If you are trying to grow a garden, weeds are bad, right? When you are in leadership and someone talks about “the Weeds”, you either think about your bad employees or you think about details that feel like they are choking you (as in ‘lost in the weeds’).
Both ideas may be true and we will talk about those, but there are other weeds that creep in to your life, impacting your productivity and effectiveness as a leader.
Here are some of the other weeds:
- Relationships that need repair or elimination.
- Outside interests where you never say NO.
- Your own distractions like email and social media.
- Thought patterns that have developed over time.
- Habits that steal health, wealth, and well being.
The first step in successful weed management is to stop watering the weeds!
Weed factors have a way of constantly grabbing your attention. Squeaky wheels get grease right? Yes, they do! The weeds always have a way of interrupting progress and needing attention.
Constantly allowing the noise to be disruptive is a kind of watering; positive reinforcement. Every time you allow a person or thing to cause you to behave differently than you intend, you are watering a weed.
Relationships
Relationships can be very large weeds. They spring up and grow, soon to be discovered as useless. At first the relationship might be nice and warm. There may be a hopeful sense that this thing can be positive. Soon the relationship turns into demands for time, resources, or worse, convictions.
Your personal values may get challenged by the person on the other side of the relationship. Your judgment about right and wrong can be tested. Your own sense of commitment to the relationship draws you further into the net, yet time after time, you begin to feel used and or displeased with the fruit of the relationship.
Maintaining the contact and allowing the opportunity for the other person to use you and your good nature is futile. You have to break it off.
Outside Interests
Many people have a sense of responsibility to serve their communities outside of work and family. On one hand, that is what makes our country so great.
From time to time though, the constant acceptance of roles and responsibilities elsewhere becomes weeds in our life too. People who constantly say yes, get tagged as such and are routinely asked for more and more; more time, more money, more service.
Soon the calendar is so full there is no time for the personal priorities you need to maintain. Conflicts arise. Stress increases. All because some new weeds have grown.
Your Own Distractions
How much time do you spend sifting through emails, texts, and other social media posts and pings? It is so easy to stay distracted by all that noise. STOP!
Set aside some time in each day to get your electronic fix. Then go on with other, more productive activities that are on your schedule.
Don’t let the lure of being connected keep you from being truly connected with the people around you who have higher value and deserve more of your focus.
Stay in the moment. If you are at lunch or dinner with someone, put away the phone. Connect with that person. Give them your undivided attention. Begin working on meaningful relationships.
Improve Your Thought Patterns
An old mentor once introduced me to the concept of “stinking thinking”. We all suffer from ‘voices’ that programmed us to believe we did not have what it takes to endure a situation, be successful, or try something new.
Maybe it was that third grade teacher who embarrassed you in front of the class, or the parent who never encouraged you to do anything, but belittled your initiatives.
Allowing any of those voices to dominate your frame of reference today is stinking thinking. Rise above those negative energies and go ahead and do what you believe you can.
Let me also mention your comfort zone here. What you hold onto as a comfort zone can actually be part of stinking thinking. Comfort zones can be big weed patches. Refrain from continually falling back into the comfort zone. Stretch your reach a bit. Find a new zone.
Bad Habits
The habits we develop can be weeds too. Whether the habit involves eating, spending, lifestyle, or other tangible experiences, your habits may be your biggest weeds. Stop watering them.
If you need to, get professional help breaking a cycle. Habits have a way of robbing us of our best potential. You can lose time in the day feeding a habit. You can certainly lose money with bad habits.
Most importantly you can damage good relationships with bad habits.
Oh and the First Two Types of Weeds
Employees – I mentioned bad employees can be considered weeds at work. Watering those weeds includes actions like tolerating less than acceptable behavior.
You hire on skill and fire on behavior.
That’s an old saying in HR circles, but very true. Questionable behavior at work should not be tolerated. Coaching and counseling is required. If the employee cannot or will not respond to the effort, then action must be taken to eliminate the weed.
I love the way Jim Collins () describes employee selection, training, and retention.
[Paraphrasing…]Get the right people on the bus and put them in the right seat on the bus. When you realize someone is not a fit, get them off the bus.
Details – Yes, the details we suffer at work can bog us down. As managers, we have to establish an appropriate attention to detail that changes as we promote up into the organization.
When you were on the front line as a single contributor at work, details were your life. All the details about your assigned duties were your first responsibility.
When you get selected to be manager, you have to step away from some of those details. You have to rely on the team who works for your to handle the details. Yet you must establish reporting and accountability within your team so that details are not lost or forgotten.
STOP WATERING THE WEEDS
Just like in agriculture, weeds come in all shapes and sizes. Eradication of weeds requires careful treatment. Certainly one of the best alternatives is to stop watering! Even with lack of water, some weeds survive for much too long. That’s when other, specifically designed effort is required to get rid of the weed.
Use some of the ideas above to evaluate what weeds exist in your garden right now. Decide today what you can do to get rid of those pesky nuisances so that yours is a garden of lush, rich, and vibrant color and beauty, flourishing for others to enjoy.
