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Does Your Company Make You a Better Person?

January 22, 2014




Whether you are someone who avoids confrontation, hides your inadequacies to avoid being found out, often acts before thinking things through, gets overly aggressive when your ideas are criticized, or are prone to any number of other forms of counterproductive thinking and behavior, you and your colleagues can expect to be working on identifying and overcoming these patterns as part of doing your job well. Together, in meetings, one-on-one sessions, and just during the course of your everyday work, you will also be seeking to get to the root causes of these patterns and continually devising different ways of doing things and seeing what happens as a result.

In a DDO, the root causes almost always are about people’s interior lives—about unwarranted and unexamined assumptions and habitual ways of behaving. And no executive or leader (no matter how senior) is immune from the same analytic process. When it comes to ongoing development, rank doesn’t have its usual privileges.

In the ordinary organization, every person is doing a second job no one is paying them to perform—covering their weaknesses and inadequacies, managing others’ good impression of them, and preserving a position that would feel more precarious if people didn’t always see them at their best. In a DDO, this is considered the single biggest waste of resources in organizational life.

Imagine if you worked in a place where your inadequacies were presumed not to be shameful but were instead potential assets for continuing growth, where business challenges were new opportunities to test out whether you could take a more effective approach to solving a problem, where no matter how effective you were at your job, you could keep stretching yourself to even greater levels of capability.

Imagine if you worked in a place where the definition of a “good fit” between the person and the job is “she does not yet have all the necessary capabilities to perform the role at a high level, but we will help her to develop them, and when she does she will have outgrown this job, and we will need to find her another.”

An implication of our work for companies that aspire to be high-performing cultures is summed up in this question:  Would you continue to consign the development of your people (and, inevitably, only a fraction of your people) to one-off training programs, executive coaches, high-potential programs, and the like if you could make your organization’s very operations the curriculum and your company the most compelling possible classroom in your sector?

Being part of such an organization is not always easy, but the environment created by a focus on development in the workplace that is universal (across all ranks and functions in the organization) and continuous (and therefore habitual) unleashes some surprising qualities: compassion alongside tough-minded introspection and organizational solidarity that comes from collective work at self-improvement.  This creates a different kind of vitality at work: a work and life integrated rather than balanced against each other.

With thanks to our research team members, Matt Miller and Inna Markus, who contributed to this piece and to the forthcoming HBR article, “Making Business Personal” (April 2014).  



Andy Fleming is the CEO of Way to Grow INC, and coauthor of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.