Building Blocks of Leadership: Lessons from Gardening

I tend to look at the world and see analogies for life in (almost) everything that I see. Gardening is no exception.?

I’ve been rediscovering my love of gardening this year - and also recognizing how little I actually knew about gardening and the “science” of it. (I now have some great Square Foot gardening books on my shelf to read, be inspired from, and plan with during the upcoming snowy months in the Midwest….).

Even though my personal academic knowledge is more limited, I’ve grown up experiencing the garden with my parents. I would sit down on their laps and “help” with planting, weeding, and harvesting from an early age. There are pictures of me playing in the garden probably even before I could walk. My parents had a huge (!!) fully organic garden looooooooooong before it was hip and trendy. I grew up composting — all of our leaves and all of our fruit/vegetable scraps. This was NOT the norm in the 1980’s. Mother Earth News and Prevention magazine were staples in the house. We canned so many quarts of tomatoes (and peaches and pears) that they would last us until the next harvest. We had an overflowing raspberry patch that we’d regularly use to make jams for the year as well. (That doesn’t even count the wheat berries we stone-ground to make our own homemade bread or the peanuts we’d grind to make our own peanut butter — more stories for another time…).?

I experienced the fruit of the labor of others - I even worked hard with and for it. But, I didn’t have to be responsible for planning everything.?

My husband (with some “help” from our children) built me two new square foot gardens at our new house (we left our old square foot garden a state away when we moved….. though, that garden often just grew weeds effectively for us…). We emptied 30ish large bags of perfectly balanced soil into our boxes.

I now had boxes filled with deep, rich soil but needed to fill them….

There is an annual heirloom plant sale in our town. I went to it and LOVED it and bought so many plants. I chose plants based on what looked good in the moment (and based on what I thought our family would enjoy) and based on the plants my 5 year old pointed out.

I then needed to plant all of my plants. And, I planted most of them (with “help” from my kiddos). I thought I had a plan, but my planning was based on guesstimates and wonderments. I knew that “square foot” gardening often meant that plants should be placed a foot apart. But, that’s not true of all of my plants… Some plants needed a lot more space to truly thrive. Putting in too much of a good thing might be ok initially, but after the initial growth, things could wither on the vine or cease to bare fruit because it was crowded by too many other things.

Here’s a few connections I see to leadership and goal setting…….

1. What do you want to produce? Start with goals for your end product. Sometimes this is referred to as backwards design. Do you have sole discretion over what your outcomes are or are there other individuals or groups who want to speak into this?
2. Know your parameters and where you have jurisdiction (and, identify the “community garden” plots for cross departmental collaboration). Recognize where there’s space for advocacy and asking for more. Give yourself permission to express and advocate and also give yourself permission to compromise, knowing these could all be legitimate responses.
3. Recognize the soil (resources) that you have and consider which seeds you can sustain. You may have incredible and cutting-edge ideas but it doesn’t always mean that there’s space for that within your current framework/budget.
4. Strategically prioritize. Just because you’ve always done something, doesn’t mean that your current environment still wants that end product or that they will help to sustain/build it.

What else is missing? How else can you strategically plant and cultivate this fall? How can you create a positive environment for your team?