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Most people expend a lot of energy at work attempting to hide their inadequacies from colleagues. The authors believe that this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today. When they went in search of firms where people see their mistakes not as vulnerabilities but as prime opportunities for growth, they found only a handful. Two stood out: Bridgewater Associates, an East Coast investment firm, and the Decurion Corporation, a West Coast real estate manager, cinema operator, and senior living center owner. Both are committed to developing every one of their people by weaving personal growth into daily work--and both are highly successful businesses. The authors spent hundreds of hours observing their practices and interviewing employees at all levels. What they saw was people working together, in meetings, in one-on-one sessions, and in the course of their everyday work to get at the root causes of problems and devise more-productive ways of doing things. Many companies conduct root cause analysis but stop short of crossing into an employee's interior world, where so many problems begin--in, for example, a tendency to avoid confrontation, to act before thinking things through, to be overly aggressive if one's ideas are criticized, and other counterproductive thinking and behavior. At Decurion and Bridgewater, everyone from the CEOs on down to the teenaged ushers work on identifying and overcoming these patterns as part of doing their jobs well.

Every manager is familiar with the employee who just won't change. Sometimes it's easy to see why--the employee fears a shift in power or the need to learn new skills. Other times, such resistance is far more puzzling. An employee has the skills and smarts to make a change with ease and is genuinely enthusiastic--yet, inexplicably, does nothing. What's going on? In this article, two organizational psychologists present a surprising conclusion. Resistance to change does not necessarily reflect opposition, nor is it merely a result of inertia. Instead, even as they hold a sincere commitment to change, many people unwittingly apply productive energy toward a hidden competing commitment. The resulting internal conflict stalls the effort in what looks like resistance but is in fact a kind of personal immunity to change. An employee who's dragging his feet on a project, for example, may have an unrecognized competing commitment to avoid the even tougher assignment--one he fears he can't handle--that might follow if he delivers too successfully on the task at hand. Without an understanding of competing commitments, attempts to change employee behavior are virtually futile. The authors outline a process for helping employees uncover their competing commitments, identify and challenge the underlying assumptions driving these commitments, and begin to change their behavior so that, ultimately, they can accomplish their goals.