A lot of my clients use a phrase: “A tiger can’t change its stripes.” I strongly disagree with this concept. Farming is a business which causes you to be humble and daily teaches you lessons.

Junkin andy
Stubborn.Farm
Andy (Caygeon) Junkin’s niche is helping stubborn farmers work better together. You can download ...

You have a choice to either learn from each lesson and evolve from it – or become extinct.

I often get called out by a family patriarch saying, “You need to change my son (or daughter). He’s got an attitude problem.” In 99 percent of these cases, it’s both generations that need to evolve. Where I get into a problem is that the son is willing to change, but the father isn’t, and it leads to an impasse.

In order for things to get better, everyone has to evolve who they are and become better people as a result.

When you were a boy, the challenges you learned were about a skill, such as how to drive a tractor or how to fix a tractor. As a young man, your challenges were management challenges, such as how to dry off a cow or how to rebalance a feed ration.

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Now, as an adult, your challenge is leadership. How to get everyone working toward the same goals and what changes in your behavior you need to make in order to get the results you want.

Just like it was a challenge to learn how to hold a steering wheel while pressing in the clutch as a young boy while learning to drive a tractor, so is it a challenge to learn to control your temper or let your temper go when motivating employees. Leadership isn’t something that is genetic or inherited like farm property; it’s developed.

I am convinced that everyone’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. Just like in every Marvel comic book, any hero with an incredible gift, it can often cause problems until you learn how to harness it. Like, for instance, the Incredible Hulk didn’t know his own strength, and his rage caused problems. But when harnessed, his strength and rage became a secret weapon.

It’s the same thing with our superheroes in farming. For instance, this family patriarch (father) had an amazing ability to pay attention to detail. You pull out a carton of eggs – and you and I would probably find a crack in one of the eggs in that carton – but he’d find a microscopic hairline crack in all of them.

He was able to point out the flaws and was obsessed with fixing them. This made him an exceptional manager; he was infatuated with fixing every little detail. But when it came to working with people, he found the fault in everyone, and people couldn’t stand the abrasive way he constantly yelled at them over the littlest details.

For instance, the day I showed up, he had signs posted, “Do not drive on the lawns.” That day he was yelling at a truck driver for driving 3 inches (literally) onto his lawn because the yard was impossible to maneuver around. He had an incredibly profitable business because he was infatuated with every little detail – but had nobody working there.

He couldn’t understand why his sons quit on him and he couldn’t keep anyone around as employees. He kept saying, “Nobody wants to work in this day and age.” The reality was that nobody wanted to work for him because he was miserable to work for.

He was a great guy with a great sense of humor, and everyone in the community loved him. I had a lot of respect for him as a man, as a husband and also as an incredible farmer. However, his infatuation with detail and expectation for everyone to be at the same level of skill as he was on the first day they worked for him was ridiculous.

What we got him to do was to evolve who he was and who he could become. We got him to adopt the mission statement: “I look at details, fix problems and bring out the best in everyone.”

For him, what that did was radically change over the next year how he managed people. Instead of expecting employees/family to instantly think the way he did, he started asking himself, “What do I know that they do not, yet need to know?” He also asked himself, “How can I make that person’s day better rather than thinking about how can he make my day better?”

He changed how he managed his employees and, soon after, his sons came home because they saw how Dad had changed. For that father, changing himself resulted in dramatic changes in the operation and family relationships.

Had he adopted a “tiger doesn’t change his stripes” attitude, he’d be a miserable old man stuck working too large of an operation without a farm – and eventually have to let the farm go, being stuck in town for the last decade of his life. Because he evolved, his life is exponentially better today.

What is your attitude going to be? Can a tiger change its stripes?  PD

Mark Andrew Junkin improves how farm families make decisions together in the years prior to farm succession. Get his book, Farming with Family: Ain’t Always Easy! at Agriculture Strategy or call at (800) 474-2057.

ILLUSTRATION: by Fredric Ridenour

 

Mark Andrew Junkin