Leadership and Weeds

For the past week I was on a business trip.  Before I left, I'd noticed that spring had started to arrive.  The main indicator of this was that the weeds in our yard were starting to sprout.  So for the week prior to leaving, I weeded one section of yard -- and when I say yard, I'm not talking about flower beds, I'm talking about "lawn" -- each day.  Got through four of the six sections, and mowed three of them also.  Those three were looking all right.

The day we left, three hours before leaving for the airport, I put in one last-gasp effort to weed the two worst sections.  I filled our yard debris bin (very large) 2/3 full before I had to quit.  And those two sections of yard didn't look much different.

We arrived home late Sunday night (actually Monday morning at 1 a.m.), then I got up yesterday and got my third-grader off to school.  During both pre- and post-nap 3-year-old nap sessions, I got back to weeding those two sections again.  And a couple of critical leadership thoughts came to me that I thought I'd share in this brief post:

• Most tasks look fairly manageable from far away.  I learned this doing project management in the corporate world, and again while weeding.  The further away someone is from the work that needs to be done, the more reasonable it seems.  The deeper into the weeds you get, the more extensive the work gets.  This is important for leadership: never assume that someone else's job is manageable just because it looks that way from where you sit
• A lot of work takes place unseen.  People walking or driving by my house this morning undoubtedly still thinks my yard looks terrible.  The "grass" is still too high, there are still way too many weeds, and things are not neatly trimmed and edged.  If you asked one of my neighbors how much work I had put in on my yard in the past two weeks, they'd at least be tempted to say "none."  Truth be told, I've probably put in 25-30 hours in that time frame.  Again, leadership must acknowledge the amount of work that goes into every task.  Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, loves to skewer project leaders for padding their project estimates.  But there's a valid side to those estimates: a lot of extra work will be done that no one will notice
• The best work is preventive and proactive.  This occurred to me as I plucked the 1000th wispy-white dandelion head to prevent it from seeding.  If I did a better job "taking care of" those weeds between November and February, maybe March and April wouldn't be so nasty.  This may be the great flaw in our current economic and social systems: we are so busy that we can't work ahead much of the time but instead just do what's next on the list.  Leadership must find a way to recognize -- and do -- the future tasks even if no one else sees them.  We have a million things to do for SEED, but the most important ones are the tasks that will prevent our having to do ten times as many later.  And that means more visible tasks may not get done when, or as fast as, others expect them to be done

Sometimes leadership is unpleasant, or unpopular, or even invisible, isn't it?