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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

I'm talking today with Robert Keegan and Lisa Leahy, both of Harvard University and co-authors of the new book and

Everyone Culture, becoming a deliberately developmental organization.

Thank you both for coming here today.

Our pleasure.

Thank you.

So one of the things you guys point out right in the beginning of the book is that in an organization, all of us have this second

job that we're kind of doing all the time, where it's we're managing how we come across we're trying to hide our weaknesses

we're trying to influence what other people think about us and one of the

provocative questions you ask in the book is what would it be like if we didn't have to do that all the time.

This is so much a part of organizational life that I actually have trouble imagining what that would look like.

So tell me a little bit about that second job and then help me picture what it would look like to not have to do that.

Yeah, so it's hard for people to even get their heads around how much energy they're spending looking good.

It's good to just think first what are the costs of this?

We're developmental psychologists, right? We believe in the

possibility of continuing growth and development in adulthood. If I'm spending part of my energy

hiding my weaknesses in my inadequacies, it's much less likely that I'm going to overcome them.

So work immediately becomes not a place where I'm likely to keep growing and developing.

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