In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profit and nonprofits; and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.
In “AN EVERYONE CULTURE: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization” authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey argue that this is the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. In this increasingly volatile, uncertain, and complex world, organizations need to expect more, not less, of themselves and the people who work for them. After all, is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their time and energy?
Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs) will best prosper when they are deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means more than consigning “people development” to high-potential leadership development programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year retreats. Deep alignment means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s ongoing development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and visible in the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.
If you are like most people, more wary of feeling vulnerable, ashamed, and unworthy—especially at work---you might find yourself feeling alarmed soon after you enter. That might be the case especially if you happen to be a leader in an organization and you feel you don’t have the luxury of being vulnerable. None of us chooses or decides to be alarmed. It happens automatically. Once alarmed, any of us will, as the neuroscientists have taught us, just as automatically protection ourselves.
The important thing is for you to realize that when these thoughts arise automatically, you’re not considering them. You’re not even “having” them. Rather, they are having you. They are taking over.
A DDO is something different from an accelerated version of business as usual and from other admirable emerging departures. A DDO represents, instead, a rethinking of the very place of people development in organizational life.
DDO is all about the difference between a “fixed” mind-set and the “growth” mind-set. No real growth occurs without first experiencing some limitation at one’s core. Until you begin to question even your fixed, taken-for-granted talents, you have not fully derived the benefits of being in a DDO.
The closest thing, in book form, to a quick DDO immersion is what you might see if you were plunked down in the middle of one of these DDO companies experimenting to take responsibility for the workings of our minds so that we can stay present, so that we can stay at work.
The myth of individualism can negatively affect our chances for success.
People also acknowledge, in different DDOs, that the environment is not for everyone, and it’s not unusual to have higher-than-usual turnover during the first twelve to eighteen months.
Leaders in new positions often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.
Consider that four out of ten newly promoted managers and executives fail within 18 months of starting new jobs, according to research by Manchester, Inc, a leadership development firm in Bala Cynwyd, PA
Two out of every five new CEOs fail in the first 18 months (HBR, January 2005).
Source: Robert Kegan: An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization