What do bees have to do with people and organizational strategy?
There’s something beautiful about how thousands of individual bees come together to execute against one singular mission — the survival of the hive. Many leaders seek that same level of focus within their organizations.
I‘ve been fascinated by how people interact, organize, and function in a work environment throughout my entire career. And, while I have lots of human-based stories about what I’ve seen and observed over my years working in the People space, as I share more about how we can create more harmony between organizations and their employees, I’ll occasionally tap into observations about the world of beekeeping.
Why?
Reason #1: My partner has been a hobby beekeeper for more than 30 years — so I have more fun facts and anecdotes about bees than I honestly know what to do with.
Reason #2: Potentially more importantly, the complex society within the beehive — is fascinating. In the wild, the hive is an organization built of tens of thousands of participants, acting in concert with one mission in mind — hive survival.
In this self-organizing body, there is no ego, no ulterior motive, no formal leadership. No one tells anyone what to do. The organization’s survival is totally dependent on having hyper-clarity of mission with the right actors, skills, resources, and timing. Bees are individually empowered to make the decisions they believe are in the best interest of supporting the organization’s mission.
Merriam-Webster defines the “hive mind,” when applied to people, as:
the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people (such as Internet users) regarded as functioning together as a single mind
A beehive is not the perfect analogy — more on that in a later post — but there are some takeaways we can learn from.
Leaders I work with crave the ability to tap into this type of mission-driven, outcomes-focused energy — particularly in an volatile environment where in order to win, organizations must be focused on the highest impact activities, yet also be ready to pivot quickly as the market and conditions change.
So occasionally, I’ll draw from observations and anecdotes about the world around us, and what we can take away as leaders. It’s not a perfect analogy — but I think it’s a fair start.
Where do you think you could use a bit more of the hive mind to further your needs as a business?