I was faced with a challenging gardening situation recently that turned into a valuable leadership lesson. It made me question how well I cope with the messy realities of both gardening and leading.
My home city of Brisbane experienced one of the worst hail storms in living memory, the kind that struck quickly and left a path of destruction. I am pleased to say that I got by relatively unscathed compared to some people. I didn’t lose the roof of my house, my windows weren’t shattered and my car did not end up looking like a golf ball on wheels.
However, that doesn’t mean I got away without any damage. My poor Peace Lily plants were shredded. They were on my balcony in large pots which, even if I had known the storm was coming, I couldn’t move out of the way. One side of them was torn apart by hail the size of 50 cent pieces. I had to simply watch on as leaves and flowers were being ripped apart.
Luckily the storm didn’t last very long. Afterwards I surveyed the damage, had a little cry and got to work fixing the mess. In a few minutes my plants had gone from being my pride and joy to a sad sight. In fact, I left a few of the damaged leaves behind because I couldn’t bring myself to see them completely bare. I know they will grow back but they will never be the same and that made me sad.
I couldn’t stand looking at the gaping holes that were left and turned the pots around to hide as much of the damage as I could. For a few days afterwards I contemplated buying new plants because I didn’t want to wait for them to grow back. I wanted things to go back to the way there were – and now! I even looked at some in my local garden centre but stopped myself from buying them. It was then that I knew there was definitely a leadership lesson in this experience.
I remembered how often I had experienced frontline leaders who were keen to get rid of a team member the moment they made a mistake or showed some type of human frailty. Maybe it was their perfectionist tendencies, they felt it reflected negatively on their leadership skills or they just didn’t have the skills to cope with the mess. It was like they were saying the person was damaged goods and not worth the effort to fix.
My plants are starting to grow back and they still have some damaged leaves but now I look at them differently. I see them as a symbol of what it means to deal with the messy and inconvenient parts of gardening in this part of the world. That’s a lesson all leaders should learn.
If you are struggling to deal with damaged people on your team contact me to talk about how coaching can help you to work through these issues and give you simple yet effective tools for dealing with the messy situations in your team.