The Best Book for Workplace Culture
By Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
Rating 10/10
Best Line #1: In any ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for … spending their time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.
Best Line #2: Probably everyone wants to work where he feels he’s getting the greatest income; it’s just that there are many kinds of incomes.
What Is Workplace Culture?
I don’t know how it happened but somewhere, at some time, the adults of the world engaged in a strange form of subconscious collusion and decided to make the workplace a dull, tedious place were the same-old, same-old thrives. This wasn’t a deliberate scheme. It was the emergent consequence of everyone pretending to be very professional, very risk averse, individually competitive, less creative, more skeptical, and just … serious.
Or so I theorize.
Workplace culture, as an idea, is nebulous. We know it is deeper than the glossy language of mission, vision, and values. We know it’s more than the brightly-colored decor and open office concepts and benefits package. It’s attitudinal. It’s behavioral. And for better or worse, the most recognizable cultures are symbolized by a specific person — the leader, founder, or chief executive. Particularly when that person regularly advocates for the culture they want in every messianic word, thought, and deed.
So workplace culture is many things. To many people.
But to keep it simple, I go back to my favorite definition that I first heard from James Allworth: workplace culture is the way you define and address problems.
Some workplaces, like Amazon, consider customer needs as its primary problem. As a result, we encounter stories of difficult environments where people work long hours, under demanding conditions, because their satisfaction, as workers, is a distant second to the customer’s. Fulfill the customer need and then we can think about fulfilling your need.
From this simple idea, a culture is born.
Other places define identity as the primary problem. Basecamp has continuously cultivated a very distinct approach to its work, and its software, and works very hard to not grow fast or chase what it deems to be shiny objects. They reinforce their identity again and again with their books, blog, and social media. With hardly any mention of their eponymous product. It’s a little bizarre, actually. They talk about their identity (i.e., how and why they work the way they do) five times more than they talk about their software. Seems strange. Most unique cultures do.
Look at any other distinct workplace and you’ll find a culture built around a specific problem and a unique way of tackling that problem.
But most places are not distinct. Most places don’t have much of a specific problem to which they organize themselves. Most places just manage a whole bunch of straddled concerns that settle into some loose pile on “the bottom line.”
In such places, there is no free coffee. In such places, we think really hard before we make any abnormal purchases (however small). In such places, we test everything for its monetary worth and entirely forget about the customer.
Such places also tend to focus entirely on relationships. So it’s about what so-and-so said. Or what they will say when they hear about such-and-such.
And then there are the places where it’s all about running out the clock. (Is it 5:00 yet?)
Just A Job To Do
It doesn’t have to be this way. More importantly, I don’t think we can afford to let it be this way. The workplace is where most of us adults will spend most of our best years. Why not make it the very best it can be? Yes, you have a job to do. But as the Chief Meaning Officer of your own company (i.e., you), that job and that workplace can be more than what you see on paper.
The trouble is that this is water. And we’re fish. Which means we don’t realize what we’re swimming in.
With that in mind, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey have delivered the best work I’ve found on workplace culture. Their book, An Everyone Culture, provides a conceptual foundation for the sort of practices that I highlighted in the best book on organizational development, Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules! Mix the two together and I think you get something very powerful.
It starts with the concept of a deliberately developmental organization (DDO). I’ve tried to explain the concept in this week’s articles, starting with the notion of adult development, followed by a detailed look at what comprises a DDO. I’ve also introduced some of Kegan and Lahey’s previous work on adult development from their equally-fabulous previous book, Immunity To Change. Here are those articles again:
Tuesday: Our Jobs Determine How We Grow
Wednesday: Three Factors of a Great Workplace
Thursday: How To Change When All Other Efforts Fail
In the section below, I’ll explain a bit more about the ideas.
The Workplace As A School
We adults yoked ourselves with a very foolish idea that we have to always have the right ideas. We’re professionals, by golly. We get it right the first time.
This is complete nonsense. It’s also a very brittle attitude, the stuff of a fixed mindset and its worship of false certainty. And here’s the kicker: no one really believes it.
But we pretend to. Because admitting ignorance or uncertainty or fear or potential failure is what makes us vulnerable to all manner of doubts from others. What will “they” think when we say we don’t know? Or when we say we got it wrong?
Kegan has identified this sort of concern as a by-product of a socialized mind. His work around this mindset, and its relationship to the workplace, is the most important work that has been done in organizational psychology. And the more I talk about DDO cultures with others, the more I realize that it sounds very strange without a grasp of his adult development framework.
But then again, it can be very simple. The basic idea of a DDO is to turn the workplace into a deeply-engaging school. Kind of. As Kegan has explained in this article, the organization transforms from a meager place where work gets done to something slightly different and more effective:
As business has come to better understand the importance of developing its people, it is recognizing this aspiration is essentially educational, that it needs to be a better ‘school,’ an incubator — not just a purchaser — of learning and talent.
