How houseplants made me a better manager
My name is Simone, I’m 35 years old, marketing manager at Amazon and houseplant enthusiast. I fit exactly right in the millennial plant parent profile: stressed-out, working long hours for a tech corporation, city rental-living, with a boyfriend and three cats.
When I jumped into my plant passion, it was a way to escape the stressing routine, to preserve a green and happy space at home. Now I own 100+ plants, and taking care of them has taught me a lot about myself and how to apply same dedication to other aspects of my life, including my job as a marketing manager.
Allowing vs controlling
If you think about the amount of time I dedicate to plants you’d be surprised to know it’s actually not that much, considering the number of specimens the live at my place. The first lesson that my passion taught me is to organize my routines to make the most out of my time. How did I get there? Slowly.
When you start with a few “babies” you want to provide for them, water and light as much as you can. You care, and sometimes you care too much. You’re tempted to establish a routine, but the wrong kind of routine that makes you do this or that everyday because it makes you feel in CONTROL. At the beginning of my journey I was over-watering my plants with my anxiety, in a similar way I often found myself over-worrying about controlling my job performance.
But when you start owning lots of plants, and you don’t have much spare time, you inevitably start neglecting part of them, and then you realize your real role in taking care of them. They don’t necessarily need constant care, they need the right amount of care (or the right amount of carelessness) to thrive. Too much water can make the roots rot, too much sun can burn the leaves.
A precious lesson for my inner perfectionist manager, who could not let go any small detail of the project he’s leading. Sometimes it’s a light touch, but the right touch, that makes the difference and ALLOWS growth.
Nevertheless, this is not easy, you need to know when you light touch it’s required and this brings me to another aspects of plant care that was extremely helpful in my daily job as a manager:
Being constant in observing
The one routine that you have to establish is observation. Plant are living beings, as for that they have their language to communicate with you. The only way to learn that language is observing your plants everyday, and possibly multiple times a day. Spending time with your plants will teach you to interpretate their signals. Droopy stems, yellow leaves, wrinkles, will tell you what they need. You learn that not all plants are the same, and to moderate your approach based on their needs. You will see some of them will need to stay moisturized all the time, others are more “autonomous”.
This connection, is the kind of connection that you want to create with the living beings you interact with at work: your peers, your teammates, your business stakeholders, and even your managers.
I realized I was so busy in getting the job done that I was investing way less time in observing and understanding what people wanted, and how my work could be helping them. Wouldn’t it be easier to do those projects right and painlessly, if you spent enough time understanding people?
Have courage and take risks
This is actually nothing new, it’s on every leadership, managerial or entrepreneurial motivational book. And for a good reason. Chi non risica non rosica, says an italian proverb, the equivalent of “nothing ventured nothing gained”. And in business environment you can also hear it paired with “we’re not surgeons after all”, and it’s true, we’re not saving lives with those excel sheets. So taking risks should be a light-hearted decision.
But when it comes to plants, that is next level. Your choices really become a question of life or death, for your plant. Most of the decisions you take are not reversible. You overwater a plant? It might be late when you realized that the plant is sentenced to death. Or they gave you a rare plant cutting you need to make it eradicate and grow, shall you put it in water? In soil? In a semi-hydroponic medium — getting nerdy I know, but to give you an idea.
So, unless you are still in that phase where plants are objects, furniture pieces that you can just replace when you don’t like them anymore, you seek for that sense of accomplishment that an old growing plant can give you. You just don’t want to buy another same plant, you want that one to live forever. This is when you actually learn to take risks and feel comfortable with it.
And the sense of responsibility that comes with that, is also an aspect that I grew a lot through my hobby, and was able to take advantage from in my regular job.
What comes next?
Resilience
Probably the most important lesson, and coming from the plants themselves rather than my attitude towards them. Within the houseplant journey, you learn by trial and error. Before really cracking a plant, you fail, many times.
How often have I been tempted to just throw away that… that… what-is-it-even-remaining-of-this-plant?! Don’t do it, keep going, keeping believing and watch. Plants are strong, plants are resilient, plants will be born again.
Whenever I’m seriously worried about a plant to die, I chop it off. Cut any healthy stem that remains to make it root separately and chop everything else off from the main plant. The roots will remain, and those roots will give to the plant the strength to come back to life.
How does this apply to my working life? I am a plant now. I invest time and energy in developing roots. So if I’d ever get my leaves burnt, scorched and I feel I’m dying, I will still have strong roots to rely on to grow back again. I will just need to chop off all those things building anxiety, projects failures, a bad meeting, toxic coworkers. Chop everything off, go back to your roots.
Everyone gets to decide what they’re comfort roots are. Taking time off, a new hobby, Netflix catalog, a life-aspiration. For me it’s friends and family. These are the roots that my inner plant use to fulfill its basic needs of love, connection and purpose. And I know that if my roots are strong, there will be more chances to have a beautiful luscious foliage. At work, it will make me a strong, resilient manager that can withstand difficult situations, then take the next step to further grow.
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My name is Simone Fortunini and I’m a passionate marketing manager with 10+ years of experience, currently working at Amazon as a Senior Brand & Advertising Campaigns Manager for Europe.
Since less than one year I decided to start sharing my houseplants passion with the online communities, creating a aplantortwo. Born as an Instagram plant-photography profile, now is also a blog where I share my experience with houseplants care and offer my plant consulting and coaching service.
