We often don’t think of the fact that great leaders must become great organisational gardeners, but it’s the reality. As a leader your role is to cultivate and nurture the people in your business so they can provide the best service to your clients. You need to take decisive action when required and continually tend to the business to ensure it stays on track. And this is just what great gardeners also do.
So if you think of your business as a garden, what are the six key activities that you must engage in to achieve a beautiful outcome?
- Create The Optimal Environment – as a leader you set the tone and culture of the business and this needs to be optimal to achieve the business goals. Plant the wrong plants in the wrong soil and they will never survive, as I discovered to my peril when I planted some azaleas in my clay-based garden. I loved the azaleas and assumed they would grow and thrive but the conditions just weren’t conducive for them to survive. Likewise, if you want your team members to thrive you have to plant them in the right environment. The best team members can fail in the wrong environment so as a leader you need to cultivate the right culture for business success.
- Plant the Right Seeds in The Right Place At The Right Time – one of the mots important roles you have as a leader is to in the words of Jim Collins “get the right people in the right seats on the bus”. Identify the right talent that will thrive in your business culture and then discover their strengths and how they will be able to contribute to the organisations success. Plant the wrong people in the wrong roles and all sorts of chaos can ensue especially when there is no clarity of who is responsible for what. Silo mentality can mean that there is disharmony as rather than working together all the people (plants) vie for the limited resources.
- Be Patient and Nurture – just like plants in your garden team members need nurturing and supporting. Let them have their space to grow and develop. Don’t crowd them and micro-manage them but rather empower them to get the job done. If things don’t go to plan, don’t fire the members, bur rather help them learn from their mistakes. Just like you can gently re-direct plants help team members to see the error of their ways and what they can do differently. Finally, remember it takes time for a seed to grow into a flower so make sure you don’t dig up the seeds before they have had time to get established. Oftentimes I see business owners doing just this with new products. Like the seeds, new products take time to get established in the marketplace so give them the time to get traction before you cull them.
- Water Regularly – plants can’t survive without water and organisations can’t survive without clear communication. As a leader you need to water your team members every day making sure they are continually appraised of what is happening. It is very important to over communicate during times of change particularly when the results are not immediate and people might be unaware of what is happening. Just like if you fail to water your plants they often die, so it is with your team members. When they feel excluded and disconnected from the purpose of the company they lose motivation and morale dwindles making them unhappy. Although team members obviously don’t physically die they can emotionally die inside as they lose their passion for their job.
- Weed Immediately – gardeners know that despite their best efforts weeds will always appear. I actually think this is the sign of a great garden, as it means that other opportunities can exist alongside what was planned. The challenge occurs when these weeds start disturbing the harmony of the flower bed. They start becoming a distraction that takes away from what everyone else is doing. In business the weeds can show up as toxic team members who start sabotaging the success of the business by diverting resources for their own agenda. In these instances a leader needs to take decisive action to stop these often silo mentality people damaging the engagement in the rest of the team.
- Know When To Prune – great gardeners know just the right time of year to prune their plants in order to get maximum growth from them. Some plants need to be cut back hard whilst others just need a light touch. Leaders however are not so good at pruning their businesses and releasing unprofitable products, systems and mindsets that just don’t serve them any longer. And yet trees know that if they are to continue to grow they need to start diverting water from lower branches so that the branches at the top of the tree can flourish. What pruning do you need to undertake in your business so that you can continue to adapt and innovative to respond to the changing market conditions?
The other thing to consider is that the gardening activities might vary depending on the season that the business is in. For example, when the business is in start up mode and just beginning to grow there will be more focus on creating the right environment (culture) and planting the right people in right roles.
As the business grows and expands the activities might move onto how to stay focused and avoid becoming overwhelmed by all the weeds (new ideas and opportunities) that could appear and distract you from your vision and purpose.
Finally, as the business matures the focus shifts to considering what products and services need to be pruned so that new opportunities can sprout to continue the growth cycle of the business.
So I’m curious what gardening lessons have you experienced from running your business?. I’d love to hear about them.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
