author, Humble Inquiry

In this remarkable book, Kegan and Lahey prescribe a radically new paradigm of organizational life. They examine in detail three organizationseach an exemplary performer in its fieldthat valorize the emotional growth of every organizational participant and engage in unrelenting discipline to make every aspect of organizational life a forcing bed for that growth. Not since Deming extinguished Taylorism has anyone offered such a profound challenge to our conventional notions of how to achieve exceptional organizational performance.

HARRY SPENCE , Court Administrator, Massachusetts Trial Court

In a world of constant change and ever-increasing challenges, companies need to learn how to unleash the full potential of their employees. Kegan and Lahey explain how organizations can become deliberately developmental to boost employee satisfaction while also achieving great business results.

DANIEL VASELLA, MD , former Chairman and CEO, Novartis AG

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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.