The notion that the better you understand human beings, the better you do at business, has been a guiding force for my work for a long time. Having recently been a guest speaker at the Garden Centre Association Conference and having spent two days immersed in the world of garden centres and plants, I think I may have to revise my notion and change the language slightly!
More of that in a little bit.
The invitation to speak at the GCA Conference was in the context of staff development and how to develop sales and grow businesses. It’s on these themes and ideas that I want to build on in this article.
My starting point is in sharing a pattern that I’ve noticed across many successful leaders; that they regularly take ideas and learning from all sectors and cross fertilise those ideas in different places. When I was building a UK based B2B business some years ago, I would regularly attend B2C conferences in the US and take ideas from there which I could bring back to our business. Why? Because it’s about finding fresh ideas, fresh innovation and finding ways to challenge the norm.
Building on that I thought I’d aim to do two things in this article. The first is to share what I saw that I believe makes the Garden Centre sector unique in it’s culture and mindset. It’s often hard to see ourselves as others do, so I thought it might be interesting to get an outsider’s perspective. And secondly to share some of the ideas that I covered in my talk – ideas that I’ve gleaned over a number of years working across a huge range of sectors to leave you with some actionable ideas and takeaways.
What makes GCA Members stand out?
If I took one word from what sits at the heart of what I took away from the two days, it would be the word nurture. It’s literally ingrained into how leaders at all levels think about their business – both of plants and of people. There are many other sectors that would do well to take notice of the notion of planting seeds, applying sunshine and water, pulling out the weeds and applying a healthy dose of patience and long term thinking. It seems so obvious to everyone in the room and yet when I spend time in other sectors, the obvious really isn’t that obvious at all.
I think my favourite phrase, which I heard and which best summed it all up was “You can’t sell a dead plant”.
In most sectors, what I see is the impatience of money and returns can be so overwhelming that it drives out the nurture. It’s about understanding the fundamental nature of the nurture business.
In the garden centre business, the lack of nurture shows up pretty easily in dead plants – the dead profits take a little longer to follow on.
In business, how does a lack of nurture show up in teams of people?
Disengaged, demotivated teams, “burn-out” or that phrase which I keep hearing of “quiet quitting?”
You can have a pretty good bet that dead profits follow from disengaged people.
Yes of course, have an eye to the bottom line, but I definitely encourage leaders to take a leaf out of the garden centre book and focus on nurture.
When you put people first, the results will follow.
Big Bold Ideas
What are the ideas I had to share with the GCA audience that can help with growing a business and staff development?
- Develop the Big Bold Mindset – You can’t navigate a new world with an old chart.
I can’t think of a single sector that isn’t facing disruption and that requires us to develop a different set of mental models, of frameworks for how we look at the world and how we approach developing the skills needed at work. Put simply, we need a new set of charts.
Professor Kamal Munir at Cambridge University talks of need to imagine a world 5 years from now and to see the players, the ecosystem, the trends and patterns that have changed and to then work out what part we want to play in that world.
My mentor used to say to me that if you plan to be in the business that you are in today in five years’ time, then you won’t be in business. Different words but same result – how can you positively disrupt yourself.
In my talk, I shared the way that I first positively disrupted my world at home (with our plans to sail the world as a family) and as I developed that skill set at home, I then used the same approach to positively disrupt our business to find new and better ways of doing things. The skill here I believe is that of getting more comfortable stepping outside of our comfort zone.
2) We, Not Me – The Essence of Teamwork at Work and at Home
On my journey, I ran into trouble because I was looking through the lens of me and not we, and old chart of the world. One that was all about numbers first rather than people first. This approach showed up in my world in a number of ways – crashing our boat on my first round the world race, and almost crashing both my home and work life following the same philosophy.
The penny dropped for me when my coach shared the superb South African proverb:
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”.
That led me on a journey to uncovering the values that united my teams – our work team and home team and creating better conversations around the things we celebrated and wanted to see more of. The thing that truly anchored this was creating our family values and building a regular conversation around the behaviours that we wanted to see more of.
What conversations could you have to either create a set of shared values and then find ways to make these a regular way of you work together?
3) Take Extreme Ownership – Navigating Emotional Black Holes
What defines us as humans is that we experience emotions. If we didn’t have them, we’d simply be thinking machines more akin to a computer. As humans we are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.
The implication of this is that we need to better understand our emotions – our patterns built up over our lifetime of the way we react to different situations. Some patterns are helpful and others can be, well, less helpful.
I talk of the notion of emotional black holes – old patterns that crop up, especially when under pressure. Just a few of the ones I’ve experienced are ego (I’m right and you’re wrong), blame (It’s your fault, not mine) and being a victim (things happen to me rather than taking control of the moment). We all have our own flavour of these – these are just some of the ones I’ve had in the past.
There are a range of different tools for dealing with these which are for another day. For this article, I want to share one very practical tool – it’s called taking Extreme Ownership.
Whatever happens to you, hold in your mind that it’s 100% on you and no-one else, even if that feels ridiculously unfair and doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation. Why? Because when you take this state of mind, it moves you to a place of possibility – of finding things that you can do to improve the situation rather than waiting for someone else. It’s quite simply the most practical mental shifts I know.
It was a tool I’ve deployed many times at work and also when we had our challenging situation with power failure in the middle of the ocean.
What situations could you get more resourceful in, come up with more creative solutions if you made this mental shift when the pressure is on?
4) Be More Resilient – Self Leadership
Doing things you’ve not done before – going after big bold goals is by definition hard and at some level requires behaviour change.
The single best way I’ve learnt for this is by paying close attention to the micro habits that shape you every simple day. In our talk, I shared the simple habits chart I’ve used for years to set and hold myself accountable to get the compounding effect of layering up different habits. My challenge to you is to start by committing to one new habit for the next 14 days and to tick this off on a paper chart every day. I dare you to start with cold showers. Not only are there are a ton of health benefits, but going right back to the big bold mindset, it’s about taking you beyond your comfort zone on a regular basis. Starting the day with ice cold water is the single most effective kick starter I know!
Learning what makes us as humans operate is the underpinning behind all I’ve shared here – it’s knowing what makes the human animal tick so that we can better navigate ourselves and those we work with. Add in the crucial notion of Nurture and taking that long term view that I was reminded of in my time at the GCA and I think you have a pretty good formula for not just creating the results you want but creating a feeling of fulfilment.
Caspar Craven spoke at the GCA Conference 2023 and is a leading authority on achieving big bold goals and a motivational leadership speaker.To get his full set of 20 principles for achieving big bold goals, you can get these by messaging Caspar’s team at www.CasparCraven.com