Hey, this is Chris with Hacking your Leadership on this week's discussion on employee
engagement. I want to talk about a graphic that I saw online that I'd
seen in the past before, but I thought it was an appropriate topic for
this conversation. It's a graphic that says leadership or if you are a leader,
you need to think like a farmer. Okay, that's interesting. Let's
read what this has to say. And there are some bullet points of things
that farmers do or don't do, and it sounds kind of ridiculous when you
put it in the context of a farmer, but the tie in too leadership.
I think some of these things really do have a good leadership tie in
here, and there are some leaders who may need to think more like a
farmer than they're doing in order to keep your teams engaged. It says to
think like a farmer as a leader. You're not supposed to shout at the
crops. You're not supposed to blame the crops for not growing fast enough.
You're not supposed to uproot crops before they've had a chance to grow. You're
supposed to choose the best plants for the soil. You're supposed to irrigate and
fertilize, you're supposed to remove weeds, and you're to remember that you will
have some good seasons and some bad seasons. You can't control the weather,
only be prepared for it. Some of these things are a little eye roll
and cliche, but some of them I think are spot on when it comes
to what leaders can have a tendency to do when it comes to their teams.
The ones that I think that I see leaders have the biggest problems with
kind of universally, are this idea of irrigating and fertilizing and removing weeds.
There are teams out there where one or two people who are not committed to
doing quality work but are not being held accountable to that can bring down the
engagement level and the performance level of an entire team. And then there are
leaders out there who they spend all their time focusing on trying to hold people
accountable that are the weeds, And they don't give any time or anywhere near
enough time to the high performers because they think, Okay, they're already doing
well, let's leave them be, when actuality, they should be spending the
majority of their time with the high performers, because those are the people who
are going to grow and take your team to the next level and you know,
be prepared for for you know, future leadership roles. So it's a
it's an interesting conversation to have because you know, looking at it in a
in a very everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten kind of way.
This is what what leadership is from a from a kind of a kindergartener's
perspective. It's funny because you know how I feel about these I'm just like,
oh, come on, and then you read it like, all right,
let me dissect it. Then like doesn't make sense. And to your
point that like there's some really good elements of this, I specifically enjoyed that
kind of choose the best plans for the soil. Yeah. And and that's
a big thing because we talk a lot about talent and people and development,
but selection process is so critical, not just in like finding the best talent
out there, but also being really conscious of like what the actual job is
and like how are you selecting the best talent for the actual job that you're
hiring for, right and and and how do people find joy in doing that
work, and how do you make sure that the you know, the culture
that you have, the environment that you have have is something that is really
open for any and all talent, but also that you're adding to the team
and that you're bringing someone in who you know kind of is aligned with the
values that you have, but also bring something new and different that will kind
of challenge and push. And I think that those are things that you know
when it comes to really being conscious of that, I think sometimes I see
a lot of times leaders move fast out of necessity instead of taking the time
to consider and think about how do you really make sure that your choice of
talent, you know, is one that is best for the soil that you
have and that will do its most amount of growth and will really make sure
that you're moving forward in the way that you want to move forward as a
team and as an organization. Right, So, sometimes the best plants for
the soil are ones that may not look like the best plants for the soil
because you're thinking long term instead of short term. And what I mean by
that is that I've seen in places where people are into roles based on a
specific set of skills that is needed in the moment, without regard to what
baggage they bring along with them, or without regard to other skills that maybe
needed more long more long term. It's it's what's being thought of is the
problem that has to get solved in the moment, which may be a problem
of the moment. It may be a problem that once that problem is solved,
the the person you've brought out of the team to solve that problem,
it gets solved, and now all of a sudden you're left with a team
that doesn't have that problem anymore, and a person who maybe shouldn't have been
there to begin with because of the the negativity that they bring, or the
or the the problems they bring along with them. Where this is done correctly
is when leaders can choose the right The right plans for the soil are chosen
based on their people skills and and their ability to get along with a team
and to influence a team, because the skills of the actual job can always
be taught. The skills of navigating an environment with with a diverse group of
people and with leaders that have different priorities given the moment and the politics of
a situation. People who know how to do that well that's a really tough
thing to teach in a short period of time. But the actual job itself
or the problem that has to get fixed. All problems, at the end
of the day, can be solved if you have the right people in place
who are committed to solving that problem. Even if that person doesn't know how
to solve it to begin with, if they have the inherent skills to do
it, you can teach them how to do it. And so the right
people for the job or the right plans for the soil. It really needs
to be thought of long term, not just you know, whatever this this
problem is this month or this quarter. One of the other ones I like
here is it says, don't uproot crops before they've had a chance to grow.
