LEARNING THINGS THE HARD WAY

Last summer, we had our 7-acre field seeded with a pasture mix. Our intention at the time was to let it grow, fence it in, and create a nice, large pasture area for our herd to graze. I had bucolic scenes in my head of the horses lazily nibbling, butterflies floating around, and pretty wild flowers everywhere. Much like what you see in the picture above.

When you seed a new field, it’s not a good idea to put animals on it for at least a few months because they will destroy the root system before it really has a chance to grow. So since we planted this field in June last year, we figured we’d wait until this spring just to be safe.

The previous owners of this property were organic farmers, and used lots of thistles to try and control the pests from eating their crops. So this field was riddled with thistles. The farmer who planted it for us warned us about letting those thistles go to seed, or we’d have them running wild all over the farm. So we started mowing.

We mowed that whole damned 7-acre pasture religiously through summer and fall last year.

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CLARIFY, CLARIFY, CLARIFY

“I think we should move up the launch date. We’re ready to go, and there’s no reason to wait”, Dave said.

“Okay, we could consider that, but what about the final supplier who wasn’t sure about being able to make the original deadline?” Brandon asked.

“Not going to be a problem”, Dave responded. “It’s fine.”

Brandon looked at Dave for a moment, thought about a couple other things to say or ask, but Dave waved him off, a little impatiently. “It’s fine”, he repeated.

Brandon left the conversation feeling uneasy and unclear. Uneasy because he wasn’t as confident as Dave about everything coming together in time, and unclear because he didn’t see how all the moving parts would work differently than what they had planned originally. But he didn’t ask any more questions. Dave seemed impatient with his questions. Dave seemed to have everything figured out. Brandon didn’t want to appear to be a worry-wart or lacking confidence.

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“AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION…”

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” goes the old saying. Made famous by Benjamin Franklin in 1735, he was talking about fire prevention. Well, we aren’t in the business of actual fire prevention here at LeadQuine, but certainly in the proverbial sense, we are all about it.

It’s a little alarming how often we hear people in workplace teams say, “Well, let’s see how this plays out first before we react/step in/do something ‘drastic’.” Before anyone knows it, they are dealing with a situation which has gotten out of hand, and could have easily been prevented had there been some simple up-front agreements or clarifications.

Up-front agreements are very simple. 

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