Book 292 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Work on Your Backhand!

Book – An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (Part 2 of 4)

Book Description:

Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.

An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science at the heart of DDOs—from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations. This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy—and that the key to success is developing everyone.

Reflection:

After I read the book Principles by the founder of Bridgewater Capital, Ray Dalio, I remember thinking immediately afterward that I will NEVER want to work in that culture. Bridgewater has a very unique culture, but it just isn’t for me. I get it what they are trying to do, I understand the principles that serve as its foundation, but I will never find a home at Bridgewater as the values couldn’t be further from the values in my own life.

And that is more than okay…it is kind of the point.

You have to find the environments that align to your unique values and purpose for everyone to thrive. At Bridgewater, I would have been like if you put a placed a beaver in the Sahara Desert, it just wouldn’t work.

Knowing my background of knowledge about Bridgewater Capital, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the authors of this book labeled Bridgewater Capital as one of the 3 DDO’s (deliberately developmental organizations) that they highlighted in this book. What I was surprised to learn about was one of the other 2 in a place called Next Jump, an ecommerce software company.

As the authors described the deliberately development culture at Next Jump, I couldn’t help but to think, “These are my people”!!! A lot of their ideas, philosophies, and activities that they use to build their unique culture are very similar to the things that Trieu and I have been talking about for years and have been trying out in our own culture we are building. Next Jumps believes in forced job rotations as soon as you get comfortable with what you are doing, they have a no firing policy, they have a work harder on yourself than you do on your job motto, they have an immersive cultural onboarding program to mutually determine if you belong or not after being hired, they have accountabilibuddy learning partners, and so much more.

This is literally everything that we’ve been working on as well. I felt so at home hearing about this amazing culture and could easily see myself finding meaningful work and meaningful relationships in this setting.

If I felt like I’d be a beaver in a desert at Bridgewater, Next Jump would be finding myself as a beaver living out their dreams in their natural home of Canada. It would be a perfect alignment!

Apparently, the team at Next Jump must even be a fellow lover of the game of tennis as one of the cultural habits they work on is something they call “working on your backhand”.

What does “working on your backhand” even mean?

In tennis, almost everyone that learns how to play tennis, and improves over time, naturally develops a forehand that is a weapon that can hurt their opponent. It is the easiest shot to learn to hit and it is the most potent for almost everyone that plays. I myself have a fantastic forehand, and my opponent learns that really quickly when we play a match and inevitable adapts to avoid hitting the ball there or I will punish them. So, what does any opponent do when they realize this? Naturally, they decide to test your backhand to see if they find a weakness they can exploit to take control of the match. When they do this, more often than not they find not only a less intimidating shot than the forehand, but a literal weakness on that side of the court.

Why? The backhand is a harder shot for most people mainly since the player's dominant hand "pulls" into the shot. Due to this, the backhand generally lacks the power and consistency of the forehand, and is usually considered more difficult to master.

That is definitely true in my game, and I know it.

I’ve been playing tennis since I was 5, and my backhand has been a thorn in my side my entire playing career up until the most recent past few years. For the majority of my tennis playing life, I would choose to run around my backhand to avoid the shot altogether and try to smack as many forehands as I could. It worked up until a certain level of skill of my opponent, but it eventually caught up to me. Running around your backhand gets you out of position and also forces you to go for too much on your forehand. Eventually, as my level of opponents increased, they quickly exposed this flaw and began to punish me. I started losing all the time and my game had plateaued.

I was fine with this for a long time, but that all changed after I met Emilia and understood what fighting for things that mattered to me really meant.

This YOML experience has changed so much of me, and my tennis game is no different. I knew I had a weak backhand and I knew that I needed to fix it if I wanted to improve my overall game. When I realized how much tennis meant to me and how it allowed me to express all of my values with my daughter, I finally made that conscious decision to focus on improving my backhand.

Shocker…I became a WAY better overall player in a not to long period of time.

It sucked at first embracing the fact that I was going to get beat up trying to play the point the right way, but I endured. Slowly over time, I’m proud to say that my backhand is no longer a glaring weakness and sometimes I can even use it as a weapon these days. It is still nowhere near as strong as my forehand, but people can’t pick on me anymore either.

The funny thing is, when I finally had turned my backhand into a mediocre shot, I started to see new “backhands” arise in my game like my mid-court volleys, my forehand cross court on the run, my ability to put the point away at the net, my serve, my backhand / forehand slice, and the list goes on and on.

Basically, new problems that I could work on arose at each new level of competency I achieved and higher level of opponents I began to play. That is life in a nut-shell in a lot of ways.

Only you know what your “backhands” are in your own life. You must be honest with yourself in identifying your weaknesses and not running around them if you want to keep evolving, learning, and growing.

If you have found an activity that aligns to your values, purpose, and mission in life it will be well worth the effort. If it doesn’t, see the reflection on the book The Dip by Seth Godin to determine if you should just quit.

Question: What are the backhands you’ve identified in your meaningful work activities? What are you doing to embrace them head on?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - An Everyone Culture