How to Stop Growing Weeds in Your Organization
Onward toward the Emperor’s hutment they came while the House Sardaukar stood awed for the first time in their history by an onslaught their minds found difficult to accept.
Herbert, Frank. Dune
In the book Dune the harsh environment forces an entire people to adapt to the conditions and become harsh and violent themselves. In the book the Sardaukar were the elite military force and establish as terrifying soldiers. One of my favourite moments in the book came when the native Fremen of Dune encounter the Sardaukar and give them a beating, handily demonstrating that they are more terrifying than the most fearsome fighters around.
I wonder about this idea of harsh environments making tough fighters and if it’s dangerous. Should we as leaders create environments full of difficulty and competition so that the toughest rise to the occasion and get tougher, or should we create safe spaces for gentle folk to put down roots and put out shoots and blossom?
I suppose it depends. How much do we care about diversity? What are the natural operating conditions of our businesses?
True Leadership Is Gardening
There is true and false leadership and much of what passes as leadership in our modern corporations is false. Steven Covey in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People distinguished between management and leadership. He uses the analogy of a team chopping their way through a forest. He suggests that managers are the ones sharpening axes and organizing people to chop down trees faster while leaders are the ones who climb a tree and shout out “We’re in the wrong forest!” Meanwhile Simon Sinek suggests:
“the real job of a leader is not about being in charge, it is about taking care of those people in our charge.”
It’s interesting to compare these two positions. I believe that leadership is ultimately about creating the conditions where people can thrive. The most prominent error I see from folks in leadership positions is to believe that their job is to make decisions. That’s a recipe for disaster eventually. I suppose in simple times with simple businesses that works, but we live in complex times with complex businesses. Any organization that’s operating with one mind orchestrating the complexity is going to fail quickly.
The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing.
— Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams
Ultimately a leader needs to enable the people on the ground (in the ground, to extend the gardening metaphor?) to make decisions. The super power of our time is distributed decision making, and not just any decision making — design. The winning teams innovate faster; they create beauty and value faster. Beauty and value don’t come from a factory, they are grown in gardens and the fruit is ready when it’s ready.
Harsh Conditions Are for Weeds
In my garden when I haven’t cared for the soil it doesn’t mean nothing grows there. Weeds happily grow there. It’s tough to grow the kind of food that I want at my table but it doesn’t mean there’s nothing growing there. Weeds are more than happy to grow in harsh conditions.
Weeds Outcompete
What are weeds anyway? Weeds are plants that are optimized to outcompete the other plants. They may be desirable or undesirable, but one way or another once they are established they need constant management to keep them from crowding out other plants that are desirable.
I remember having a blackberry in my yard and because of my fond childhood memories of blackberry jam that my grandmother used to make I wanted to keep it and collect berries.
That didn’t last more than two seasons.
Today if I see a tiny blackberry shoot, I rip it out from the roots and don’t give it a foothold in my yard. It is such an aggressive and fast growing plant that it tested my limits trying to keep it under control.
By Creating A Competitive Environment, We Encourage Weeds
It’s tempting to try to create an environment of competition. I’ve seen companies roll out career levelling frameworks presumably to give people incentive to work on personal growth. What happens instead is that it creates an environment of competition. Once the career levels are rolled out people now have a name for the game and they have ‘rules’ for how to play. It reinforces the finite game mindset that Simon Sinek talks about.
I know the error of this firsthand from parenting a gaggle of children. There have been so many times where I pulled out the “first one done gets a prize...” card and was almost instantly disappointed in myself for making the same mistake I had made some often before.
Children don’t play the game like adults do. The younger and less competent children would start playing the game and then realize almost immediately that it was stacked against them, at which point they either stop trying or try harder. If they tried harder, the deck was still stacked against them and at the end they were completely devastated and in floods of tears. Now I had to deal with a destroyed human being. It didn’t matter which way they went, I didn’t get what I wanted as the parent. (A peaceful resolution, completed on time)
Then I have a highly confident and competitive child. He always wins whatever race I set up. He also cuts every corner he can and hurts people’s feelings along the way. If he happens to lose, he’s a bear about it and makes it so no one else enjoys winning. He’s not a bad person, but he’s wired for competition and getting what he wants. I can easily set up an environment where he thrives but that also brings out the worst kind of thriving.
Setting up a competition is a lose, lose, lose situation when there are a diverse set of abilities and attitudes. The weeds take over the garden.
Tend a Collaborative Environment Instead
Instead of creating a competitive environment at work we need to set up an environment where collaboration is rewarded rather than competition. I suspect the biggest factor that encourages competition is speed. As I’ve seen with my kids, when we encourage people to be fast and execute quickly, we’re likely to fall into the trap of fostering a competitive environment.
I don’t have a good example ready at hand of a good work environment that fosters collaboration so I’ll give a family example instead.
What I do now with my children is to try to set up ways for them to compete against themselves and help one another. Every week we have a deep clean of our house and each child gets a different zone of the house. At the end of the process we celebrate completion. Everyone gets thanked for completing their work. Then we do a small award ceremony to recognize the values that were expressed during the process.
- First starter — whoever got started first gets this prize
- Hardest worker — whoever put in the most effort gets this prize
- Most helpful — this one is the grand prize, worth double the other ones. Helpfulness is the key virtue we are emphasizing.
I learned that rewarding the first one completed is a terrible idea. That would foster the wrong kind of competition. I also rarely award a prize to a child who nominates themselves for one of the awards.
In addition to that, for a child to complete their zone they have to have someone else check it for them. This fosters an environment of feedback. It’s not easy since children tend to give harsh feedback, but the process is teaching them how to give feedback and most importantly when they check their sibling’s zone, they are training their own eyes to be able to do the job themselves when it rotates around their way.
And Yet Competition is Essential
I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m saying that competition is bad. In fact I believe it’s essential for growth.
Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees. — Willard Marriott
A leader has to be thoughtful and delicate about how to create the right environment for the right kind of competition. When team members crowd each other out and stifle each other’s contributions and growth it is the wrong kind of competition. Perhaps we could call it weedy competition. There’s another kind of competition that’s healthy: contagious competition.
Just a Starting Point
These ideas are just a starting point. There is a lot of complexity to dive into here but I think there a sound analogy to be explored here with companion planting, pulling weeds and competitiveness. The navy SEAL teams need to select only the strongest competitors because of the harsh environments they’re going into. Some startups probably need to only select employees that are operating at a high level of competitiveness.
Eventually though we have to come to terms with the fact that we are a diverse group of humans. Some of the best art will come from gentle and slow growing plants and we need to cultivate an environment for them to reach their full potential as well.
What this looks like in a work environment I’ll need to spend some time to write up another time. Do you find that competitive work environments encourage the wrong kind of growth?
