Cultivate — why the best leaders tend conditions (Word at Work Series)

Good morning, and today's word of the day is cultivate. Now you might be saying, well, Rob, that is the name of your company, and that is true, but there's a very good reason for that. So join me today as we explore the dictionary definition of the word cultivate, little bit about the history, and what that might mean for the world of work. Good ideas often start with a single word. This is here's an idea worth playing with with myself, Lambert from Cultivate.

Each episode, one word, its origin, its journey, and what it still means for the way we work today. So let's take a look at the dictionary definition of the word cultivate. The dictionary has cultivators prepare and use land for crops or gardening, grow plants or crops, try to develop or gain a particular quality, that one's interesting, try to win the friendship or support of, good use, and cultivated means well educated and having good taste. You see the history of the word cultivate is one of those interesting words that hasn't really lost much of its meaning as it's journeyed through time, unlike some of the others that we've covered on this channel. So the word cultivate comes from the Latin cultivar, which means basically to till, to tend to, to care for or improve the land.

That in turn comes from the word cultus, which means care, tending, cultivation, refinement, worship or habitation. And then the word cultus, and this is where it gets a little bit interesting, comes from the verb collare, which means to inhabit, to care for, to tend, to nurture, to protect. But here's where I think it gets quite interesting because the word collaire gives us a whole family of words. Cultivate, to nurture growth. Culture, which means the original cultivation of land, and then later to mean the cultivation, the growth, the nurturing of people and societies.

Agriculture, which is the cultivation of fields and land. Horticulture, the cultivation of gardens. And even the word cult comes from this, which originally meant worship, it meant devotion, it meant care. At its heart, cultivation is not about control, it is about stewardship. So the cultivator does not force growth, they create the conditions in which growth is possible.

So what does the word cultivate mean for the world of work? Well, is where I think it becomes surprisingly powerful for organisations. You see, much of modern work is geared around extraction. Extract more output, extract more efficiency, Do more with less. We've heard that a lot.

Extract more value. Extract more performance. Extract more productivity. Cultivation starts from a different assumption. Instead of asking how do we get more from this, we start with a question more around, well, what conditions are required for this to flourish?

See, that shift might sound subtle, but it fundamentally changes the way that we approach work, and I think, obviously, for the better. A cultivated team is not one that is pushed harder. It is one where clarity, alignment, safety, meaning, attention, capability, and motivation are all deliberately nurtured over time. A cultivated organization is not one that grows the fastest, but it is one that develops the capacity for sustained growth. There's a wonderful book that I reread every single year called Growing a Business by Paul Hawken.

Notice the word growing a business. Not scaling, not hacking, not buying our way through. There's not forcing, not mandated, growing. This entire book is about nurturing and growing by paying attention, by seeing, by studying, by tending to, by seeing the steps one by one, by releasing revenue over time. It is a it is a wonderful book about the nature of nurturing and tending to a business and paying attention to what is actually happening in the organization.

And I got this second hand and right here in the front, the previous owner, presumably the dad who bought this and then gifted it to his son. It even says, to Todd, may this nurture the seed. Nurture, seed, cultivate, grow, it's all connected. And this is a wonderful, wonderful book. And in Paul Hawkins' writing, businesses are seen less as machines and more as organic systems.

So a gardener doesn't pull the plants and the seeds to make them taller, they nurture the soil. They think about the conditions. They remove obstacles, water consistently. They tend to the flowers for growth. Growth happens as a consequence, and this is almost the opposite of most business advice.

Modern organizations often operate as though the quarter must produce a harvest. Cultivation recognizes seasons. There are times for planting. There are times for growth. Times for pruning.

Times for harvest. And of course, time for rest and recovery. A cultivated leader thinks differently to a controlling one. A controlling leader might ask, how do we make this happen? A cultivated leader might ask, what conditions do we need to make this thing flourish, to make the organization grow?

One is focused often on intervention. The other is focused on the environment. The difference sounds subtle, but actually it leads to radically different behaviors. Instead of driving people, they develop them. Instead of forcing alignment, they create clarity.

Instead of demanding innovation and creativity, they create space and time and meaning for ideas to emerge. Instead of measuring only the outputs, they pay attention to the health of the system that is generating those outcomes. And the opposite of cultivation is not neglect, it's often impatience. Cultivation recognizes that there is a gap between an idea and the value that it generates. There's often a gap between effort and result, and there is always a gap between planting and the harvest.

The work of leadership is not simply to demand outcomes, it is to create the kind of environment, the conditions in which those outcomes inevitably emerge. And that's precisely why cultivated is such a rich and interesting word for the world of work. It reminds us that organizations are not machines to be optimized. They are environments in which the conditions and the climate need to be tended to carefully. And just like the garden and the farmer's field, they respond less to force and pressure and more to care, meaning, time, space, and energy.

And with that, I'm gonna put the aircon back on, and I shall speak to you in the next Word at Work. You take care of yourselves. Bye bye.