“Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made by singing, “Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade,” as so poignantly said by Rudyard Kipling, in the ‘The Glory of the Garden’.
You have got to get your hands in the dirt and work the ground.
Yet, pulling and pushing at the young shoots after planting won’t make them grow faster either. There has to be a delicate balance between the hard work required to stimulate growth and the patience needed to allow that to happen in its own time and space frequency. Gardening like leadership is thus the matter of your enthusiasm holding you up while your back gets used to the work. You have to trust that the future holds the possibility of better things, new growth, sunshine as well as much-needed rain. This is the first essential step to making good things happen.
The next step is to surrender to the process of opening yourself up to everyone and everything and
forming a deep connection to what is and being fully present.
In leadership this entails giving up some foreknown beliefs such as a winning the war for talents, getting the right butts in the right seats, focusing solely on improving your hiring strategies and operations and neglecting the real potential that lies in first surrendering to the need of all living things to grow and prosper.
Where your attention goes, your energy flows and by placing the focus and attention on the growth and development you allow for a deeper sense of belonging and responsibility to and for the process. In their white paper „The Deliberately Developmental Organisation“ published by Way To Grow Inc in March 2014 Keghan, Lahey and Miller encourage us all as leaders and people developers to aspire and work towards the following in our organisations and as individuals:
„Deep alignment with people’s motive to grow means fashioning an organizational culture in which support to people’s ongoing development is woven into the daily fabric of working life, visible in the company’s regular operations, day-to-day routines, and conversations. Thus, the approach to work in a DDO is not about doing something familiar a great deal harder, a great deal longer, or a great deal more. It is not about developing employees’ skills better than one’s peers. At the level of culture, it is about integrating deeper forms of personal learning into every aspect of life in the company. (copyright March 2014).“
What type of environment is a such an organisation
going to provide for learning and growth?
It will certainly take you out of your comfort zone, require you to be fully present and engaged, challenge your weak spots or opportunities for growth, expect you to make mistakes and be prepared to fix them, encourage you to collaborate and challenge the status quo. As Maurice from Quantum Monkeys reported from their experience with the DDO implementation in his blogpost on Agile and Learning Principles (April 2017),
„These three practices — working on your weak points, staying out of your comfort zone, and making yet fixing mistakes — are a powerful combination. Brand-new skill sets were acquired by people in a matter of weeks. And with more varied skill sets comes a better perspective.“
What would foster that growth is continual open candid dialogue that aligns personal, developmental and organisational needs with the overall business strategy and objectives providing an ongoing exchange between all levels of the organisation. The values and behavioural framework around those provide the canvas for which the individualised learning can take place. Global objectives such as total quality, operational excellence or continuing improvement are the guideposts.
Thus, just like plants people need 7 crucial things to grow well as individuals and in their contributions.
- Room to grow.
- A healthy climate.
- Stimulating environment with enough light.
- Water and nutrients.
And last not least above all else:
- Simply time and some patience. The rest nature takes care of by itself.
