Growing Weeders Into Leaders with Jeff McManus Part 2 (of 2)
“You have to look at ways to challenge yourself. Otherwise, you become stagnant. Nature’s great at showing us this. If it’s not growing, it dies, and then when it dies, it gets rotten.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM Jeff McManus
Jeff McManus grows things. As the Director of Landscape Services at the University of Mississippi, he grows plants....he grows people....he grows ideas. Taking his grounds staff, affectionately known as "weeders", and developing them into "leaders" has been a joyous challenge that reaped acres of rewards in the form of national recognition by the Princeton Review, PGMS, Newsweek and every faculty, staff, student and visitor who has walked onto the Ole Miss Campus. Building on that momentum, Jeff has designed a professional development plan for his Weeders called Landscape University - a replicable training program that promotes the individual's innate ability to GROW. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science in Landscape and Ornamental Horticulture from Auburn University and is a PGMS Certified Grounds manager, and Certified Arborist. Jeff has spoken at Caterpillar Inc, the Biltmore Estates, Leadercast, SRAPPA, Trent Lott Leadership Institute as well as the SEC Ole Miss Athletics. He has also worked with Memphis University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Georgia and private firms in developing their own training programs.
compaction to aerification
“Nature teaches us if you go out in the woods and you look at the trees, there's this organic leaf litter all on the ground. So all these leaves are here, and they're composting and it turns into great soil content. And the roots are just really happy. But when you take that same tree, and you move it into an urban environment, and you move it into a city or town, you lose all that good organic matter. And what happens is, especially on the grove, people start walking in the grove and on the grass, and nobody intentionally means to, to harm the roots or the trees, but that compaction keeps pushing that dirt and soil down. And so those roots can't move. And if you don't do something to break that up, we call it aerification, those trees can start to slowly go into decline.
You see this a lot of times in a construction site where somebody built a house, and there were a lot of trees around it. And the construction team came in and did their job. But when they were there, they park their equipment under the trees, they stack the bricks there, they put the lumber there… and in two to three to five years, some of those trees start dying. And that's because of the compaction. So I've kind of looked at that as internal. If we're not willing to do something in ourselves to cultivate our own learning, over time, we just let our experiences just build up and pack us down. And it becomes a hard pan of life. And what I have found is that I have to have to be that catalyst, and break that up. And as a leader, that's not always easy. I don't always need to be a disrupter. But I want to be a catalyst to learning. So that's why I bring in Jim Rohn on video, that's why I bring in even public speakers is because I want to challenge us to quit thinking just like we did yesterday. How can we make this process quicker, simpler? How can we do this better? And then ultimately, I want our team to be better. And so when they go home, that they're better mamas and better daddies. They're better in their community, that, you know, the biggest compliment, I'll just share this I got was a letter from a 12 year old from one of my workers, who thanked me for what I had helped do with her dad through this program, and how he really invest his time with his daughter. That's the win. That's the lesson is keep cultivating, keep plowing and plant fresh seeds, plant new plants, let them grow.”
pause and invest in your people
“We'll look at nature. Let's go back to our tree analogy. If we're in an urban environment, we're going to work and we're getting hit every day, and we're in the grind. We're having to be on zoom calls every day. That's fatigue. That's the compaction. And so you have to look at ways to challenge yourself. Otherwise you become stagnant. Nature's great showing us this: If it's not growing, it dies, and then when it dies, it gets rotten. And so many people have already died, they just hadn't been buried yet. They're just walking around as a corpse. Because they've quit learning, they quit trying new things, they quit having the availability to be open-minded. And so that's one of the fun things that we try to do here… because it's easy to check the boxes, especially as a leader who owns a company, you just try and take care of your customers. But if you can pause and invest in your people… look at Southwest Airlines, Chick Fil A does this, Ritz Carlton does this, Disney does this. So many of their large organizations invest in their people, it's for a reason, because they want their people to be the answer the problem solvers.“
borrowing confidence
“Employees were thinking paycheck, and a pension, they just wanted to survive. And when the culture just wants to survive, they put their head down. They’re just trying to get through the day, because it's miserable. They're not being challenged. They're not empowered. And so they're being talked down to, they're being told what they're doing wrong. But they had no way to invest in themselves, to believe in themselves. And as a leader, that's one things we get we get to do is to frame it, and let people borrow our confidence. I just saw hardworking people, who wanted to provide for their families. Well, that's honorable, that's great. But then how do I get them excited about what they're doing? And so that that's what my challenge was, was how to tap into that intrinsic motivation. So that they're not just looking for a paycheck and a pension. But now, they have a passion and a purpose. And that passion is, I want to be one of the best, I want to be an expert.”
thrive to survive
“We're more than just physical bodies, we're made up of the mental, the emotional, the spiritual.. we've got to feed those as well. And so a lot of times, if I don't take the time to feed that, that part of me dries up. It becomes really useless. And so I've got to make sure that I have fed that part. I need to be listening, I need to be growing, I need to be developing. When the plants aren't getting watered, if we go into a drought, only the tough are going to survive - only those with deep roots. But they're not thriving. They're just surviving. And a lot of people are just surviving. Because the roots are deep. They're tough people. They're hardcore, but they're not thriving. And so where's that clean water? Where's that feeding, you're getting daily, where's that nutrition coming from? Because we can't just regenerate it all the time.
We need to get it from the outside, coming in the inside. For me every morning, it's having personal time, it's slowing down to have that quiet time. It's that in the car time. But I'm always listening to a book, I'm listening to a podcast, I'm doing some stuff in real estate. And so I think that, to me is a huge part of it is don't just feed your body physically, but feed it emotionally, mentally and spiritually as well.”
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