Work-Life Balance

By Robert Kegan

When we hear people talk about struggling to maintain worklife balance, our hearts sink a little. As an executive in a highperforming company we have studied said, “If work and life are separate things — if work is what keeps you from living — we’ve got a serious problem.”

In our research on what we call Deliberately Developmental Organizations — or DDOs — we have identified successful organisations that regard this trade-off as a false one… What if employees’ continuous development were assumed to be the critical ingredient for acompany’s success?

The companies we call DDOs are built around the simple but radical conviction that the organisation can prosper only if its culture is designed from the ground up to enable ongoing development for all its people. That is, a company can’t meet ever-greater business aspirations unless its people are constantly growing through doing their work…

The environment created by a focus on development in the workplace that is universal (across all ranks and functions) and continuous (and, so, habitual) unleashes surprising qualities: compassion alongside tough-minded introspection and organisational solidarity that comes from collective work at self-improvement.

This creates a different kind of vitality: a work and life integrated, not balanced against each other.

From “Does Your Company Make You a Better Person?”