I recently spent the afternoon of my birthday pulling dandelions from my lawn. I know it sounds like an unglamorous way to spend your birthday, but I had a very cool new tool that made the task into kind of a zen meditation: Poke, tilt, pull, eject. Poke, tilt, pull, eject.
With help from this weed puller from Fiskars, I cleared hundreds of those yellow-flowered stinkers. And had a leadership revelation in the process.
If you’ve ever scanned your yard to eradicate weeds, you know that they tend to cluster. One dandelion pops up. It drops its puffy little seeds. And three more dandelions sprout in the near vicinity. Pretty soon whole sections of your landscape are being taken over by the jagged leaves and white puff balls of dandelion knots.
As I dug up hundreds of tightly packed clusters that day, it occurred to me that dandelions are like work-related performance problems leaders don’t deal with right away. A behavior occurs, and if we as leaders don’t address it, it matures into a multi-seeded monster that spreads all over. And pretty soon the problem behaviors are choking out the behaviors we DO want. Just like the jagged leaves of the dandelions overtake the nice green grass I really WANT to cultivate in my yard.
When a single weed waves its flower in the middle of the lawn, it’s easy to ignore it. To consider it a one-off. Just like that random undesirable thing that an employee does—it’s easy to dismiss it as an anomaly. Something that will go away if we ignore it.
But it doesn’t. Allowed to continue, that one problem grows, spreads its influence, and pretty soon it’s the standard, not the outlier.
As leaders, it’s our job to notice when undesirable behaviors pop up, and to address them before they spread. Because it’s a lot harder and more painful to stop a problem after it spreads.
I have the blister on my thumb to prove it.