Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Harvard Business Review Press, £22.49/£14.29 e-book
This is a book that begins with a deliberately unsettling premise: that we waste most of our time at work playing politics, making ourselves look good, jostling for position or simply hiding in the hope we won’t be found out.
The organisations that succeed, say Kegan and Lahey, are those that put aside pettiness and get people developing and exceeding their potential at all levels and throughout their careers.
An Everyone Culture is a rallying cry from two experts in adult education to create what they term ‘deliberately developmental organisations’ that hardwire growth and excellence into everyday business. They have the science to back it up: the authors’ debunking of common wisdom on adult learning preferences is masterful. But they also have three powerful and vivid examples: including e-commerce business Next Step (whose immersive recruitment practices are likened to a ‘nine-hour blind date’) and cinema operator Decurion, where employees ‘check in’ their whole selves and are urged to ‘give away their job’ by sharing every crumb of knowledge with colleagues.
Most excitingly, Kegan and Lahey have been given widespread access to Bridgewater, the world’s most successful hedge fund, alternately lampooned and lauded for its practice of ‘radical honesty’, but which emerges here as an inquiry-based culture where staff use a ‘pain button’ to pour out their problems on an app and leave no stone unturned in the quest for feedback.
These firms are all brave enough to value ‘process integrity’ above financial outcomes, yet all are undoubtedly successful, and the authors believe this is no coincidence. An Everyone Culture is not a complete exploration of what a learning organisation might look like, but it is a compelling, intelligent and provocative examination of what happens, for good and ill, when you move beyond the platitudes and genuinely put people first.