Over the years there's one thing I've learned about dandelions. You can scour your yard, removing one after another. You can cover the same ground multiple times. You can go right to left, then left to right. You can cover it along the borders, diagonally, even on your hands and knees, but you will never find all the dandelions.
I have a weed puller. It has a wooden handle that fits in my hand. Protruding from the wooden handle is a metal rod with an end shaped like a viper's tongue. It's designed to be able to get under weeds and help remove them from your yard. Even with this weekend weapon, I've had no luck eradicating the weeds.
Just recently I spent over an hour methodically scouring my yard removing dandelions. I was proud of my work and confident they were all gone. (See I've really not learned anything at all.) Yesterday as I backed the car from the driveway, I noticed one incredibly large — stalk? — protruding from the ground. What the heck? How did a lawn that had been weed free just two days ago become host to this monster?
Today I went back and found four more dandelions to remove. I suspect they are not the last.
How could I have walked this yard like a Federal Marshall looking for an escaped convict and miss so blatantly obvious a violator?
I went to Google for answers. Dandelions are well adapted to a modern world of disturbed habitats — that would lawns. They are difficult to eliminate and grow under more adverse circumstances than competitors. If you don't remove it completely it will regenerate.
The familiar white, globular seed bulb spreads breaks up in the wind and spreads the seeds far and wide. They regenerate a lot. The taproot is deep and if you don't get it all, it just grows back.
Just Like Problem Employees
My dandelion dilemma reminded me of problem employees. Just when you think you've identified them and taken actions to remove them from their jobs, they or someone curiously like them pops back up again. How does this happen?
In my experience the answer is quite similar to how a dandelion thrives.
First, they survive in disturbed habitats; dysfunctional organizations with disrupted cultures. It's not hard to separate them from the high performers but they can find protection among everyone else. You've seen this in your own yard. At the base of one of your healthy bushes is a weed that's hard to reach. You don't want to harm the healthy plant, but you know you need to remove the weed. But that weed is part of a team.
Yet we know that teams rarely are that. More frequently a few high performers are driving team performance. Always attached, at the base of the high performers, is one of the organizational weeds.
I saw this in graduate school. Early on in our first year we worked together to understand each other's strengths; finance, marketing, writing. We had a member whose strength was coasting, and he did it quite effectively through two years. Since well over half the grades posted were group grades, we chose to ignore the problem. He firmly rooted himself inside an otherwise high performing team and has a graduate degree on his wall — for no apparent reason.
Oftentimes the dandelion employee has been in one place so long, and has rooted so deeply, they are nearly impossible to remove. People simply have gotten so used to dealing with the problem, they assume it will never go away and get into the habit of looking past it. As a result organization integrity continues to deteriorate.
The Tap Root is the Key
A dandelion drops a deep tap root into the earth. If you don't remove it — all of it — the dandelion grows back. Eventually it blossoms and the white seed bulb sprays its seeds across the landscape. It shouldn't be hard to see where I'm going with this. Dysfunctional cultures are so because of people embedded in the business who are constantly spraying their negativity, their unpredictability, their lack of character, their unprofessionalism across the organization. The very top people — your healthy plants — have learned to ignore all of it, because time and time again, when brought to the attention of senior leadership, nothing was done about it.
I've had the good fortune to walk into more than one environment where the seed bulbs have been at work for some time. I say good fortune, because there is nothing more fun to tackle than a yard full of dandelions. After all, it's going to look a lot better in the short run even before we get to the really deep roots. With each season comes a new opportunity to remove the dandelions that are causing the problem.
The organizational tap root buries itself in a dysfunctional culture — a disturbed habitat. Fix the culture, set appropriate expectations, celebrate good examples, honor top performers and suddenly the weeds stick out so much you can't miss them, and neither can anyone else. Suddenly the employees you want to retain start looking around and think, "Someone is finally doing something about the poor performers and I really like the look and feel of this new yard."
Your Allies are Critical
Every one of us has been critical of human resources at some time in our career. I can honestly say that I have had the good fortune to be aligned with some amazing human resource professionals. They weren't amazing because they agreed with everything I said or were aligned with every tap root that I wanted to dig up. To the contrary, they were often savagely opposed to my point of view. Yet, we were aligned in our confidence in each other's ultimate goal: build a healthy culture characterized by recognition and reward of behaviors that would best serve the organization's long term interests. And for the most part, we were looking at the same weeds in the disturbed habitat.
Unfortunately we live in a litigious world where whistle blowing has become a career path all its own and no one was ever terminated for a good reason — in their own mind. Yet to build the culture you need to succeed, taking the lawsuits is an absolute must. Settlements are an unavoidable fact of life, but I argue that dysfunctional employees do so much damage that the legal cost is a small price to pay.
Aligning your top leaders is equally important. They and their staffs are hiring new employees every week, and the opportunity for a weed to re-enter the carefully maintained yard is high. Every person in the organization from human resources to training to the administrative assistants must be aligned with the culture and be aware of what a dandelion looks and acts like. Everyone's goal has to be to eliminate the disturbed habitat and build a healthy organizational lawn.
In my career I can name many, many people who today are building sustainable cultures that will support healthy organizations. They still have a lot of work ahead to build those three levels of succession, but I'm confident they'll achieve the goal. Every year brings a new opportunity for dandelions to regain their position.
The search never ends.
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