Clear Leadership: The key to unlocking your farm’s potential?

Leadership isn’t an innate trait, it is a skill you can learn, practice and improve over time. And as leaders in our business, it’s up to us to ensure the people in our operation feel engaged, take ownership and buy into what we’re doing.

So how do we have the conversations that strengthen our relationships? And if trust breaks down, how do we rebuild it? 

Because in farming, as in any business, people are everything. You can have the best soil, water, machinery, genetics or business plan – but if your team aren’t working together, it can make it harder to achieve your goals. That’s why clarity in leadership matters.

In this thought-leadership column, we explore Clear Leadership, a practical framework developed by Gervase Bushe^[1] from Simon Fraser University in Canada. It is designed to help leaders build clarity in relationships, improve communication and foster trust within teams. As the leader in your farm business, it’s up to you to lead the conversation and set the tone for how your team interacts.  

At the heart of Clear Leadership is relationships. While we engage in transactional relationships every day, it’s the partnerships – built on mutuality and shared purpose – that we need to work on building and sustaining.

While most partnerships start out well and with the best of intentions, they can deteriorate over time. And when they do, we often start telling ourselves ‘stories’ about why things have changed and begin interacting with others based on these stories. This is where ‘interpersonal mush’ sets in and we can see poor communication, lack of honesty and people not feeling safe to air their concerns. This shuts down the opportunity for a straight conversation to create clarity about the way forward.  

So how can we keep our partnerships in good health and avoid the mush?

A key to strong partnerships and clear leadership is interpersonal clarity. That is, being aware of your own experience, the other person’s experience, and the difference between the two, as everyone experiences the same moment differently.

A practical way to break this down is through the Experience Cube, which has four components: 

1.      Observations: What you see or hear, without interpretation

2.      Thoughts: Your interpretations, assumptions or beliefs

3.      Feelings: Your emotional response to the situation

4.      Wants: What you want, or hope for, moving forward

By increasing our awareness of each dimension of our experience, we can better understand how we interpret our observations, process our thoughts and understand our feelings to clarify what we want. 

1. Be More Aware

Awareness starts by owning your own experience. Recognise that it is your experience, not a collective one, that you are having. We can’t speak for others, so we need to own what we are saying by using clear language.

Tip: Start your sentences with “I” when talking about your own experience. For example, “They think I’m wrong” is not an observation, it’s a thought. Consider rephrasing to: “I think they think I’m wrong.”

2. Be More Descriptive 

Next, describe your experience in a way that makes sense to the other person – especially when talking about a ‘less than perfect’ experience with them. Share what you felt or noticed, without passing judgement.

Tip: Instead of saying “You are always leaving the gate open”. Try: “When the gate is left open, the stock can wander out onto the road.” 

3. Be Your Curious Self

Finally, be your curious self. As leaders in our business, we need to ask questions to help understand people's motivations, thoughts and feelings rather than jumping to judgement.

We can use the Experience Cube, here, as the framework to ask questions about the other person’s observations, thoughts, feelings and wants. For example: 

• What did you notice?
• What were you thinking or telling yourself?
• How did you feel?
• What do you want?  

You might be surprised by their response when you simply listen. The role of the curious self is not to solve their problem, give advice or fix their experience, rather it is to listen so the other person can gain their own sense of interpersonal clarity to move forward.

Tip: Use paraphrasing to summarise your understanding of what the other person is saying. 

Clear Leadership is about creating clarity for yourself and your team, which can enable you to work together to achieve the results important to you and your business. By modelling clarity and curiosity, we as leaders can communicate more clearly and respectfully, while helping create an environment where our team feel safe to engage in an open and constructive way. 

[1] Clear Leadership: Sustaining Real Collaboration and Partnership at Work (2010).  

At Rabobank, we’re committed to supporting you and your business through every season. Our Thought Leadership series draws on knowledge from our Executive Development Program and is designed to equip farmers with practical insights to help enhance their operations.

This clear leadership content is delivered on the Rabo agri Executive Development Program by Professor Richard Hall, and Naomi Fox, Principal of Culture Co-Lab.