I’m reminded of a workplace I wanted to join many years ago. It was a place that only offered entry level jobs. Because all upper-level jobs were filled internally. That particular workplace only hired for potential when they hired from the outside. They never purchased free agents like me because I would lack the ground-level understanding of their system and culture and, thus, would more likely become a bad fit.
As much as that place frustrated me, I respected the coherence of their approach. It’s akin to a high school. I cannot be admitted into a high school. Why? Well, I already graduated. And the school doesn’t cater to thirty-somethings who already know the material.
Instead, the high school brings in students who have yet to master the information in order to teach it to them. The school could have a whole bunch of people like me in class if all they cared about was delivering great grades. But that’s not the point. The point is to teach. Even when the students don’t get the best grades.
Can’t the workplace be the same?
Specifically, why keep people in jobs they already “graduated” when there is so much more to explore? Once a person has mastery of their initial job, it’s time to elevate them to the next level.
Not by promotions. By empowerment. These are entirely different things. I’ll explain further in the next section.
Before I do, I want to stress the broader point that most people will be shaped by the workplace. They will learn something. Either bad habits of the pre-existing culture, whatever that might entail, or good habits from a deliberately-developmental approach.
To shape people and culture in the best way possible, the workplace should steadily increase the degree of difficulty that each job possesses. Such jobs should be wedded with a single overriding objective: personal growth. That’s the idea behind this notion of work as a school. But I definitely encourage you to read Kegan’s article for more.
It echoes the work of Peter Senge in his 1990 classic, The Fifth Discipline. But there is an important distinction to be had. Whereas Senge focused on learning as the vehicle for great business performance, along with systems thinking, Kegan and Lahey focus on adult development.
What’s the difference? Learning, as an activity, is subsidiary to adult development. We need to learn. We’re going to learn. We’re always learning. But to use this knowledge to help us climb the ladder from socialized to self-authored to self-transforming mindsets (i.e., adult development) is what really transforms us and an organization.
Coincidentally, we know that school is a fantastic place for learning but many an unsuccessful valedictorian stand as proof that our mindset is of greater importance than our total recall of facts, figures, and the other recitations that usually result in straight A’s.
Those straight A’s are overrated. Without reciting Carol Dweck’s work on fixed/growth mindsets and Duckworth’s grit, I’ll just say that our perpetual infatuation with getting things right, passing every test, and doing the tricks successfully the first time, is what limits so many workplaces from ever becoming anything more than what we’ve originally been conditioned to expect in grade school.
So how does a DDO change this?
It Ain’t Work. It’s Practice.
By changing the work that is done, day in and day out, into part of a broader practice. It isn’t about tasks delivered to a minimum state of compliance. It’s about craft delivered on an ever-advancing edge of mastery and continuous improvement. With false starts, good days, bad days, strikes and gutters, ups and downs. All defined by feedback which, as you may know, is the hallmark of deliberate practice. As our authors write,
When we talk to people who’ve been immersed in the culture of practice in DDOs for at least a couple of years, they describe the ways their own mind-set began to change from one of performance to one of practice. They tell us how hard it was to receive feedback until they realized that the feedback was being given to help them get better.
Imagine a place where you got a performance evaluation after every single project, idea, and deliverable. I don’t mean feedback as in reaction. I mean feedback as it relates to your specific “edge” that you’re looking to develop.
Example
Think of it this way: every person I’ve ever known does their work within the context of their own aspirations. There are people who write a memo a certain way because they want to persuade the future reader on their point of view. It isn’t merely about following orders.
So what makes a good memo for this person? Not the grammar or the quality of the information. Those things are important but they aren’t critical. What’s critical is the persuasiveness of their writing. Does it lead the reader to the same conclusion? If so, great. If not, what’s missing?
In this small example, the people within a DDO would have a clear understanding of this person’s aspiration. They would judge this memo on three fronts: quality, clarity, and persuasiveness. Quality is the typical way a reader judges a memo. Are there typos? Something that doesn’t make sense? Clarity is the degree to which the content creates understanding. And persuasiveness is the unique component specific to this writer’s aspirations (i.e., their “edge”).
Usually, the reader (i.e. boss) reads the memo, agrees or disagrees, and gives direction on that front alone. Along with any quality issue that might pertain. But the meta-game within the DDO includes a second conversation on how the writer can create a more-persuasive case in the future. Such a persuasive approach might lead them to forgoing a memo entirely.
There are two objectives then: writing a good memo as a basis for decision-making and studying the persuasion tactics for ways to improve the person’s future strategy.
