The Second Job No One is Paying You For

The single greatest things we can do for each other is create a space where we can be ourselves. That’s a part of what’s behind the curtain of the intentional design here at DEUCE. 

Culture isn’t about having ping pong tables at your office. 

A culture that supports meaningful work and meaningful relationships requires some hard work. Hell, it can even be scary. The type of culture we’re working to build here isn’t just rainbows and butterflies and togetherness, either. I wish it were. 

In fact, the reasons why people can or cannot be themselves in a space is a combination of both their participation in a vulnerable culture of trust and willingness and those who hold the container’s willingness to build such a space. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. 

I think it’s worth it, in part, because of what Harvard’s Robert Kegan says most American workers are doing as a second full time job. Here’s a key except from one of his works that has greatly influenced DEUCE culture: 

“In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding. We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: it prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.”

― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization 

I don’t think any of us can afford to do that second job. What about you?