Here’s the dilemma: In a competitive, complex, and volatile business environment, companies need more from their employees than ever. But the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear, and compromising their capacity.
现在的困境是:在竞争激烈、复杂多变的商业环境中，企业比以往任何时候都更需要员工。但是，同样可以动摇企业也是雇员，他们也令企业感到害怕，并损害了企业的能力。

 

It’s no wonder that so many C-Suite leaders are focused on how to build higher performance cultures.  The irony, we’ve found, is that building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth.
难怪这么多高层领导都专注于如何建立更高的绩效文化。我们发现，具有讽刺意味的是，建立一种注重绩效的文化可能不是最好的、最健康的、或者最可持续的。相反，专注于创造一种成长型文化可能更有效。
 
A culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behavior. Learning organizations classically focus on intellectually oriented issues such as knowledge and expertise.  That’s plainly critical, but a true growth culture also focuses on deeper issues connected to how people feel, and how they behave as a result. In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out; and spend less energy defending their personal value so they have more energy available to create external value. How people feel — and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.
文化就是人们建立自己行为的信念的集合。学习型公司组织专注于专业知识等面向知识的问题。这显然是至关重要的，但真正的成长型文化也关注与人们的感受有关的更深层次的问题，以及他们的行为方式。在成长型文化中，人们通过培养自己的能力来克服盲区，承认不安全感和缺点，而不是无意识地把它们表现出来，花更少的精力来保护他们的个人价值，这样他们就有更多的精力去创造外在的价值。人们的感受——以及给别人的感觉——与他们知道多少都是一样重要的。
 
Building a growth culture, we’ve found, requires a blend of individual and organizational components:
我们发现，建立个人及公司成长型文化需要以下要素：
 
1. An environment that feels safe, fueled first by top by leaders willing to role model vulnerability and take personal responsibility for their shortcomings and missteps.
让员工感到安全的工作环境，领导者首先表露自己的缺点，并积极改正和克服缺点。
 
2. A focus on continuous learning through inquiry, curiosity and transparency, in place of judgment, certainty and self-protection.
通过问询、培养好奇心和事务公开、准确判断和自我保护机制等注重长期性学习能力的培养。
 
3. Time-limited, manageable experiments with new behaviors in order to test our unconscious assumption that changing the status quo is dangerous and likely to have negative consequences.
有时间限制的、可管理的新行为实验，以此来检验我们这种无意识的假设:改变现状是危险的，可能会产生消极的后果。
 
4. Continuous feedback – up, down and across the organization – grounded in a shared commitment to helping each other grow and get better.
 
不断的向上、向下、跨组织的反馈。这种反馈应该基于共同的信念，帮助彼此成长和进步。
 
By contrast, a performance-driven culture often exacerbates people’s fears by creating up a zero-sum game in which people are either succeeding or failing and “winners” quickly get weeded out from “losers.” Results also matter in growth cultures, but in addition to rewarding success, they also treat failures and shortcomings as critical opportunities for learning and improving, individually and collectively.
相比之下，以业绩为导向的文化往往会加剧人们的恐惧，创造出一种零和游戏，人们要么成功，要么失败，“赢家”很快就会从“失败者”中除名。“结果在成长型文化中也很重要，但除了奖励成功之外，他们还把失败和缺点当作学习和改进的关键机会，不管是个人还是集体都是这样。”
 
These are easy words to say, but they’re much harder to practice.  Instinctively, we’re each inclined to hide, rationalize, minimize, cover up, and deny our weaknesses and mistakes because they make us feel vulnerable, at risk, and unworthy. These fears narrow and limit our perspective rather than enlarging it — at a time when the complexity of the problems we face often exceeds the complexity of thinking necessary to solve them.
这些话说起来容易，但做起来难多了。本能地，我们都倾向于隐藏、合理化、最小化、掩盖、否认我们的弱点和错误，因为它们让我们感到脆弱、危险和不值得。这些恐惧是狭隘的，限制了我们的视野——在我们所面对的问题的复杂性超出我们想象时尤其如此。
 
We began building a growth culture at my own company in the aftermath of a tumultuous period during which we brought in several new leaders, with different skill sets, to reinvent what we provided to clients and how we ran our business. Until then, we had always been a conflict-averse culture, preferring to see ourselves as a happy family for as long as our business prospered.  Resentments got pushed beneath the surface, but they became harder to contain as we struggled through this period of change and uncertainty. Tension grew between our old and new employees, and our old and new ways of running our business.  As CEO, I was seen as insufficiently respectful of who we’d been, and what values needed to be retained.
在经历了一段动荡的时期之后，我们开始在我自己的公司建立一个成长型文化。在这段时间里，我们引进了几位不同技能的新领导人，以彻底改造我们为客户提供的服务，以及我们如何经营我们的业务。在那之前，我们一直都是一种不喜欢冲突的文化，喜欢把自己看作一个幸福的家庭，只要我们的生意兴隆就可以了。愤恨被隐藏。但随着我们在这一变化和不确定时期的挣扎，他们变得更难控制了。我们的老员工和新员工之间的关系越来越紧张，新老方法之间也有矛盾。作为CEO，人们认为我不够尊重公司过去的文化和价值。
 
