Fire the Leadership

What does an organization do when its employees fail to produce?  Replace the leadership, obviously…

And that’s exactly what I set out to do. 

In my opinion, beekeeping is like a roller coaster.  As logical as the bees generally conduct themselves, I never cease finding myself surprised at every (turn) hive inspection.  I find beekeeping to be a metaphor for business, and again, much like a roller coaster, the strategic actions a corporation takes are generally predictable. 

That being said, imagine my surprise when I opened my hive today in the quest to save what I believed to be a failing and highly vulnerable hive, only to find my reaction was….an overreaction. 

For those of you who are following my blogs as a form of tongue-in-cheek business entertainment, I must confess I use this platform to diary my beekeeping (memorializing mistakes and all).  We are 8 weeks into my bee season and I’ve pretty actively been tending them.  Within 2 weeks, I found mostly fully drawn comb in 8 frames of the brood chamber, and evidence of eggs and larvae with a respectable laying pattern. 

Mid-June: I added a honey super containing 10 undrawn frames and erroneously added a queen excluder.  My logic led me to believe feeding the bees would help them draw wax for the honey super.  As it turned out, this was likely a smart mistake, despite the counter advice of my fellow Bkeepr’s.  Feeding sugar-water, that is.  The queen excluder was a big mistake.

Fast forward a month… I expected to see fully drawn comb and capped honey in my honey super.  What did I find?  Nothing.  No drawn comb, just a handful of bees in the honey super.  I immediately set upon conducting a full investigation.  I pulled apart the hive, conducted root-cause analysis which led to the following observations:

1.       I found the queen in the top middle brood chamber, taking a ‘manage by walking around’ approach to the frame

2.       No wax drawn on frames 1 or 10.  For whatever reason, my bees don’t seem motivated to work the ends of the super (I suspect this is a task without recognition!)

3.       Light bee population based on my own expectations

4.       Brood laying seemed scattered and lazy

5.       No honey stores at all

The Bkeepr is the Chair-person of the board.  Our job is to oversee the operation, provide guidance, remove obstacles, and provide resources as needed to aid our organization’s mission.  What I witnessed in this trip, was an organization not in control of their destination.  I saw a staff with inept leadership who was not preparing the hive for the changing conditions….and she needed to be replaced.

I immediately took to task for second opinion and diagnosis.  Replacing leadership can present a major disruption to the hive, so this decision needed to be the right one, there is no going back once committed to the strategy.   I have to interject that I received no consensus on what I should do.  If you ask four Bkeepr’s a question, you will get at least as many answers.

I concluded, the risk of not replacing her outweighed the risk of keeping her.  Keeping her in power meant certain winter death.  If she wasn’t producing enough brood to collect, gather, and keep the hive mass warm over winter, they would certainly starve and freeze to death. 

Unlike some organizations who have great or effective layers of managers to ensure the mission of the organization is executed, bees cannot compensate for a failing leader.  There is no soft way to go about changing leadership.

I made the decision, in order to save the hive this late in the season, the original queen must be located, (literally) executed, and replaced with a new, foreign queen.  This is not a task for the delicate.  I admit, I kill a few bees every time I go into the hive (can’t help it) and my heart sinks to my stomach when I hear the unmistakable crunch.  The thought of killing the queen was not a job I was looking forward to doing.

Being the resourceful Chair-woman of Board I am, I was successful in locating a replacement queen from a commercial Bkeepr.  I made the call to secure her, and within 6 hours I was in route, queen in the car and on my way to the hive. 

I entered the hive prepared to correct my earlier poor decision (remove that excluder), and confirm my decision that executig the leader was the correct one.  All started well enough.  The honey super was empty, still no drawn comb, and only a few bees working the area.

I then entered the brood chamber expecting to see spotty egg laying, and an insignificant number of bees. What did I see/experience?   Really annoyed bees, let’s just call them beetch’s.   I inspected 5 frames, full of bees working the brood, I did not spot the queen.  While I saw sections of great brood pattern, I certainly saw pockets of spotty brood that really is more attributed to the hot weather than a defunct leader.   I suspect neighbor hives look much like mine. 

The conclusion: The hive is still in trouble.  My bees need to collect/store honey for wintering.  They are soooo behind.  We are experiencing a dearth (no nectar to collect).  All I can do for them is feed them, compensate for the lack of nature, not the lack of leadership. 

Lesson learned – the cause of an organization’s failure should be very apparent before steps to replace leadership are executed.  It is so important to focus on the right problem to solve before deciding “off with her head” is the right conclusion. 

For sale: 1 (mated) Queen

Working Girls

Smoking should occur at least 30 ft from doorways!

Brush up against me, I have something to say...

Honey Bees don’t use words to communicate to each other, yet they do have a language.  They are consistently in sync with the current condition of the hive, their queen, and outside competition.  How? Pheromones.  The queen releases pheromones while her attending bees pick up her pheromones and by the process of brushing against their neighbors, they start spreading the queen’s scent throughout the hive.   This is the most basic and natural method of sweep-communication. Sweep communication is a term I will use to define the process of disseminating business objectives for the purpose of furthering the prerogative of corporate purpose or strategy through proximity alone.  Think about the water cooler discussions that occur and how much information is shared casually.

In functional corporate organizations, we can see professional connectivity working via individual business units, or departments.  When individual business units are synced together, positive results generally follow within that group.  What happens when multiple functional business units operate in a silo, communicating effectively solely within their unit?  Best case scenario, stagnation of the larger corporate initiatives due to unawareness of how solitary business units influence the corporate momentum.  Without a proximity unifier, a link between business functions, sweep communication doesn’t work.   

