An Everyone Culture
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.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
9mentions
6people
2016–2019years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've found Kegan's work to be an extremely useful lens on the world, and I've found his research with Lisa Lahey to be extremely useful both for my personal development and for my company. We currently have a pilot program implementing insights from their books An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (one of the best books I've read in years, and I read a lot) and Immunity to Change, and I think it's made a significant difference for those who are taking part in the pilot and for the company in general.
- I'll end the year at 83 or 84 books for the year (depends on what I choose to start once I get home from the day's festivities), and here were the highlights for me:
1. An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, et al
An Everyone Culture profiles three high-performing companies that look very different, but all share the assumption that developing the company's people is not a contrary goal to developing the business, and is in fact a great path to getting you there. I read it with a group of my partners in my company, and we came out of it with an actionable pilot program that has gone incredibly well so far and has begun to expand. I read this one twice.
2. The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson
I avoided Sanderson because of the hype and book length despite years of recommendations from people who know what I find interesting in books. That was a mistake, and this year I fixed it, reading about twenty of his books. They're all in my top half for the year (and I consider the top 85-90% to have been worth reading), but The Stormlight Archive (beginning with The Way of Kings) comes out on top. Fantastic magic system, complex plot, and lucid writing. Check it out!
3. The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan
Think of this as a giant Less Wrong post by an economist on the value of education. Caplan explains his theory of the value of education (which he doesn't discount), and shows convincingly that much of the system as it currently stands is wasteful for society. I came in skeptical (having benefitted personally and professionally from my nineteen years of school), but I came out convinced. Highly recommended for anyone who reads SSC or Less Wrong and says "I'd love a book that argued a premise that carefully."
4. The Three-Body trilogy by Cixin Liu
Masterpiece of SF lit. For fans of hard SF only. The prose is not wonderful (as the author himself will tell you), but it's truly wonderful, and deserves all the considerable praise it's gotten over the years. I found the style fascinatingly different and refreshing, having never read much Eastern lit.
5. Measure What Matters by John Doerr
There's a reason this gets recommended so often, and I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to get to it. After reading I immediately worked toward implementing OKRs in part of my company, and will work towards pushing it throughout. It's a messy process at the beginning, but after a few months we're already seeing some improvements (and the process has revealed some weaknesses we could work on as well).
6. Letters to Lucilius by Seneca
I reread this periodically, and it always ends up in my top books of the year. Seneca's Stoicism bears none of the toxic asceticism attributed by its critics, and instead simply demonstrates how to live as better people.
7. The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
The authors took a careful look at the volatile nature of our public discourse, and set out to figure out how big of a problem it is and what might be contributing to it. I came in skeptical of the problem, but was thoroughly convinced to take it seriously. Haidt is, of course, amazing as usual.
Those seven (actually eleven) are the biggest standouts of the year. Looking forward to others' suggestions!
- I think you might find An Everyone Culture, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey a worthwhile read. It challenges what you say, on some level, and reinforces it in other ways.
Like you said, it's a balancing act. But one aspect you left out – and one of the things I took away from their research – is that honesty has big benefits if everyone is on the same page about it. If one person is being "honest", and the rest of the team isn't on board, there's going to be the sort of friction you describe. Or if the honesty is only negative, rather than constructive, that's obviously not healthy. On the other hand, if the whole team is on board about honesty – including being critical – and if there are structures in place that make sure the honesty/transparency/criticism is a constructive force, then it can pay big dividends.
- Check out "An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization" It's a fascinating profile of the pioneering organizational cultures at three companies, Bridgewater, Next Jump (a tech startup in NYC), and Decurion (a movie theater chain). Each has processes specifically intended to support the development of their employees, and the book distills the commonalities in those practices.
https://hbr.org/product/an-everyone-culture-becoming-a-delib...
- There are great books about making innovation your default culture. I highly recommend reading "An Everyone Culture" which is about creating Deliberate Learning Organizations: https://blog.coderbyheart.com/an-everyone-culture
- Well, everybody starts somewhere. And books greatly help (me) to get more input and some books (like An Everyone Culture) are so outstanding and unique, that it's worth reading them even if you are not in the position to change an organization.
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