Robert Kegan

Lisa Lahey

Andy Fleming

Matthew Miller

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">Idea in Brief</h4>
 <div class="ideainbrief-contents">
  <h5>The problem</h5>
  <p>Most people at work are doing a second job that no one’s paying them to do—preserving their reputations, putting their best selves forward, hiding their inadequacies.</p>
  <h5>The proposition</h5>
  <p>What if a company was set up in such a way that instead of hiding their weaknesses, employees used them as opportunities for both personal and business growth?</p>
  <h5>The result</h5>
  <p>The examples of two very different companies—a hedge fund and a movie theater operator—suggest that it’s possible to meld business growth with personal growth in every employee’s day-to-day work.</p>
 </div>
</article-ideainbrief><p>To an extent that we ourselves are only beginning to appreciate, most people at work, even in high-performing organizations, divert considerable energy every day to a second job that no one has hired them to do: preserving their reputations, putting their best selves forward, and hiding their inadequacies from others and themselves. We believe this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today.</p>

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<p><span class="reprint">Reprint: R1404B</span></p>
<p>Most people expend a lot of energy at work attempting to hide their inadequacies from colleagues. The authors believe that this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today. When they went in search of firms where people see their mistakes not as vulnerabilities but as prime opportunities for growth, they found only a handful. Two stood out: Bridgewater Associates, an East Coast investment firm, and the Decurion Corporation, a West Coast real estate manager, cinema operator, and senior living center owner. Both are committed to developing every one of their people by weaving personal growth into daily work&#8212;and both are highly successful businesses.</p>
<p>The authors spent hundreds of hours observing their practices and interviewing employees at all levels. What they saw was people working together, in meetings, in one-on-one sessions, and in the course of their everyday work, to get at the root causes of problems and devise more-productive ways of doing things. Many companies conduct root cause analysis but stop short of crossing into an employee&#8217;s interior world, where so many problems begin&#8212;in, for example, a tendency to avoid confrontation, to act before thinking things through, to be overly aggressive if one&#8217;s ideas are criticized, and other counterproductive thinking and behavior. At Decurion and Bridgewater, everyone from the CEOs on down to the teenage ushers works on identifying and overcoming these patterns as part of doing the job well.</p>

Making Business Personal

Reprint: R1404B Most people expend a lot of energy at work attempting to hide their inadequacies from colleagues. The authors believe that this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today. When they went in search of firms where people see their mistakes not as vulnerabilities but as prime opportunities for growth, they found only a handful. Two stood out: Bridgewater Associates, an East Coast investment firm, and the Decurion Corporation, a West Coast real estate manager, cinema operator, and senior living center owner. Both are committed to developing every one of their people by weaving personal growth into daily work—and both are highly successful businesses. The authors spent hundreds of hours observing their practices and interviewing employees at all levels. What they saw was people working together, in meetings, in one-on-one sessions, and in the course of their everyday work, to get at the root causes of problems and devise more-productive ways of doing things. Many companies conduct root cause analysis but stop short of crossing into an employee’s interior world, where so many problems begin—in, for example, a tendency to avoid confrontation, to act before thinking things through, to be overly aggressive if one’s ideas are criticized, and other counterproductive thinking and behavior. At Decurion and Bridgewater, everyone from the CEOs on down to the teenage ushers works on identifying and overcoming these patterns as part of doing the job well.

Making Business Personal

Summary.

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