Beyond The False Divide

A high stakes drama is playing out between employees and leadership inside leading corporations.

On the one hand, in survey after survey, employees say that they want to grow at work: to take on bigger challenges, develop new capabilities and skills, and make a meaningful contribution to something that matters, from the core of who they are. They want to feel like they matter to the business and that there is space for them to develop and put their creative intelligence to work. Yet, many employees are not having this experience.

On the other hand, leaders want to grow an innovative, engaged, and high performing business in an environment that is increasingly competitive and uncertain. To accomplish this, they need to tap and mobilize everyone’s creative intelligence toward business growth. This means more and more employees becoming leaders?—people who can take ownership and responsibility, think rigorously about the whole business, exercise agency and self-accountability, and care more about customer and business success than individual self-interest. Yet, many leaders express frustration that not enough employees are rising to this level of responsibility and maturity of mind and character.

Essentially, employees and leaders want the same thing: they want the company and everyone in it to grow, make a meaningful impact, and achieve financial success along the way. The tragic irony lies in their failure to recognize their common ground. This is in big part because they lack an effective shared framework and process for fostering this all-encompassing development and growth. The practices currently used—such as delegation, empowerment, talent management, defined career paths, climate surveys, or learning and development initiatives—keep failing to deliver the changes that are needed and desired on both sides.

Clearly there’s a need to rethink our approaches, and to find a way forward that enables growth at three levels simultaneously:

• Tapping into people’s innate desire to learn, grow, and contribute,
• Building the capacity of teams to fire on all cylinders, supporting and challenging one another to achieve unanticipated breakthroughs on behalf of customers, and
• Anchoring everyone into a profound sense of the meaning and significance of their work because of the difference it could make in the lives of those it’s intended to serve and the impacts it could have on their industry.

For the past 60 years, a small group of practitioners working in companies large and small has been developing such an approach. They have evolved a sophisticated, developmental, organizational change technology (sometimes called Regenerative Business) from which I’ve selected a few principles to serve as an introduction for how you might begin working in this way.

Principle 1: Grow everyone; leave no one behind

Every person has the potential to understand work and business as a dynamic whole—to develop, that is, the ‘mind of a CEO’. This is what affords them the basis for making new and significant contributions to business growth. Each person will do this in their own distinctive way, based on who they are and what they find meaningful. A powerhouse business learns to tap and align this creative diversity as one of its most valuable resources, developing each of its members toward the fullest possible expression of their unique potential.

Most companies invest the majority of their people development resources in a small group of senior leaders and individuals who’ve been identified as having high potential, leaving the rest to make do with largely ineffective “self-serve” online learning programs. This approach rests on two assumptions. First, companies can reliably identify those few who will have the greatest impact on the business. Second, high-quality development cannot be made available to everyone.

Regenerative Business flips these assumptions, along with their associated limitations. It postulates that it’s impossible to know or measure someone’s potential, that everyone’s potential is open-ended, and that the only way to awaken and actualize someone’s potential is through ongoing development. In other words, you don’t selectively develop a few people based on whether you see potential in them. You develop everyone in order to awaken and actualize the potential that is innate in human beings, the potential that enables them to make some distinctive contribution that cannot be known in advance.

Regenerative Business also eschews traditional learning and change methods, such as instructor-led trainings or workshops and professional coaching, in favor of an organic, non-linear approach. This involves cultivating a developmental culture and way of working where individuals and teams learn to use everything they do—meetings, projects, etc.—as an opportunity to grow and evolve; they develop their capacity to reflect, use systemic thinking frameworks, and challenge each other with difficult questions, thus upgrading on a daily basis their critical thinking and self-managing abilities.

An important aspect of fostering this developmental culture is growing in-business Resources—team members who commit themselves to becoming particularly skilled at cultivating whole-business thinking and self-managing capacity among their colleagues. Being immersed in such a culture has a multiplying effect where everyone (and every activity) develops everyone, thus dramatically accelerating the learning process while simultaneously making it accessible to all.

For example, I recently worked with a business that was rapidly expanding into a new and much larger market, presenting a number of exciting growth challenges. Successful expansion required cultivating leadership capacity and the mind of a CEO at every level of the organization. We started our work by forming a core team—a diagonal group of self-nominated and highly committed people from all levels and functions within the business. They were tasked with an audacious mission: not just to rapidly grow as leaders and develop the mind of a CEO in themselves, but to lead this change in and on behalf of the whole organization. As their development progressed, they naturally became Resources to their teams and functions, engaging everyone around them in the development process, and thus accelerating the pace of change. According to one of the senior leaders, this was a game changer because it enabled the organization to dramatically scale its leadership capacity, cross-team alignment, and decision-making speed in just a few short months.

Principle 2: Grow whole people

The recent pivot to ‘skills economy’ comes from a worldview that deals with complex work by breaking it into discrete tasks and inculcating the discrete skills needed to carry out these tasks. In such a world, people are viewed as walking-talking skillsets. Not only does this approach inadvertently violates the corporate DEI mantra, “Bring your whole self to work,” but it ignores what actually makes people successful in their work endeavors. Ask any business leader what kind of people they want to hire and have around, and they’ll likely describe someone who exercises ownership, responsibility, self-discipline, and self-accountability, someone who is creative, resourceful, and can think on their feet, and someone who is driven by a sense of purpose that is aligned with the purpose of the business. Netflix, a company with the most productive workforce in the world, only seeks “rare self-responsible persons” to join the business. Such people are self-directing, self-managing, self-accountable, act like leaders rather than wait to be told what to do, and care more about making a contribution than their own self-interest.

