Leadership topic - Seeds

Nobody arrives fully formed. Somebody handed you the guitar.

Seeds is the leadingWithMusic label for what you were given before you could have earned it, and what you are handing on now without noticing. It is rarely a mentorship program or a plan. It is a preacher letting a 9 year old hold his instrument. It is a debate coach putting you with the right partner and never explaining why. It is a grandfather with a garden who says come look at this with me instead of giving a lecture. The people who plant almost never announce that they are planting, which is why most of us cannot name our own suppliers until somebody makes us sit down and try.

The uncomfortable half is that you are on the other side of it now. If you run anything, somebody on your floor is waiting to be handed the real work rather than the safe version of it, and they have stopped asking out loud. You will want to wait until they are ready. They will never be ready. You were not ready either, and you have been telling yourself ever since that you earned the room. You did earn the room. Somebody still handed you the guitar, and the interval between those 2 facts is where most leadership development quietly happens.

The last thing worth saying about Seeds is that they are almost never harvested on the day you planned to harvest them. The reorg you designed the structure for gets cancelled. The launch the roadmap was cut to slips 2 quarters. The boss whose priorities shaped the whole plan leaves in March. What you planted still comes up, on its own schedule, usually somewhere you were not watching. The leaders worth studying are the ones who can play the date they are standing on.