Once our new team was in place and I had greater clarity about the path forward, my first instinct was to surface the remaining tensions across the organization, and then work to be more transparent with one another. But realistically, we hadn’t built enough safety to make that possible. Instead, we began our work with our smaller team of senior leaders, inviting all employees to anonymously share their relative level of trust in each of us, in areas including our honesty, intentions, authenticity, skills, integrity, standards, and results.
一旦我们的新团队就位，并且我对前进的道路有了更清晰的认识，我的第一反应就是解决那些隐藏起来的紧张和矛盾。但是实际上，我们并没有给员工足够的安全感来实现这个想法。取而代之的是，我们开始与高层领导团队合作，邀请所有员工匿名分享他们对我们每个人的信任程度，包括我们的诚实、意图、真实性、技能、正直、标准和结果。
 
The feedback we got was raw and tough. When we sat down together to discuss it, we agreed to try to view the feedback through a lens of personal responsibility, rather than defensively. One of my colleagues jumped in courageously, owning her inclination to be controlling and harsh at times, and reflecting on what in her past influenced that self-protective behavior. She made no excuses, and her vulnerability set the tone for the rest of us.  We followed by sharing the toughest feedback we’d each received, what felt most significant about it, and where we thought it came from, and what behaving differently would look like. It was intense and demanding work, but we all left feeling buoyed.
我们得到的反馈是残酷的。当我们坐下来讨论这个问题时，我们同意尝试通过个人责任的视角来看待反馈，而不是防御性的视角。我的一个同事勇敢地站了出来，直言自己有时太过严厉、控制欲强，并且反思她过去一些自我保护行为的影响。她没有找借口，她的诚实和勇敢也鼓励了我们这样做。接下来，我们分享了每个人收到的最严厉的反馈，最重要的是什么，以及我们认为它来自哪里，以及我们的行为会有什么不同。这个过程并不容易，但我们都感到兴奋。
 
A week later, we shared specific experiments we had devised to try out new ways of behaving in response to the primary challenge each of us had defined. We also agreed to meet once a week to share progress and setbacks, and invite feedback from one another.  Eight weeks later, at an offsite, we shared with the rest of the company what we’d heard from them, what had resonated for us most deeply, and what we were doing about it.  We’d begun the journey of building our own growth culture.
一周后，我们分享了我们设计的一些具体实验，试图找出应对我们每个人所定义的主要挑战的新方法。我们还同意每周举行一次会议，分享进展和挫折，并分享彼此的反馈。八周后，在一个非公开场合，我们与公司的其他成员分享了我们从他们那里听到的消息，以及我们最深刻的共鸣，以及我们正在做的事情。我们开始了建立自己的成长型文化的旅程。
 
Perhaps the most fundamental lesson we’ve learned – including in our subsequent work with clients – is that fueling growth requires a delicate balance between challenging and nurturing.  Think about a young child beginning to venture into the world. The infant crawls away from its mother to explore the environment, but frequently looks back and returns periodically in order to feel reassured and comforted.  We are not so different as adults. Too much challenge, too continuously – without sufficient reassurance — eventually overwhelms us and breaks us down. Too little challenge – too much time spent in our comfort zone – precludes our growth and eventually makes us weaker.
我们学到的最基本的教训——包括在我们与客户的后续工作中——是需要在刺激增长和培养员工之间保持一个微妙的平衡。想想一个小孩开始冒险进入这个世界、婴儿从母亲身边爬出来探索周围的环境，他们经常会回头看，时不时地回来，以感到安心和安慰。我们成年人也是这样。面临频繁激烈的挑战，却又得不到安慰时，我们最终会崩溃。缺乏挑战——在我们的舒适区花费太多的时间——则会阻碍了我们的成长，最终使我们变得更弱。
 
A performance culture asks, “How much energy can we mobilize?” and the answer is only a finite amount.  A growth culture asks, “How much energy can we liberate?” and the answer is infinite.
绩效型文化会问:“我们有多少精力?”答案是有限的。成长型文化问:“我们能释放多少能量?”答案是无限的。