An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey · 2016

A radical new model for unleashing a company's potential by creating a culture where everyone is dedicated to personal growth, turning weaknesses and errors into opportunities for development.

Most people in organizations are doing a second, unpaid job: hiding their weaknesses and managing impressions. This wastes immense resources. The authors, developmental psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, introduce a solution: the Deliberately Developmental Organization (DDO). A DDO is built on the radical conviction that organizations prosper most when they align with people's strongest motive: to grow. Through in-depth case studies of three pioneering companies—Bridgewater Associates, Decurion Corporation, and Next Jump—the book reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science that create a culture where everyone can overcome their internal barriers to change. It demonstrates how weaving personal development into the daily fabric of working life leads to enhanced profitability, innovation, and a more fulfilling way of being at work.

The model it argues

This model explains how a set of specific organizational design principles and practices, which constitute a Deliberately Developmental Organization (DDO), foster key psychological and behavioral states in employees. These states, characterized by psychological safety, a growth mindset, and the cessation of impression management, lead to dual positive outcomes: individual human flourishing (continuous personal development) and superior organizational performance (profitability, innovation, adaptability).

Key ideas

Developmental Aspirations (Edge): The organization's explicit and deeply held conviction that adult growth is possible, necessary, and a central strategic goal. It is the belief that business excellence and personal development are a single, unified objective, not a trade-off.
Supportive Community (Home): The network of teams, peer relationships, and leader-employee dynamics characterized by high levels of trust and psychological safety, where vulnerability is held and feedback is delivered with care and support for each other's growth.
Developmental Practices (Groove): The collection of regular, structured routines, tools, and processes embedded in daily work that are designed to surface and address individual and collective growing edges, weaknesses, and limiting assumptions.
Psychological Safety: A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, such as exposing weaknesses, admitting errors, or offering dissenting opinions, without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.
Cessation of Impression Management: The behavioral pattern of individuals no longer devoting time and energy to hiding weaknesses, managing others' favorable impressions, playing politics, or covering up inadequacies.
Growth Mindset Enactment: The active and consistent behavior of individuals who believe their abilities can be developed, demonstrated by seeking feedback, embracing challenges, persisting in the face of setbacks, and deliberately working on their weaknesses or 'growing edge'.
Adult Mental Development: An individual's qualitative progression in mental complexity and meaning-making, characterized by the ability to move from being subject to one's environment and beliefs to taking them as objects of reflection (e.g., from Socialized to Self-Authoring to Self-Transforming Mind).
Organizational Performance: The attainment of superior business results, measured by metrics such as profitability, adaptability to complex challenges, innovation, speed to promotability, and employee engagement and retention.