A Radical New Model for Unleashing Your Company's Potential
In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for-namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people's impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company's resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.
What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone-not just select "high potentials"-could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies-Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people's strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning "people development" to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people's development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company's regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.
An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It 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. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations.
This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy-and that the key to success is developing everyone.
"This book speaks to the heart of what I believe: Our work environments are the perfect learning laboratories. Our focus needs to not just be on individual learning, but also on building the processes, tools, and organizational system for learning to take place-and stick."
Melissa Daimler, Senior Vice President, Talent Acquisition and Development, WeWork
"If you want to stay on the cutting edge of how our culture thinks about work, you might browse Rob Kegan and Lisa Lahey's latest book, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, which will urge you to measure the meaning of your work not by how much you like or value it, but by how much it makes you grow up, and past the edge of your current limits."
The Advertiser (Australia)
"Could it be that workplaces can become the ultimate forum to help people become greater than they think possible? Read this book to find out."
