Deliberately Developmental Leader (DDLs) refers less to a ‘style’ of leadership and more to an entire philosophy and approach to leadership.

1. Rethink happiness

✦ Whatever your personal experience, overemphasize how important the distinction is between the conception of happiness that aims to banish pain and suffering VS understanding that in the pursuit of flourishing, struggling can hold enormous value.

✦ Pressure, after all, creates diamonds and fire refines gold.

2. Make weaknesses public

✦ People’s ‘flaws’ or development areas are being spoken about not to shame, minimize or hold power over anyone, but to further their growth and development.

3. Help your people rediscover their inherent resilience

✦ Get to know your people – notice when they are depleted, in need of a recharge, dancing on the edge of burnout, or out of touch with their inherent resilience. Prevention is better than cure.

4. Focus on Feedback

✦ A culture characterized by the presence of a lot of feedback tackles people’s development areas with more gusto.

✦ When weaknesses are pointed out as the norm rather than the exception, the business stops investing energy into the “second job no one is paying for” – the job of covering up, hiding and faking our way through the day.

What is Greiner’s Growth Model?

A culture deck is basically the same as an employee handbook. The format is the only difference. Decks are MS PowerPoint, handbooks are MS Word.

How to Do It:

Polarise the audience

If you try to appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one. For example, Netflix’s famous deck contains statements like “we are a team, not a family”. As Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, is quoted in Brett's book: “If you know [that mentality] going in, you can love it; if you don’t know it, you can feel bait-and-switched.”

Be deliberate

Culture happens anyway, so choose the culture you want and need.

Be really specific

Pinpoint the discrete parts of your culture that embody who you are and can’t be mistaken for anyone else.

Be authentic

Take inspiration but find your own voice and make sure it’s true to who you are.

Don’t exaggerate

Culture decks are fashionable and they’re a powerful way of attracting and retaining the right people. It’s good to be aspirational but make sure it’s grounded in reality.

🔽 The very best company culture decks on the web