Quit Searching For Leaders, They Pick Themselves.

A Great Place In The Yard To Watch The Stars!

I love to work in my yard.  It has never been considered working to me.  I love to landscape and design new ideas to flow through all the other things I have going on around my house.  I can go out in the morning to get started on some projects of trimming and tidying up.  I can get lost doing those things and 5 hours later my wife will ask me if I need something to eat.  I lose track of time when I get into my yard.  It is one of my favorite "babbling brook" applications for leading me to some sense of balance in my life.  My yard is not work, it is truly therapy.

I have a couple of old shovels in the shed.  They have had some serious use.  I even broke the handle on one of them digging some larger rocks out of the ground.  I was using the old shovel as a lever to loosen the rock as I impatiently dug out the hard soil around it.  I would slam the shovel head into the hard soil, just under the edges of the large rock and put all of my weight down on the handle to try and wiggle the rock from side to side.  If I could loosen the rock this way, I could make the digging a lot easier to do.  Oops.  I heard the handle crack at the junction where the metal shovel head and the wooden handle meet.  My favorite shovel might have begun to break!

I pulled it out to see what the damage was.  It was a pretty good crack!  No more heavy duty shoveling with this favorite guy!  His days are left only for the light weight dirt moving.  I called in the duty of my second shovel.  It did fine to finish my work.  Second is now my number one shovel.  I also know that I cannot use shovels that way anymore.  If I do, I will be relegated to buying shovels more often than I need to.

I noticed that both of my shovels are designed exactly the same.  I never noticed that before.  One was more worn than the other, however.  Both will do exactly the same work.  Both will change nothing about how I spend time in my yard.  Each shovel will lead me to the digging success I need to do.  Shovels pick themselves to do the shoveling work.  Shovels do not cut branches down when I prune my trees.  Shovels dig when I need to dig.  Shovels also have limits.  My second shovel will live a more successful life because I recognized how I abused the first one.  I do not want to buy another shovel.  The second one will be the one that will finish my life's shoveling needs.  I have come to trust its limits and will respect what it can and cannot do.  I am the impatient operator who killed my number one shovel.  Man, I hate the truth!  I killed the leader.

A Nice Place To Sit Under A Large Pine Tree!

Shovels are just like leaders in your organization.  When it comes to digging, shovels pick themselves.  Your business has these kinds of leaders.  When it comes to bookkeeping, leaders pick themselves.  When it comes to marketing, leaders pick themselves.  When it comes to selling, leaders pick themselves.  When it comes to merchandising, leaders pick themselves.  When it comes to human resource management, leaders pick themselves.  If you have employees, quit trying to use your shovel as a tree trimmer or a crow bar.  You will eventually break the handle.  And some of you owners have shovels in your shed that you refuse to use.  They hang in your business like second rate shovels leaning on a wall.  You might discover how well they will dig.

Do not search too hard to pick the leaders you want for helping you to operate your business.  In the past 3 decades, I can count on two hands the amount of times I formally advertised to solicit people to apply to work for a position I had open.  I have employed several thousand people in my small business career.  I bet I have interviewed less than 100 people in those three decades.  I meet good leaders everywhere I go.  I find them behind a checkout register, at a coffee shop cleaning up the floor, in a garage doing mechanic work or installing television cables.  Leaders are everywhere.  Look around, you can easily see the ones who pick themselves.  I have not had a great need to advertise for new employees.  I usually know where they are and ask if they are happy doing what they are doing.  Most will jump ship.  I only ask them to perform well, be productive and grow their leadership skills into something worth exposing, and above all...have fun doing that.

One of the best ways to have a landscaped yard everyone admires is to fall in love with the work you give to your yard.  When it becomes a labor of love, the results become larger than the work you can ever apply.  When you look around at other workers in other business models, you will discover many hard working leaders applying their working skills well at doing a lot of stuff they do not love to do.  They are everywhere.  Most of the time, some good respect and appreciative ownership is all they need for them to become special leaders in their workplace.  Many of those workers are still searching for that special place to express themselves.  All they need is to be given a chance to bloom into what they can eventually become.

A Great Spot For A Morning Cup of Coffee!

Most owners are control freaks.  I am one of those owners.  I like things done a particular "way" and will work hard on protecting that "way."  I have also learned to discover that my "way" has not always been the best "way."  Give it up.  Permit your natural leaders the rope and chain to move about more freely.  Quit trying to make them do what you think they ought to be doing.  Allow your natural leaders to go out to dig for themselves.  Allow them to break their own shovel handles.  If it is good enough for you to break handles, why do you strap them down so tightly that they will never be able to learn how to dig instead of crow bar leaning?  These little nuances help them to improve their leadership skills.  If you believe one comes without the other, your business will continue to suffer in its path to become great.

Sometimes Spring Carries Its Own Magic!

Six of my best leaders no longer work for my business models.  Someone else snagged them away.  One is the general manager of one of the largest west coast landscape companies located in Boise, Idaho.  One is the lead comptroller for a legal firm who manages direct service industries on their use of Bonneville Power Administrations 'bulk power' distribution for the west coast, offices located in Seattle, Washington.  One is the west coast regional manager for United Postal Services (UPS) multiple warehouse locations, offices located in Portland, Oregon.  One is the owner of several recreational building firms that specialize in log facilities design, constructing many of the Disney theme park buildings.  One is working in another country providing hotel management advice to some of the largest hotel chains on the globe.  And another is now retired with a home located on a golf course in Arizona.  He worked in corporate management for a candy company.  Two of these people did not finish high school.  All of them were given key roles in some of my small business models.  In each case, it was likely their first experience at leadership permission.  In three cases, I was only able to employ them for a very short while.  They were looking for something bigger, better and quicker.  You want these kinds of stories in your employment file.  These types of people will never hurt your business growth.  They will make many mistakes, but they will never hurt your business growth.

I have witnessed many people in my career who have been given the "positional" power to guide a small business and carefully watched them "kill" the spirit of potentially great leaders.  It is a tragic thing to see.  How many shovels are leaning on the wall in your shed?  Just remember how to permit your leaders to bloom into what they pick themselves to be.  It is an "art" you might want to learn.

Until next time...