Description
In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for—namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.
What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone—not just select “high potentials”—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.
Author(s)
From the Harvard website:
Robert Kegan is a psychologist who teaches, researches, writes, and consults about adult development, adult learning, and professional development. His work explores the possibility and necessity of ongoing psychological transformation in adulthood; the fit between adult capacities and the hidden demands of modern life; and the evolution of consciousness in adulthood and its implications for supporting adult learning, professional development, and adult education. In addition to his faculty appointment at HGSE, Kegan serves as educational chair of the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education; as co-director of a joint program with the Harvard Medical School to bring principles of adult learning to the reform of medical education; and as co-director of the Change Leadership Group, a program for the training of change leadership coaches for school and district leaders. Kegan, a licensed clinical psychologist and practising therapist, lectures widely to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development. “I have been told,” he says, “it may help to know that I am also a husband and a father; influenced by Hasidism; an airplane pilot; a poker player; and the unheralded inventor of the ‘Base Average,’ a more comprehensive way of gauging a baseball player’s offensive contributions.”
Compiled from profiles on her business websites:
For more than 30 years, Dr. Lisa Lahey has specialized in identifying personal and organizational impediments to change. She has personally helped thousands of individuals and groups to unpack and understand these insights, and to ultimately break free of unproductive habits in order to achieve personal and professional goals.
She is a world-renowned author on adult education and development, based on her successful research partnership with Robert Kegan.
Lahey is a faculty member and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For her seminal research, creation of developmental diagnostics and models, and prolific writing on the topic of adult development, Lahey has earned numerous awards, particularly Boston University’s Gislason Prize for contributions to organizational leadership.
Lahey is an inspirational speaker, whose passion for adult education, women’s development, diversity and inclusion, and care for the aged have earned her special attention from the healthcare, nonprofit and education sectors. She is the former associate director of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group, a national project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop greater internal capacity for leading organizational improvements in US public school districts.
She is a co-founder and owner of both The Developmental Edge and Minds at Work.