Embracing nature's bounty

A timely spring gardening metaphor

A ring of rose bushes surrounds my house, first planted by the previous owner and now my baby. Twice a year after extensive pruning, fertilizing, and watering, they bloom in abundance. The neighbors pause, admire, and sniff. Curious gardeners stop me with questions about their types and aromas. Set back against the house, there’s also a red geranium. As a space filler, it is perfect. It requires literally nothing. It quietly grows larger, absorbing surrounding space. Nobody mentions it despite its healthy pop of red.

Show off.

Several years ago, a manager and I were discussing the people on our teams. She described a situation with an employee who delivered amazing work but was often frustrated with the system and other people. That employee had exacting standards for themselves, their peers, and their management. I yelled out "Oh my gosh, THEY ARE A ROSE."

Now if you work with me, you are used to such things. The manager paused and smiled bemusedly; no paramedics were called. I explained my immediate connection with the requirements and brilliance of roses. We must deeply invest to get those blooms. However we also have to be careful to not starve the rest of the garden, to notice our strong and silent performers, our geraniums, successfully flowering away in the corners without demands.

Geranium! I see you…

Why the metaphor

I write so much about leadership because I think we’re losing sight — amid all the manliness and Machiavellian talk today — of what actually works. My personal experience in tech fuels my argument because I am a great leader (she says with no doubt). My teams were happier and delivered better results than comparison groups, but somehow that didn’t calculate into what was truly valued. Senior leadership rarely discussed how I was obtaining high scores on management surveys while steadily delivering projects. Or why I had such a following and why it was relatively easy for me to recruit. Senior leadership also didn’t tap me to share my talents with other leaders, although sometimes HR did. My bosses reaped the benefits of my steady delivery, but to get promoted, I would have needed to pull off company-wide and highly political miracles on top of managing a large team.

Why? First of all, shrug. Tech is a very ‘have cake and eat it too’ place. The bar had been set by people who theoretically had done both, although often with less management prowess so that was a nice-to-have. Despite the teams getting larger and the ability to drive results becoming more vital, the definition of strong leadership was pretty loose. From occasional comments, I also gathered that some thought my management results were not repeatable, too unique to my style or personality. My team's happiness was somehow a reflection of being lenient on employees, babying them and protecting them from hardship. It was a cult crafted by luck or fortune rather than skill. That said, I kept inheriting teams to rehab and fix so there was some acknowledgement of my abilities, but in a way that I can only describe as lazy. I was around, so why not use me?

I did try to avoid these assumptions. I made efforts to share exactly how I led and how that made a difference: a busy mixture of setting a consistent vision, defining clear roles, policing hiring practices, tailoring opportunity to employees (and vice versa), and repeatedly fixing what didn’t work. I sent leaders my yearly strategy deck, my hiring principles, and the messages sent to my team keeping them focused, etc. etc. etc. But I think it all sounded too simple to be true? There must be some kind of NEW THING no one has tried. It needs the perfect slide deck, definitely a pictogram, and preferably a book and a speaking tour. It couldn’t be that basic.

And it isn’t. The main attribute is consistency, and consistency is hard. You have to commit day after day after day, and then do it again even when you’re annoyed you already did it. Oh hey, new team member, you haven’t heard the team vision yet? Oh hey, tenured team member, your role is not clear anymore? Oh, our hiring profile needs to be updated for different skills? Oh, you’re unhappy with the role you just got? Oh, that partner team doesn’t understand what we do? You’ll never stop.

At first blush, one does wonder whether I would have been taken more seriously as a man. If we consider guiding, fostering, and nurturing as all feminine ideals, then we do set up an opposition with masculine efforts like bossing, demanding, and extracting. Anywhere business is male-dominated, we do see feminine attributes, performed by any gender, get sidelined. See: Mark “Suckerberg” Zuckerberg.

But back to the flowers

But as always, I think we’re forcing gender norms unnecessarily into extremes. I am reminded of the movie “A Little Chaos” where a woman (Kate Winslet, obvi) wiled her way into the all-male world of 17th century royal gardening in France. While today’s gardening is marketed (particularly in the US) as quite feminine (cute gloves, aprons and pink shovels), it’s long been both an exacting art and science for both genders.

I grow a balanced garden because we need all the plants: The dramatic showstoppers and the quiet deliverers. The ones that multiply swiftly and happily, and the ones that take longer to germinate but then produce amazing blooms. The swift-spreading ground-cover that protects the soil while the other plants take root. The wild and crazy blooms that seem to come from nowhere, shooting from the ground unpredictably with riotous color. The prickly ones that rarely bloom but produce an awesome spectacle when they do. You need all types, and you need to support all of them.

Did you know that you can propagate roses and geraniums to make more? For one, you study intricate instructions involving the right time of year, the correct environment, and root growth serums. Maybe some prayers. For the other one, you take a leaf clipping and stick it in the dirt. Guess which one is which. You’ll want all the types to build and grow your team culture. Some elements will spread easily like joy, and others take longer like patience. Having different plants will keep your garden blooming beautifully all year round.

ANYWAY having really seeded (🥁) that metaphor, you’ve earned your Nurture Badge. Go tend some gardens, my friends.

Editor’s Note: Released as Free on 6/26/26.