Leadership Patience

Routine on a dairy farm comes with the seasons. Roughly around the same time each year, fields are prepared, corn is planted, hay is cut and put in the barn. Cows and other domestic animals are let out and brought back in, sheep are shorn, maybe you take your pigs to the county fair to win a ribbon.

It's always the same, not counting some minor changes due to weather or other factors. And it’s been going on for hundreds of years, thousands even, in spite of technological advancements and agricultural science. The wheel turns.

The wheel turns in leadership, as well, and as a young manager early in my career, it was a lesson I had to learn.

Pickin' rock

Five million years ago, during the last ice age, glaciers ground across Northern New York, clearing wide paths of hilly land and creating the Adirondack Mountains, and the Tug Hill Plateau. They left rocks in their wake, worn round from thousands of years of excruciatingly slow motion.

Every year, before the fields can be prepared for crops, these rocks have to be removed. Ranging in size from a softball to a beach ball, they need to be moved to make room for the corn. As you’d expect, hidden granite rocks the size of watermelons are generally not good for farming equipment.

So, every year, a tractor slowly makes its way up and down the fields pulling a wagon. Behind the tractor comes the farming family, all sizes, and any friends or neighbors they could convince to help. They pick up any of these glacial rocks they come across and throw them in the wagon, rinse and repeat, for the entire field. And the next, and the next.

Rinse and repeat, each year. And the next, and the next. It’s called pickin’ rock where I come from, and it’s a farming institution in the still-cold spring. In places where the rock wasn’t worn round by a glacier, farmers make stone fences from the wagonloads they collect. Where I grew up, older farms would have great piles of round rocks here and there, sometimes along a fence line or going into the woods.

As a kid, it always perplexed me. Where do these rocks come from? Didn’t we just pick these fields clean of them last year? Generational farmers like my parents or their parents never seemed to care. It was a job they had to do, before they could get the corn in the ground. It was a critical part of the harvest cycle. But it always frustrated me how every year you'd pick all the rocks, and then the next year more would show up.

Well, to answer the question, rocks are brought to the surface from the inexorable pressures of a full year of the earth slowly shifting. It’s as simple as that. When a plow turns the earth, more are discovered, and the cycle continues.

Frustrations of a new leader

As a fresh-faced young HR manager, the world was my oyster. I was excited to transform the lives of the employees I was happy to serve. I looked forward to helping them achieve their wildest dreams, become the president of the company, unify around our company’s organizational vision and rule the world. I put together development days, staffed a morale committee, learned all my coworkers’ favorite breakfast sandwiches and fed them out of my own pocket. I worked alongside them so I could relate, stayed later, moved faster, picked up garbage in the breakroom. I’m sure they appreciated it. But I couldn’t get them to invest in themselves. No one ever seemed interested in talking about their future growth and development, or completing an engagement survey.

Mostly I just got the same few tired questions, especially from the new people. When am I eligible for benefits? How do I submit a missed punch form? Which Friday is payday, and how many hours are on my check? How do I put in for PTO?

Day after day after day. The same old questions, like the rocks that showed up in the fields year after year.

Over time, I became frustrated. I blamed my team. Why couldn’t they take a minute to talk to me about the really important stuff like their future goals and how to get there? Why do they always have stupid questions about the timeclock and their paycheck and when open enrollment starts?

You know where this is going. The team I worked with were mostly hourly employees in customer-facing positions. They worried about clocking in on time and getting their job done. They hoped their customers wouldn’t be rude to them that day. They worried about making rent, and not missing the benefits open enrollment window because their kids needed their medicine.

They worried an idealistic young manager like me would take them off the floor for an hour to talk about their future, and they’d have to come back to an hour’s worth of work that had piled up while they were gone. ?

The problem was me

It's pretty obvious I was the problem. I didn't understand why yet, but I made a change anyway. I decided to just be the best I could at answering all of the questions, not just the ones I thought they should think were important. I decided not to take it personally. I got better at predicting the questions my team would have, especially when they were new, and created FAQ resources to make it easy on them. Instead of having career development days, I had benefits information days. I made sure every new hire orientation group knew when they could expect their first check and what weeks would be included on it. I rinsed, and repeated, and rinsed again, as much as my team needed it. ??

Here's the thing: when the rocks are picked from the fields, crops can be planted, grow, and be harvested. Similarly, after my team’s questions about their urgent needs were answered, once in a while someone would stop by to talk about their interest in becoming a manager. After a bit, more employees started feeling comfortable enough to join the occasional development day, or take a second to complete the employee survey. I started to look forward to those repetitive questions I got, because I knew I could make someone’s day a heck of a lot better by competently answering them. And later on, if that person had more questions, I’d be ready for them too, and the ones that came after.

The lesson I learned was an important one, and it helped me as I continued in my career as an HR leader. I wasn’t patient with the questions I was getting because I didn't understand that they would never stop. Many times, leadership is just about being patient with a member of your team. I was projecting onto my team what I thought they should be worrying about, instead of listening to what they were really worrying about. Being patient with all those questions gave me the opportunity to find the best ways to answer them, and when I did that, people felt comfortable moving on to their next questions. And so on, and so on, rinse and repeat.

Before a farmer can plant their crops, they know they have to pick rock. Every year, one after the next. That's why my parents, and their parents, never got frustrated with the process. It was just something to make sure you did well, because it facilitated the harvest. For my team, I knew they would have paycheck and benefits questions. It was urgent to them, and it was a critical part of their employment cycle. I knew I’d make myself available when they had more, and later if we made it to a conversation about their future, all the better. The rocks come back every year, you can’t help it. It's the same with the questions that matter the most to your people. Understanding that made me better at what I did - Both as a farmer, and as an HR leader. ????????

Patrick Ingham has been helping business leaders deliver better results through the lens of their people for almost 20 years. He is the founder of?John Patrick Consulting Group , an HR, people ops and talent optimization consulting agency. For more tips and tricks on how to optimize your business performance through people operations, check out his other articles or reach out for a free 1:1 consultation today.?