An Everyone Culture

The most intellectually serious book on this shelf and the hardest to act on.

Kegan and Lahey's central observation is the one I return to most often: in most organisations, everyone is doing a second job nobody is paying them for — managing other people's impressions of them, hiding limitations, covering weaknesses, playing the politics of looking competent. The energy that goes into that second job is enormous, and it is entirely subtracted from the first one. As a description of what is actually happening inside an average workplace, I don't think anything else in the literature comes close.

Their proposal is the deliberately developmental organisation: a workplace designed so that growth is the everyday work rather than an annual event, where the gap between who you are and who you are becoming is discussed openly and constantly.

The difficulty is that the three organisations they study are genuinely unusual, and the model asks for a degree of exposure that most workplaces have not earned the right to request. Asking people to be developmentally transparent in an organisation that still runs forced ranking is not brave, it is unsafe. The prerequisite work — psychological safety, fair reward, managers capable of holding the conversation — is most of the job, and the book rather skips past it.

Read it for the diagnosis, which is unmatched. Be very careful with the prescription.