Leader’s Guide to Planting a Tree

Being a leader means planting a metaphorical tree in the shade of which you will never sit. You’re setting your business AND employees up for success all while juggling a few hats and continuing to grow a forest. The concept of being a leader has not yet changed, but how we do it now matters more than ever. More business leaders than ever before, according to a Gartner survey, are looking to prioritize leadership and management effectiveness. So how can we play this game effectively while remembering there is no “I” in team?

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”

There are several variously attributed quotes with this idea at the core. At Poll Everywhere, we try to live out this value and have enshrined it in our own values for our leaders. We view our leaders as coaches before they are ‘managers.’ We also hold the value of a growth mindset for all. We want folks at Poll Everywhere to grow their skills and their careers. And we want that even if Poll Everywhere won’t directly benefit from all of that growth. We invest in our people to plant these metaphorical trees.

Leaders must build trust, learn what motivates the individuals on the team, identify the individual strengths, and then connect the team to the best possible deployment to make the most of the team goals. There is more art than science to how a leader does this because even for an individual with specific strengths in hearing feedback and technical excellence, they may have a bad week and need empathy or want to develop a weakness on a new project. Balancing all of these concerns and still producing what is necessary is a complex challenge.

In my ten years in software engineering, I learned a few lessons that I hold closely as CEO. The first is that position and title don’t grant authority or leadership to people. You build that faith in others, and the position and title reflect the faith. This is much the same as our fiat currency. Dollars have value because we all agree that they have value. Apart from that agreement, dollars are quite worthless. We must build that trust and credibility with how we lead, with empathy, and clear vision.

I also learned as an engineer what the military has known for a couple generations: when things get difficult, people work for the folks on their team. They press on with the people in their small, day-to-day group in mind. They don’t do it for the company, for money, for the product impact, nor for the charismatic leader. Culture is built by leaders, but it can work for you or against you. Your example and the people you choose will decide it.

One best practice that I observed in my time in software engineering was the tendency of the best managers to place a lot of trust and autonomy in their technical or team leads and then get out of the way. Create space for the compelling folks you hired to challenge themselves and solve problems.

The only way that employees can grow and, indeed, that leaders themselves can grow is to accurately perceive themselves. There is much research that informs us that we do not see ourselves as accurately as we see others. It is imperative to build the skill of having difficult conversations and offering feedback to each other in order to offer this gift of insight, perspective, and ultimately growth.

We are investing in training and culture to improve our own ability to offer effective and consistent feedback in 2023. We believe it is critical to growing our people. We believe it will plant those metaphorical shade trees. Our managers will invest in growing the rest of our talented people, and the cycle will repeat. Some of our managers may move on sooner than we’d like, but that is when the skills they have developed will appear to us as the shade trees we wish to bring to the world. A world with better people who help each other is simply a better world for all.