Business Leaders, Suppress the Cultural Weeds

In addition to coaching business owners and their leadership teams across the country, I raise grass-fed beef. One of the enemies of the rancher raising grass-fed beef is weeds and to control weeds, we focus on what we want…great grass; not what we don’t want…weeds.  

Weeds are also the enemy of a great business culture. To control the “weeds” in your business, focus on what you want…a culture that maximizes the outcomes you want.  

The concept of raising grass-fed beef is simple. The cows are like employees and their job is to eat the grass and turn it into meat. Of course, the better the grass is, the happier the cows are and the better they do their job. When weeds appear, they can start to choke out the good grass and if not controlled, will take over an entire pasture. It happens slow at first and it is hard to tell that the meat production is slowing. Then all of a sudden, your cows will cross through an electric fence to get to the “greener grass on the other side.” 

There are different ways to control weeds such as chemicals or mowing. Both drive up costs, are time consuming, and can have negative side effects. As mentioned above, the best way to control the weeds is to focus on cultivating what you want to grow rather than always dealing with what you don’t want to grow.  

In other words, cultivate great grass through solid pasture management. Great, dense grass will help choke out the weeds and prevent the spread of new ones.  

The culture of your business is quite similar to our pastures and you should work to cultivate the kind of culture that will also choke out and prevent the spread of weeds.  

You can’t help but get the occasional “weed.” Those weeds slow production without you even noticing at first. Sometimes, we might even find the weed attractive.  The Canadian Thistle has a beautiful purple bloom and when there is just one, it can be tempting to wait before cutting it down. In business, that attractive weed might be the person with lots of tribal knowledge, seemingly loved by clients or uniquely valuable in some other way. However, like weeds choking out grass, those people will slow the production of others and actually chase off the employees you really want to keep.  

They will “head for greener pastures”! 

So, what does it look like to cultivate a great culture? First, decide what result you want from your culture. When you know the result that you want, you can determine what type of mindset you want to attract and cultivate in ways that get those results.  

Cultivating this mindset in your staff starts with talking about it all the time. Feed it with training, feedback, and rewards. When weeds appear, cut the negative behavior with coaching and if necessary, let people go.  

For example, one recent client has determined that their Mission is to Create Champions inside the company and out. They have articulated what that looks like for each person in each role. They will hire those who get excited about this mission and they will cultivate it within those folks. However, if it turns out they hire a weed, the great employees will shift that person's mindset or the weed will be eradicated as soon as possible.  

Know this - like our pastures, if you are not actively cultivating what you want, what you don’t want will show up and grow!