Harvest, Then Plant

It is a great pleasure to discover that our personal values have become so fixed that they will express themselves without conscious effort. A few days ago, I was writing a job application and addressing the myth of "overqualification." I wrote, "A job is not a box of fixed size that we fit in or not; it is a field to be harvested, planted, and cultivated."

First you plant?

I was thinking more of the box vs. field contrast when I wrote the words, trying to suggest that the "overqualified," if they have the right attitude, find the challenges and potentials of a job faster and meet them better. That a good job is what you make it, not a static, dead thing but malleable and as likely to grow and blossom as a tended garden. After I had mailed the letter, I suddenly thought, "Wait a minute. Didn't you get that backwards? First you plant."

Well, no. The notion that you plant, cultivate, and then harvest is part of the legacy of our culture, which has set itself as nature's adversary. How much wiser it is, first to learn the land, harvesting what it has to offer and studying the nature of its gifts. Then change is part of a true evolution, rather than conquest. For centuries, we have come to new lands, scoured them sterile, and tried to make them produce what we are used to. And the environmental legacy is not pretty, whether you look at fields leached of nutrients, mountains gutted for chemicals to bleach jeans, ponds clogged with imported weeds, or hordes of starlings spackling your car.

The first stage of culture should be a model for the humility with which one approaches a new land. Sadly, we take the term "hunter/gatherer" to be inherently pejorative: the poor people, merely living off the land. In our self-absorption, we even think it shows their other character flaws — ignorance, perhaps naiveté, or even stupidity — that they don't seem to consider themselves "poor." That, generally, is a lesson we teach them. Sarah Winnemucca, Paiute, leader, author, and teacher, makes that clear in her autobiography.

Sally Zanjani's excellent biography of Sarah Winnemucca.

Hunting and gathering is a way to learn to know the land, to become its inhabitants rather than raiders. The land comes to know you as a fellow rather than a master. Frost puts the alternative succinctly: "The land was ours before we were the land's." Our history in America (understand, I use "our" referring to my own white heritage) is one of ignorance and folly, driven by the pride that provides answers but hasn't heard the questions. Harvest knowledge, harvest understanding, learn what you have come to use, learn from those who precede you. Then you plant, with knowledge of the land's limitations, and cultivate to create the great cooperative that is ecologically sound subsistence, and harvest again.

A new job is no different. How many new hires come in determined, perhaps not even consciously, to make the job fit their preconceptions? The old military saw, that we always prepare to fight the last war, applies to many other endeavors. We shape things to make them familiar, demanding that they be a new manifestation of the old. But without understanding what they are, how can we dare change them into something better? No one is overqualified for a job the day they start work, and if they learn the job well, then a sensible employer will use their skills effectively and fairly. The discontent of being overqualified is a sense of being undervalued, and being undervalued is a function of how one is treated, not one's paycheck.

The "overqualified" hire who creates problems and ultimately fails generally is not defeated by "overqualification" but by blind hubris to the value of harvesting first. His "overqualification" is not details of a resumé but a self-important, doctrinaire frame of mind. Macho managers brag about cleaning house, by which we are to understand not a dutiful housewife but a new Hercules hosing down the Augean stables. The attitude sets the mode of transaction between the new hire and the existing staff as adversarial. The existing staff is challenged to prove they are not part of the dross, the rocks and indigenous trees that must be bulldozed to make way for grainfields, potato farms, and chicken ranches. A new manager with such an attitude better be prepared to work without cooperation.

It is much easier to control the bulldozer attitude below the management level, but it is pervasive. I had a tech writer working for me, briefly, who could not edit others' work. They wrote it wrong, after all, and it needed rewriting. Even a proofread turned into a rewrite. An edit that should take two hours became days' of unnecessary revision, putting projects off schedule. Surely it is the height of arrogance — and indiscretion — to assume that your fellows don't know what they are doing.

Any employer should be wary of such an attitude in a manager. The manager who plans to make a new world over in his own image is suffering from a divine arrogance that is dangerous and probably misplaced. Is there anyone who has nothing more to learn? Pity them, but don't hire them to run your office. Such managers succeed only if they have the luxury of carte blanche, and the expense in lost legacies is exorbitant. And the attitude insults the employer, after all. It implies that the employer has failed in his own stewardship. Who hired the "incompetents"? Who let things get into such a mess?

No doubt there are workplaces that have degenerated into something unsalvageable (though I've never seen one), but even then, the logical beginning of the fix is not destruction but analysis. What is here worth keeping? What is here that must be kept? Remember the baby and the bathwater? Keep the baby. What can be used as raw material for a new beginning?

Remember the baby and the bathwater? One, you keep.

Asking for an explanation, trying to understand, is a great way to offer help. The fresh eye brings with it what I call "The Emperor's New Clothes" questions. But those questions are merely provocations if they are asked with adult cynicism rather than the child's honest curiosity. "Why do we do it this way?" is the sort of question that can prompt change or defensiveness. Change management is generally thought of as helping people accept change. In other words, softening the impact of what is being done to them. Much better to think of change management as managing the change rather than managing the changed. Again, harvesting what's there, then planting new.

A good manager brings his knowledge to the new world humbly, confident not of being right but of being able to judge well and choose effectively. Harvest the knowledge that surrounds you, understand the nature of your new land — its taste, its chemistry, its own energy and vector of change — and move in harmony with it toward mutual goals. This is true husbandry.