Treating teams like vegetables
On a rare working from home day I was looking out at my garden and thinking about the parallels between gardening and leading teams.
One thing that gives me great pleasure in my gardening is growing fruit and vegetables that I can then eat but this involves quite an investment, both in time and emotion.
I start during the quiet winter period as I plan what I want to grow this year, am I going to try anything new or shall I just stick with what I normally grow? At this stage I start wracking my brain as to which variety of vegetables I grew last year, when did I start, what was the weather like, what was successful, what didn’t work. Each year I promise I’ll start a gardening diary, with notes on what I did, when, and what the weather was like, so that I can learn for next year — it’s one of those resolutions that never quite gets kept.
Then the planting starts, lots of seeds go in and there’s the anxious wait to see how many germinate, has the temperature been right, too much or too little water, which ones are going to be the strongest ones (not always the first to germinate)? If you’re lucky you have a few spare plants to pass on to friends, and in exceptional years you’ll be discarding some seedlings as you just don’t have room for them.
The careful nurturing then starts, the regular watering, moving the seedlings through progressively bigger pots, being careful though, one careless grab of the delicate stem and you can irrevocably damage the seedling (I have no cucumbers this year!).
The next tricky decision is when to start hardening off the plants, getting them prepared to deal with life outside of the protected environment they’ve been nurtured in. This is a gradual process, exposing them when the weather is being kind and bringing them back in when it turns a bit cold, slowly increasing the range of temperatures you expose them to until they become robust and spend all the time outside.
Finally, you get to plant them in the vegetable bed and reclaim the window sills. At this point you’d like to think that’s it — but it never is. First there’s the never-ending weeding, all those plants competing for the nutrients and light. Then there’s the pests and diseases to keep an eye out for, do you sacrifice the odd plant or resort to chemicals, but be careful you don’t want to discourage the pollinators or those that will eat any bugs. Some plants grow tall and straight, others have different ideas and need some “encouragement” to grow in the direction you want, some just need a bit of support. Then you must feed and water them, sometimes the British weather provides this in abundance, but some years you have to intervene.
Eventually you get to harvest the fruits of your labours (literally), but the jobs not done, before you know it you’re clearing the bed and thinking about how to add some nutrients back in ready for next year, should I grow a manure crop, is my compost in a state where I can spread it onto the bed?
And then the whole cycle starts again.
