It's Not Your Staff. It's the Soil You've Planted Them In.

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There's a study that I come back to often when I'm working with leaders who are frustrated with their team's performance. It involves two seeds taken from the exact same tree. One was planted in a rainforest. The other was planted in a dry desert. When researchers returned years later, the tree in the rainforest had grown to eight metres tall. The one in the desert had barely reached a metre — thin, dry, and stunted.

Same seed. Identical genetic material. Completely different outcome.

And the question that follows is obvious once you hear it, but it changes the way most leaders think about performance: if you swapped the seeds around and planted the desert tree in the rainforest, would it have grown short? Of course not. The seed was never the problem. The environment was everything.

I use this analogy a lot when talking about workplace culture because it cuts through the instinct most leaders have when someone on their team is underperforming. The first place we look is the person — their attitude, their effort, their capability. And sometimes that's the right place to look. But more often than I'd expect, the environment is playing a significant role that isn't being examined.

Culture and environment affect performance in ways that are easy to underestimate because they're not immediately visible in the numbers. A team that's cramped, noisy, and unappreciated doesn't show up in a spreadsheet as a culture problem — it shows up as missed targets, high turnover, and a general flatness that leaders struggle to diagnose.

The soil matters. And as a leader, the soil is your responsibility.

What does that actually mean in practice? It means looking honestly at the conditions you're asking your people to work in, and asking whether those conditions are set up for them to flourish or just to survive.

Some of it is physical. Is the office space working for the size of the team you now have? Companies grow, but their environments don't always keep pace. People end up sitting shoulder to shoulder, noise levels rise, there's no privacy for phone calls, and what started as a manageable open-plan layout becomes a source of daily friction. These things wear people down gradually and invisibly — and by the time the resentment surfaces, it's already been building for months.

Some of it is psychological. Is appreciation part of how your team operates day to day? Not just formal recognition — the small, genuine acknowledgement of a job well done. A thank you. A specific comment about something someone handled well. These are the equivalent of water added to the soil, and their absence is felt even when nobody names it directly.

And some of it is cultural — the rituals, the moments, the things that make a workplace feel like somewhere people want to be rather than somewhere they have to be. Some companies have a bell that gets rung when a major deal closes, and everyone high-fives. Some have a team colour day on Fridays, or a fundraising event, or a Christmas party that people actually look forward to. These things aren't frivolous. They're the signals that tell people their workplace sees them as human beings rather than just units of output.

None of this requires a large budget or a complete office redesign. The most effective cultural improvements I've seen are often the smallest ones — a coffee machine, a bowl of chocolates on the counter, a leader who walks around and says good morning and means it. The cumulative effect of those small things is a team that feels valued, and a team that feels valued performs differently to one that doesn't.

If your people aren't flourishing, before you look at the seeds, look at the soil. Ask yourself honestly whether the environment you've created is one where people have what they need to grow — and what one or two things you could change this week to improve it.

What does your company do to build a better environment?