Fruit, trees, and expectations
It’s been said that you can tell a tree by the fruit it produces.
I was on a bike ride this afternoon, listening to a podcast recently from one of my favorite teachers, Timothy Keller (a pastor in NYC), who made the point that fruit does not give a tree life; rather, it is evidence that the tree is alive.
Most often, I run into this metaphor in a spiritual context. But because I was on a bike ride with time to think AND I spent the morning finishing prep work on a client session for later in the week on setting expectations, I began to consider whether this metaphor works in a business context. I believe it does!
“Fruit” in organizational life typically outputs and outcomes - the measurables of what we do. Easy examples are a sales target, cost savings measures, some productivity ratio, click-throughs, etc. In the context of individual performance, we typically look at some objective metric to determine whether someone is doing a good job and contributing to the company’s overall health. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this - at all! In this context, “fruit” is essential.
But let’s invoke Keller’s idea….
Organizational (or individual) fruit doesn’t give life. Rather, it’s evidence that the organization (or individual) is alive. So, where does the “life” of an organization come from? Here’s where I think leading thoughts like Simon Sinek’s “Just Cause” (from The Infinite Game) kick in. This is where we begin to find engagement. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Woodall in Nine Lies About Work assert that great companies don’t cascade goals; they cascade meaning.
“We need to give them (our employees) a sense of which hill we’re trying to take…
[For] the team infused with such meaning, each person will be smart enough and driven enough to set goals voluntarily that manifest that meaning….
Our people don’t need to be told what to do; they need to be told why.”
Listen, I don’t back away for a minute from the measureables. It comes with the territory of organizational life. I think it’s right that we give results the appropriate attention. And, I think it would be healthy (and “pro-fruit”) to also consider what gives our organizations and our people “life”, giving it appropriate attention and priority so that we can produce more fruit, and more of the fruit we want to produce.
After all, “you can tell a tree by the fruit it produces”.