This is just one very small example. Multiply this by every other task and associate it to every other person’s “edge” for personal development and you get a very different culture very fast. Again, it’s basically a university of sorts. Or really, more like a sports team. Where bosses are coaches and colleagues are teammates who know your edge as well as you do and who help you, challenge you, in that “iron sharpens iron” sort of sense. Only with a very high degree of trust built around shared goals.
The Organization Is A Sports Team
Coincidentally, Netflix’s culture has been identified along these lines. A slide from their now-old-yet-memorable culture deck reads as follows:
We’re a team, not a family.
We’re like a pro sports team,
Not a kid’s recreation team.
Coaches’ job at every level of Netflix
To hire, develop, and cut smartly,
So we have stars in every position.
That might seem a little intimidating — what, with the whole “cut smartly” thing. But the distinction here between team and family is critical. I roll my eyes at the places that describe their organization as a family. Largely because it isn’t true and it loses sight of, you know, the whole point of going to work. Worse, it imbues management with a weird parental characteristic that is completely unnecessary. No one needs another mom and dad. Or another family.
The boss-as-coach model is also endemic to the approaches championed in the three best books I’ve read on management. So this all follows a pattern. The point is that work, when seen as a practice, takes on a more wholesome quality; continuous improvement, as an idea, fits naturally in this point-of-view. Failure, with all its overly-lauded benefits, gets put into more-suitable perspective.
On that last point about failure, as it relates to sports, is that you can accept failure while striving for success during practice time. So make all time practice time. To continue the sports analogy, perpetual practice at being the best you can be means that even during game time, when all is on the line, and failure feels terrible, you can still stay focused and let the score take care of itself.
I hope that makes sense. Thinking of work as a perpetual practice certainly helps me.
Bottom-Line Benefits
Chapter Five of the book is where Kegan and Lahey earn all the respect I can possibly give. For all that can sound strange, idealistic, cultish, or brutal about the DDO culture, there’s a larger question that continually rises to the top of a reader’s mind as you learn about the case studies. That question is the title of Chapter Five: But Is This Any Way To Run A Business?
The answer was “yes” for me before I read this chapter. But that’s largely due to my ingrained preferences reinforced from years of too much reading and working in too many organizations. All the same, the question initially sparks a “no” from most people who hear about DDOs. Our authors do a fantastic job of proving those doubters wrong.
First, you can justify the DDO approach by pointing to the scoreboard. The companies profiled in this book are all quite successful: Next Jump, Decurion, and Bridgewater. Is that because of their DDO practices? It’s hard to say but I think so and the authors do a good job of explaining why. Without getting too deep into it, just consider the simple fact that these DDO practices certainly don’t hurt the financial bottom line and appear to really help the other bottom lines of employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction.
Second, there is a pragmatic point to be had about what we, as people, want in our work experiences. I think most folks, particularly in knowledge worker settings, want something closer to what the DDO offers. The empowerment, the high trust and camaraderie, the continual growth, the continual challenge.
But my favorite justification comes from the philosophical argument that our authors make. It starts with the following thesis derived from the text:
… everyone in the usual organization is doing a second job of hiding her weaknesses, uncertainties, and limitations; managing others’ favorable impressions. What is the cost of this second job to the company?
If you buy into this idea — and I wholeheartedly do; I’ve seen it firsthand — then the rest of the idea behind a DDO starts to make sense very fast. Getting rid of that second job requires practically everything that the DDO is designed to deliver. That’s the whole point. Conventional organizations are designed to coddle our poorly-developed mindsets and insecurities through hierarchy, Taylorism, vague culture, and conventional industry norms. A DDO is designed to question those things, readdress them, and elevate the workplace into something else entirely. Hence the title deliberately developmental organization.
No one has to go out and create such a place today. But this chapter helps me understand why we should.
Conclusion
There is a third way, of course. Somewhere between the staid strawman of the conventional organization and the sleek dynamism of the DDO is that hybrid middle-ground of a workplace geared towards “performance management.” Many larger tech firms seem to embody this idea. Other modern workplaces follow this model, too. It appears to work. But as I read this book, I find that these modern performance management firms are gaining success because they’re moving towards the DDO end of the spectrum. They’re just at the proto-stage, trending towards full DDO status.
Which is to say that I think we’re going to a lot more places transform into DDOs. The war for talent and retention compels it. Also, the framework is flexible enough to allow for many permutations on the general concept. Finally, the results of champions like Bridgewater and Next Jump will accelerate the move.
And why not? Talented people want to continue to be talented people. And work with others who are equally talented and want the same thing. Together, these talented people form a culture akin to the DDO because it naturally fulfills their distinct needs.
Want talent? Real talent? You probably want to be a DDO then. Or so this book convinces me. To learn more, here’s the link to Amazon.