Richard Kegan and Lisa Lahey have been leading the way on how organizations can make their primary focus about learning and adaptation for success. Their 2016 book An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization includes a bounty of specific tools and approaches to integrating learning into every aspect of an organization’s processes, structures and overall growth. In particular, they emphasize the importance of every person from top to bottom being explicitly accountable to successive learning goals, and pushing past their own fears and resistance, to normalize learning and the vulnerability required to excel.
Reinventing Organizations
Management consultant Frederic Laloux has been studying the arc of organizational design across history and looking at what’s coming next in terms of organizational structures that better serve human creativity and ingenuity. Frederic Laloux’s 2014 book, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, includes numerous examples of organizations in the private and non-profit sector that have been willing to break significantly with traditional hierarchy and create highly empowered employees and facilitative leadership. You can geta comprehensive overview of what is covered in his book from this fascinating 90 minute talk.
Collaborative Skills Worksheet
Over the last 15 years, I’ve compiled a list of 24 attributes and behaviors that, when practiced, grow the potential for collaboration, trust and psychological safety in relationships. As a starting point to any process, I will ask people to select the behaviors that make the biggest difference for them personally in terms of trust and collaboration with others. Then we’ll discuss the nuances of why these are so important to each person, where the need for it comes from, and what it looks like in practice. Interestingly, people have noticed that all of them could be boiled down into one simple practice which is just ‘listening with curiosity to understand.’ If folks did nothing else, this one intentional practice would amplify trust exponentially, even when people disagree with each other about a approach or a decision.