Reflecting and drawing parallels between leadership and nature
Sometime last week, after a long day at the farm, as I reflected on my leadership career, I couldn’t help but notice how our stories and experiences connect with nature.
This one time, I took on a new team member from another organisation. I would like to keep the name confidential, so, for the sake of the story, let’s call her Radha. I was shocked to find that she was earning at 25% more than any of my other team members.
I dug deeper to understand this anomaly. 25% is an exceptional hike and very rarely granted – so you would expect it to be given to an outstanding performer (and from what I could see, Radha was not one).
I found that one of Radha’s previous managers had given her an unnecessary 20% pay, that lifted and levelled her career to the role she was in now.
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This brings me to one of my favourite nature analogies. Fast growing trees in the tropics can gain up to 3 or more metres of height in a single growing season. And that’s great if you want to grow a forest quickly. But if you want a productive food forest (much like what we want our organizations to be), this process wouldn’t help at all. You would need to control the growth in order to protect the space for smaller species which take longer to grow.
In the corporate context, you might have heard about the T model. It helps determine whether an employee possesses deep insights into a niche subject (symbolized by the vertical bar of the T) or the employee possesses a broad array of skill-sets but lacks depth in any particular subject (symbolised by the crossbar of the T – ‘a generalist’).
We can apply a similar model to the nature analogy. I call it ‘the Tree model’ -
Trees can be pruned in two ways:
a) By coppicing the crown area. This results in growth of side branches and development of a more branched and denser tree. This method also leads to a stronger stem and is preferably applied to fast growing trees.
b) By removing side branches. This results in the tree quickly gaining height and expanding upward. This method is useful for slow growing trees.
Some trees are capable of doing a) and b) themselves, this is called self-pruning capability.
Now, let me tell you how this concept connects to the case introduced in the beginning: The case of Radha.
Radha progressed pretty well in the early stages of her career. But she was promoted to a role she was not ready for at all. It was an immature promotion.
In my experience, such immaturity leads to devastated careers.
Unfortunately, most of the times, it takes a lifetime for people like Radha to realise what went wrong, or in fact, to even recognise if anything went wrong at all. All because of an untimely and pre-mature promotion.
High stakes make it harder to experiment and risk. She never got a chance to try, test, fail, grow and become stronger.
While Radha, in all probability, could not grow "into and upto" her maximum potential, her peers and colleagues had to thrive in the limited space available to them. This again led to unproductive growth of the team and the organisation.
Our Radha-Tree grew too high – without being given the chance to grow a strong trunk. It is not difficult to recognize the energy balance of this: a devastated career, a waste of considerable amount of funds for the company, an undernourished and unhealthy team/work environment and a painful and resentful exercise for all involved.
I will leave it to you to reflect further on the T-model and the tree analogy. Questions I would love to hear your responses to are:
What type of a leader/person do you identify yourself as?
How do you develop a team member who prefers to acquire a breadth of knowledge and skills at a rather shallow level?
How do you develop a team member who possesses depth in a niche area and lacks breadth and overview?
Mother Nature, by the way, has her own way of taking care of the pruning, if you let her. She will send bugs to eat the soft young shoots of trees and she will send animals to nibble on the low branches 😊. All we have to do is mimic her, she teaches us everything.
Looking forward to hear back.