How do you handle dirty things?
We generally don’t like dirt or dirty things, especially when it’s not in a welcome place or well contained. Yet dirt is essential to life just like the air we breathe. In fact, when dirt is combined with the right amount of sunshine and water, it can be the fertile ground to produce the most extravagant beauty the world has to offer (or the most annoying weeds). If you’ve ever been responsible for any sort of lawn maintenance, then you know that almost anything will grow given just a little bit of dirt. Is there anything to learn about leadership from dirt? I’m glad you asked…
Back in the first century, Jesus told a parable that was easily relatable to a very agrarian audience. He told the story of a farmer who went about sowing seed for a future harvest.
As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.
Not too hard here to see that the existence and condition of dirt has a huge part to play in growth and reproduction, but first let’s take a look at the farmer. This entire parable is predicated on the fact that there is a farmer taking the initiative to plant seeds. As the leader, you have a requisite duty to be intentional about planting the seeds of leadership in your organization. It’s not optional, and without it, you will see no growth and have no hope for a future. What I love about this story is that the farmer is not necessarily concerned with where the seed is going to take root or how it will grow, the most important action here is planting the seed. The soil and conditions will determine the outcome of the effort. That’s not to say the leader doesn’t have a future responsibility for tending to the growth of the organization, but it is important to notice that the leader can only do so much. You can’t force leadership growth in someone whose heart is too shallow, or who lacks the wisdom and maturity to balance their emotions.
Sometimes we try to make leadership development too complicated. We are constantly looking for the perfect place to sow our seeds, or we become too selective about what we share because we don’t want to waste a single moment; however, it has been my experience that you’ll get much better results if you are liberal and consistent with your dispensation of leadership training. Not only does this benefit your entire organization, but you will also get the unexpected benefit of a harvest where you thought none would ever exist.
Now it’s time to get dirty. But before we can look at the condition of the soil in your organization, we need to look at the heart of the leader. It would be unfair, short-sighted, and unwise to expect anything from your organization that you aren’t willing to cultivate in your own heart. The challenge for the leader is that they are by nature out ahead of the organization. The leader has more knowledge, more experience, and more maturity. The evils of pride and arrogance are subtle intruders that can create a fine callus on an otherwise healthy heart for leadership. You must not only keep your heart fallow, but you must also be putting yourself in the path to receive seeds of growth from others. The leader who is growing will also have a heart that is kind towards those in the organization who are experiencing growing pains of their own. It creates an essential empathy that allows the leader to gently guide the organization with understanding.
You’ll generally have a wide variety of hearts in your organization. Some of them are hard and callused, others are shallow, some are too busy, and then hopefully a few that are rich and fertile. As a leader you need to be aware of these heart conditions, because you will need to work together with these individuals to help them understand why growth isn’t happening according to their expectations. The leader is often the only one with the perspective to assess what is happening and what can be done to improve the health of the heart.
Callused and hard hearts are the most difficult places to develop leadership growth. These individuals often have a thick layer of pride, arrogance, or indifference that has built up over years of living under bad leadership, bad parenting, or difficult life experiences. They have become jaded to the point that they can no longer trust that there is anything or anyone good out there who really wants to help them. To them, being open and fallow is just another risk of being disappointed. If you are committed to growing something in these people, you must be willing to take the long approach and bring along the tools necessary to break away the hard places to get to the soft heart that lies beneath. This could take years and may even be out of your depth as a leader. Oftentimes professional help and special counseling is required to help move these individuals forward. Depending on your organizational goals and timeline, you may need to make a judgement call about the best use of your leadership bandwidth. Unfortunately, at some level you can’t help those who aren’t willing to help themselves.
Shallow hearts can be a deceptively easy place to grow leadership. Often these individuals are eager to learn and give their time to your teaching. They will quickly digest what you give them and often show quick results that appear to be real growth and change; however, the leader must be patient to see if the growth has roots deep enough to support lasting change. The growth from a shallow heart will fade away when the heat of reality sets in, because they have nothing deep to sustain them through the rigors of the journey. Often the solution to growing shallow hearts is to step back and work on depth. Depth of heart comes naturally from maturity and experience, but it can be accelerated with intentional coaching. If the owner of the shallow heart is really ready to grow their leadership, then they will open to the deep cuts and uncomfortable conversations necessary to prepare a deep heart for long term growth. Be wary again though that the shallow heart doesn’t deceive you into thinking you are making progress when in fact they are just putting on a show. If you bring along a shallow heart too deep into the journey before they are ready, they will get over their head and not be able to recover.
Busy hearts are all too common today, and I believe they face possibly the biggest barrier in getting to the greatest stages of leadership. Tragically, busy hearts are often found inside individuals with the greatest unmet potential. They have the all the right conditions to develop deep roots and sustain long term growth, however they struggle with priorities and instead try to “make it all work” without making the necessary sacrifices to see real growth. To reiterate, you must be willing to sacrifice busyness in order to ascend to the highest levels of leadership. Many leaders get stuck along their own journey because of busyness, and so it’s not too difficult to see why this is a hard thing for leaders to develop in their organization. I mean how can you tell someone to stop being busy when you as the leader are a paragon of multitasking and 12-hour days?
We should probably take a detour here and put some context to the term busyness. Busyness can occur physically, but it more often seems to happen mentally these days. Our modern definition of leadership is to have complete command and control over every aspect of our organization. We divide our limited attention into increasingly smaller slices of focus and believe that we are benefiting ourselves and our organization in the process. We put “one more” meeting on our calendar, we even double-book ourselves and try to catch a piece of two meetings at once. We try to be everywhere, and we try to know everything. All the while, we can’t understand why our leadership isn’t getting anywhere. At least my inbox is cleaned, I’ve finished the latest season of Bridgerton, and I got that perfect photo of that amazing steak sandwich uploaded to Instagram.
Hopefully, you are starting to grasp the idea that leaders must set the tone for what is important in life. Only once you do that can you start to address the busy hearts in your organization. When you take up this process, it is important to be aware that you are battling against the massive forces of modern culture, media, friends, and family. What I mean is that it is a difficult task to distill all the things vying for our attention down to just a handful of priorities. One approach I have found that has proven to be successful is focusing on what we can control, and what we cannot. Our minds tend to spiral when we give it space for things where we have limited control like war, pandemics, Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelcy, or inflation; however, when we truly begin to declutter the things clouding our view of the vision, we can start to make progress towards greater leadership.
Then there is the fertile heart. Notice what Jesus says in the parable, that a single seed planted in the right soil can produce a hundred times what was sown. This is like exponential growth! Think about an organization where every leader you train is capable of producing a hundred more. You would almost have no worries about the health of your followers and the vision. The journey becomes so much easier, and you will begin to make much greater gains on a daily basis than when you are trying to be the hero and lead alone. Make sure you are investing in your fertile hearts. It is hands down the best way to grow your organization. It takes the least amount of work on your part as the leader, and it has the potential to produce explosive growth beyond your ability to lead alone.
Take five minutes and consider the condition of your heart. Have you developed a callous heart that is stunting your growth? Are you too busy trying to command and control your organization? Where do you need to let go? Are you investing in the fertile hearts that will give you the greatest return on your investment?
Dirt has a lot to teach us about leadership. The condition of the hearts in your organization and your ability to cultivate leadership out of the most difficult conditions are the keys to long term growth and progress toward the vision that will outlast your time as the leader. Today, grab your tools and get to work. The fields are ready.
