Would You Have a More Honest Workplace If Everything Were Recorded? | Big Think

Would You Have a More Honest Workplace If Everything Were Recorded?

Watch the newest video from Big Think

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Managing your professional image at work shouldn't be a full-time job. And if it is, you're either not getting paid for working two jobs, or your company is losing a lot of productivity. According to Robert Kegan, adult developmental psychologist at Harvard University, and author of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, much of image management comes down to combatting office gossip.

Just about everyone engages in office gossip, or at least entertains those who do. Yet we all recognize gossiping as unprofessional behavior. In fact, part of managing your perception at the office may be allowing gossip to occur (lest you be seen as overly righteous). Kegan says there's a radical solution to so much wasted time and effort, not to mention negative emotion.

Imagine if every room in your workplace had a tape recorder, and that each time a person's name was mentioned, they would receive an email if they were not present for the conversation. Not a transcript, just a notification that they were brought up, and because they weren't present, didn't have a chance to respond.

That's probably giving you an uncomfortable feeling, but companies that do implement this kind of radical transparency see positive returns, says Kegan.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ROBERT KEGAN:

Robert Kegan is a psychologist who teaches, researches, writes, and consults about adult development, adult learning, and professional development. His work explores the possibility and necessity of ongoing psychological transformation in adulthood; the fit between adult capacities and the hidden demands of modern life; and the evolution of consciousness in adulthood and its implications for supporting adult learning, professional development, and adult education.

In addition to his faculty appointment at HGSE, Kegan serves as educational chair of the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education; as co-director of a joint program with the Harvard Medical School to bring principles of adult learning to the reform of medical education; and as co-director of the Change Leadership Group, a program for the training of change leadership coaches for school and district leaders.

Kegan, a licensed clinical psychologist and practicing therapist, lectures widely to professional and lay audiences, and consults in the area of professional development. "I have been told," he says, "it may help to know that I am also a husband and a father; influenced by Hasidism; an airplane pilot; a poker player; and the unheralded inventor of the 'Base Average,' a more comprehensive way of gauging a baseball player's offensive contributions."

He is the author of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Robert Kegan: A deliberately development organization is first of all a mouthful. So we call it a DDO for short. And it’s sort of an answer to the question if an organization is so valued developing the capabilities of its people that it would want to create a culture that could immersively gather every member of that culture into an ongoing developmental personal kind of learning journey what would that culture look like? What would such an organization look like? And that’s what we set out to discover and, you know, in the process what we learned is that in the ordinary organization most people are doing a second job that nobody’s paying them for and that second job has to do with looking good, hiding their weaknesses, covering their inadequacies, managing other people’s favorable impressions of them. And you can say that’s human nature but it also turns out to be incredibly costly in ways that we don’t think enough about. If I keep hiding my weaknesses the likelihood that I’m going to overcome them shrinks to near zero and the organization has to keep essentially paying for the consequences of my limitations. And they’re paying me full time salary for part time work. So imagine an organization where people would feel safe enough that they would kind of consider they were hired not because anybody thought they were perfect but because people thought they were good and that they could learn.

And that one of their jobs there is to learn. And where you get actually supported for, you know, revealing your mistakes and you could say that there’s kind of an entrepreneurial stance toward people development, you know. ....

To read the transcript, please go to.