These are not skills—they are complex traits and capabilities of will, character, and mind. While skills are relatively easy to acquire, these complex capabilities are harder to build or find, as Netflix would attest. It is also true that people who have developed these capabilities are able to learn new skills quickly and on demand; driven by their sense of purpose and self-discipline, they’ll do and learn whatever is necessary to help manifest the collective purpose to which they have subscribed.

This is why Regenerative Business focuses on developing whole people—their will, character, and complex thinking abilities. In a business setting, this means developing self-responsible agency, whole-business mind, and deep caring for the lives and aspirations of customers and other stakeholders that the business serves. These three core capabilities make up the mind of a CEO framework.

How does this work in practice? Recently, I’ve facilitated an ongoing multi-year change process with a company that’s been on the journey of revitalizing its strategic direction, building a stronger leadership culture, and accelerating business growth. From the beginning, we’ve focused on growing the mind of a CEO in everyone, beginning with the leadership team and moving from there to touch everyone they engage with.

As part of this work, participants explored who they truly are at their core and what they deeply care about. They pursued a deeper understanding of and caring for customers. They gained new insight into their business as a whole, in terms of its origins, its current way of working, and the future it wishes to create. As a result, they ideated, advanced, and tested new strategies and pursuits that match their own aspirations with results that will make a big difference for customers, and that promise to accelerate business growth.

So strong was the conviction produced by this approach that one of the group members announced that she was going to stake her entire career on the audacious pursuit that she identified; we refer to this as promise beyond ableness. Participants also reported a dramatic improvement in the quality of their strategic thinking and leadership, engagement with others, and overall ability to tackle difficult and previously intractable challenges at work.

Principle 3: Grow people by putting them to work on how to grow the business

It is common for companies to think of people development as “something extra”, something that happens away from work (the popular 70/20/10 model is an example.) Moreover, most learning and development suffers from a relevance deficit: it has little to do with the immediate challenges that organization members face at work. Is it any wonder that most learning and development programs are seen by leaders as a “good for employee satisfaction” at best and “wasted time away from work” at worst?

The Regenerative Business approach works from the premise that development must be integrated into how people work, every day. People evolve themselves (their thinking and self-management), how they work (the process), and what they work on (the products) in real time, as they are working. This has the obvious benefits of continuously evolving the business, its value-adding contributions, and its employees and stakeholders. But it requires that people develop an entirely new muscle—the capacity to work consciously and reflectively, while observing and disrupting their automatic patterns, and while challenging themselves to evolve how they think and work at each iteration.

As an example, I worked with a regional sales?organization for a multi-national telecom giant. The organization had become deeply dysfunctional, prone to in-fighting and personal agendas, and this had negatively and noticeably impacted its performance in the eyes of both the public and corporate leadership. I was invited to help this group find a way to radically improve its customers’ experience. We introduced a thinking framework that enabled the organization members to clearly image what it was like to interact with customers from different mindsets and levels of engagement. Using this framework, they learned to distinguish among being purely transactional (clinching the sale), exercising kindness (being courteous and respectful), exuding empathy (listening well for customer wishes and concerns), extending compassion (being proactive in solving customers’ problems), and evoking caring (for the whole of customers’ lives, including the role this product or service could uniquely play in helping them achieve their aspirations.)

Based on the framework, we developed a set of managing principles that challenged and supported everyone to bring caring to each customer interaction, while restraining the habitual tendency to engage in transaction with a bit of kindness mixed in. The framework also served as an instrument for self-observing, self-assessment, and self-correction. Teams would get together for a brief 10-15 minute pause, 2-3 times per day, to reflect on what each member was learning and how they were evolving their thinking and engagement and the results and effects they observed. Rather then giving feedback or advice, the team members served as Resources to one another, helping to deepen insights and challenge everyone to up their game. In subsequent development sessions, we reflected on our progress and introduced new and more challenging frameworks, setting our eyes on the next leap forward.

If you stepped into one of our development sessions, you wouldn’t have been able to tell whether we were having a working meeting or a learning workshop—they were one and the same. We were learning to work developmentally, and this yielded a heady mix of excitement, breakthroughs, big leaps in performance and results, and incredible camaraderie because we were on a purposeful mission to reinvent ourselves, our business, and our contribution—together. The turnaround we generated was fast and profound, resulting in an almost immediate improvement in sales and customer satisfaction and raised eyebrows among impressed corporate leaders.

Conclusion

Companies struggle to reconcile their employees’ desire for growth and meaningful contributions at work with the business’s need to grow and thrive in a hyper-competitive environment. They fail to recognize that these seemingly divergent imperatives are interconnected—they are, in essence, two sides of the same coin. By putting people to work on increasingly significant challenges that they can use to grow themselves, and by developing their capacity to think like CEOs, companies can accelerate growth that benefits everyone simultaneously.