I have absolutely seen people not be given enough time to get better at
what they have to get better at before, you know, leaders kind of
cut bait on them. And that's really unfortunate when I see that happen,
because typically it means that the leader themselves hasn't put the time into the person
to help them grow. You can't just throw something into a place and just
say, okay, go do it now. I'm gonna leave you alone,
I'm gonna do nothing to help you, nothing to support you, nothing to
teach you, or to set expectations or provide clarity on what the expectations are.
And then three months from now or six months from now, I'm gonna
tear you out of here because you didn't do what I wanted you to do.
You are there some exceptions to that, sure, but the majority of
time, when a person is put into a role and then taken out of
that role in a very short period of time, and it wasn't their decision
to leave that role, it's because they were not given the support necessary to
do that. It takes a lot more to get a plant to take root
than it does to just keep a plant alive once it's there. Once it's
there, it can tend to be a little bit more hearty, but when
you first put something in the ground, you need to put more care into
it or it will likely die. I want to give some advice to leaders
on what they can do in this situation. If they're reading through this and
they're thinking, Okay, maybe I do some of these things is incorrectly.
But first I want to give it toward to one of our sponsors. All
right. If you're a leader and you're reading through this list, we'll post
a link to it in the podcast description. If you're reading through this list
of ways to think like a farmer and you're thinking, maybe you need to
do this a little bit better, what I can say to you is that
there's a leader in my life who has a story that he tells that has
always resonated with me, and it's about how his boss came in and asked
him what happened the previous day because the scorecard the numbers weren't where they should
have been for the previous day, and he very flippantly responded with, I
guess I wasn't a good leader yesterday. This is a it's a an eye
opening, light bulb blasting moment that you can have here when you realize that
the individual day is hardly impacted by you as a leader at all. It's
only in aggregate. Don't hold yourself to a standard that says that the failure
of a day is a failure of leadership as a whole. Remember you will
have good seasons seasons. You can't control the weather, only be prepared for
it, and so do your best to focus on the individual behaviors of your
team and trust that the results will be there as long as you're doing it
over a long period of time. Look for trends and not what an individual
day performance is. Yeah, And the only thing I would add to that,
I think is just continual when it comes to like, you know,
maintaining kind of the crops and making sure that you're continuing to grow what you're
looking for from a cultural standpoint, that that not just removing the weeds,
but also because that's kind of like sometimes you'll get somebody who's just not aligned
with the values and doing the work, and that's really important as a leader
to make sure that if they're not aligned with the values, if they're not
working as a team, if they're not kind of reflective of the culture that
you want, that you have to do your role as a leader to remove
them. But I also think that like pruning plants and making sure that like
people and like the small things that happen, the small adjustments, the the
the the way that people maybe talk to each other, the comfort level that
people get over time when it comes to meetings and language and stuff like that,
those are things you really have to keep an eye on and be conscious
of to make sure that you know, over time the comforts of growing a
team that becomes really close and really good kind of you know, the culture
they've created. There still has to be an openness to that, and there
still has to be the ability to people to maintain the expectations that you have
around the behaviors, around the way that they communicate and they treat each other.
Those are critical things because what ends up happening over time is that you
just allow the little things, the little things of little things, and then
six months, nine months, a year from now, the team is in
a very different place than they were at that point, and it's much harder
for you to bring in additional talent, and people feel welcome and feel like
they can come in on day one and have an impact and be able to
work well with the team and the culture. I think I think I's spot
on removing weeds. You can't look at a weed as a euphemism for a
person. A weed could be a behavior is exuded out of a team of
people or a person, and removing the weed isn't necessarily getting rid of the
person it's getting rid of, or you know, kind of nipping in the
bud a trend that you're seeing before it becomes a common practice. So yeah,
removing weeds is just about making sure that there's some some care given to
the things that have to change or the constructive criticism that has to happen in
order to keep the team cohesion aligned, not just you know, the Jack
Welsh eliminate the bottom ten percent kind of thing. That's not necessarily what moving
wids is. So I like that. I like that clarification. Thank you
everybody for joining us on this discussion on employee engagement. Join us next Thursday
for another one. You have a great day.