Do you see a business effectiveness connection?  Pheromones may be the unspoken language of the bees; the unspoken language of business is sweep-communication.  More powerful than a mere exchange of dialog, close and frequent proximity to others allows for syncing. 

Bee’s work in assigned “business units” throughout the advancements of their lifecycles.  So, in the summer months, for the first 3 weeks of a new bee’s life, they are “assigned” house duties; some of which include either wax building, attending the queen, guard duties,  or as an under-taker bee (removing death from the hive).  The needs of the hive are determined largely out of sweep communication.  They all work together to accomplish their goals and can respond to any changes of the goals due to the proximity of one another.  They are living the corporate existence in the most effective manner imaginable. 

We have to look beyond the obvious option of using conference calls and video conferencing and substitution for human interaction and consider the power of message spreaders.  Why does it seem as though there are always a few well-connected individuals who seem to always have a handle on what is happening, who is moving up (or out)?   These individuals are the epitome of sweep communication at its finest.  They are connectors.  Regardless of where they sit, whether they are in a cubicle, office, or sitting in slippers in their home assiduously working their keyboards, they are connected and a pivotal part of maintaining corporate enthusiasm at their best, and spreading toxicity at their worst. 

For the corporation, the communication may spread more slowly, but the verbal buzz is no less heady.   The great sweep communicators can influence the direction of ideas, propel ideas into strategies ripe for execution, or deliver the frost that turns great ideas into raisins on the vine.

We haven’t addressed the pros/cons of the work-from-home model, and yet application of this model is becoming more accepted in industries where traditional corporate structures have dominated the past century.  The concept of harnessing sweep communicators as effective communicator tools seemingly puts the multiple benefits of the ‘work-at-home’ model in peril.  How can an organization maintain an adequate level of sync without the benefit of physical connectivity?    

Creative integration of sweep communicators into corporate mix can certainly help, and greater efforts are needed to overcome the obstacle where physical proximity is lacking.  A degree of simulated proximity can be delivered through the myriad choices of technological assistance; like video conferencing, live chat, and document sharing tools.  This does present inevitable obstacles around summoning idea buy-in when those ideas are not delivered with facial expression, body language, or a voice.

How can an organization utilizing remote staff most effectively use sweep communicators to propel ideas, unite business units or spread the corporate prerogative with fervor throughout the organization?

Please post your thoughts!

Release the Queen!

My first peak under the cover one week after package installation.  No disappointments!

Flight of the Bumble Bee

Flight of the Bumble Bee - Day 2, day after installation.  Foraging bee's embarking on their "orientation flights".

Bee Installation Part I (The Acquisition)

Don’t Blow Smoke During Assimilation

At the beginning of spring, beekeepers start assessing the health of their hive.  For some, this first peek inside the hive presents a view that can only be described as utter devastation, a total loss.  The reasons for hive death are plentiful and outnumber the reasons why they survive.  Needless to say, a beekeeper looks for a strong work crew at winters end so the bees can start their outdoor duties as the warmth of the spring sun finally arrives.   

The fact the hive doesn’t survive over the winter leaves a beekeeper with few options other than to replace their hive with a new package of bees, an “installation”, an acquisition. 

Receiving a new bee package is quite thrilling.  A cluster of what you hope will be young, enthusiastic workers, a new leader (the queen) and a few drones as an insurance policy should the unspeakable happen.  It’s a fresh start, and there will be a lot of activity to monitor in the preceding months as the hive settles into their respective duties.

You will never find two Beekeepers who agree on everything, but there are a few smart rules most beekeepers follow, with few exceptions.  (1) Wear a veil and (2) have your smoker ready. 

The smoke causes a distraction in the hive; it notifies the hive you are there and evokes a sense of panic that sends the bees into the hive to start gorging themselves in preparation to abandon the hive, should that smoke turn to fire.   It essentially redirects their attention to the smoke, and not the beekeeper.

The bees in the new package are strangers to one another.  They have just traveled hundreds of miles, collected by being shaken from various hives.  A new queen is placed amongst them and off they are to meet their new caretaker.  The close proximity of the bees will help ensure the queen’s pheromones are distributed amongst the cluster, but until the scent is distributed amongst the group and a structure is provided for them to begin their work, the package is vulnerable. 

The bees are homeless and unsettled.  Like any established corporation having developed a strong cultural identity around a unifying mission or vision, the workers connect to and work for the organization.   They crave a home office, an executive leadership team who can move an organization, rather than merely speak to it.

Simply put: a new employee into an organization needs to become a part of their new organization, or the organization risks losing them.   They fail or flee, its true for the bee.

Here’s a rule breaker: Don’t use a smoke during a bee installation.  When you introduce the bee’s into the hive, think of smoke as anti-assimilation.  The new package is homeless and prone to drifting when installed; the introduction to anything other than the purest communication of the hive, the queen’s pheromones is just proverbial smoke.   The introduction of smoke could have devastating effects, scattering the workers, sending them off to search for a landing spot nowhere near the intended hive. 

Do I smell corporate smoke?  Cut through the corporate smoke by offering operational and organizational transparency.   Create an on-boarding process that provides clarity in mission, articulate corporate priorities and strategy, and explicitly define how the new employee will be successful in their structure.  Unveil and put away the smoker.