An Everyone Culture ─ Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

What if companies viewed becoming world-class less as the product of successful recruitment and retention efforts and more as the outcome of a relentless focus on the growth in capabilitieseven personal developmentofall the people who make up the company? What if a company did everything within its power to create conditions in which individuals could overcome their own internal barriers to change, transcend their blind spots, and see errors and weaknesses as prime opportunities for personal growth?

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey have found and studied such companiesDeliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the deceptively simple but radical conviction that organizations 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.

This book dives deeply into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach and reveals the design principles at the heart of DDOsfrom their disciplined, consistent approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to how managers and leaders define their roles differently than in typical companies. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations.

An Everyone Culture will cause you to rethink the basic notion of people-development in organizational life.

Dr. Robert Kegan is the Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. The recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards, his thirty years of research and writing on adult development have contributed to the recognition that ongoing psychological development after adolescence is at once possible and necessary to meet the demands of modern life. His seminal books,The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads, have been published in several languages throughout the world.Dr. Lisa Lahey leads the Personal Mastery component of a path-breaking new doctoral program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, designed to produce the public-sector equivalent of the turnaround specialist.” A developmental psychologist and educator, and coauthor of Change Leadership, she led the research team that created the developmental diagnostic, now used around the world, for assessing adult meaning-systems.