How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. Seven Languages for Transformation

ROBERT KEGAN AND LISA LASKOW LAHEY: How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. Seven Languages for Transformation. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 2001, 241 pp., $24.95, ISBN: 0-7879-5535-3. Robert Kegan, William and Miriam Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, has set such high standards with his two prior intellectually and affectively compelling books, The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads, that we greet each new book with joyful anticipation, while also wondering, a bit anxiously, whether any new contributions could possibly be equally valuable. Let me reassure my readers right away that How the Way We Talk Can CHANGE the Way We Work, co-authored with Lisa Laskow Lahey, research director of the Change Leadership Project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, is a brilliant new book that will not disappoint their high expectations. The title of the book, while it could arguably be more compact, along with the subtitle: Seven Languages for Transformation, faithfully announces its message. It is a book about how to bring about change. While the authors acknowledge our own experience of the difficulty of change, they also suddenly make it seem possible, quite within our own reach, given a measure of good will and thoughtfulness. Indeed, the book is written in such an accessible self-help, how-to style, and with such persuasive conviction, that everyone is invited to try the suggested methods, immediately, starting today, with the help of charts provided in the book, or around the dinner table. Indeed, while the book seems to address itself to the workplace, its new suggested languages could be used in all settings, including the family. After an introduction with an irresistible title, which, once again, tells the story about to unfold, What Do You Really Want . and What Will You Do To Keep from Getting It, the book is divided into three parts. Part One: The Internal Languages: Building the New Machine introduces the first four languages: In Chapter One, From the Language of Complaint to the Language of Commitment, suggests that our complaints about work (or presumably relationship) conditions should be taken seriously because complaints are hidden commitments. "I am so overworked I can't attend to the details of my job" can be translated into: I am committed to do a good job, which means needing time to attend to details. Chapter Two leads us from Blame to Personal Responsibility-"can [you] identify anything you are not doing that is keeping your commitment from being fully realized" (p. 34). Chapter Three, the key of why change does not happen, is called From the Language of New Year's Resolutions to The Language of Competing Commitments . Here our attention is drawn to some usually not fully acknowledged countercommitment that prevents the desired change. Directly complementary to that chapter is Chapter Five, suggesting that we should reexamine our most cherished and absolute assumptions and be open to alternate perspectives. The overworked person who has no time for details finds, as a countercommitment, that he/she is reluctant to delegate pieces of work, because he/she has the assumption that others will not do it as well as he/she him/herself. …