Recently the groundhog saw his shadow, predicting six more weeks of winter. It occurred to me that the humble groundhog, or “woodchuck” as we know them in Northern New York, can teach us a lesson about leadership. Sometimes, especially for new leaders, balancing the needs of a team against your daily individual workload can be a challenge. Well, luckily, our prognosticating friend has a solution.

As you might know, I was blessed early on with a background in farming. Dairy farming, in particular, and one of the many things that a dairy farmer needs to pay attention to is crop management. Cows are the approximate size of small rhinos, and they eat a lot of food. In order to feed their cows a nutritious and balanced diet, most farmers manage hundreds or thousands of acres of corn, hay, and other crops livestock find to be delicious. And, as fascinating as that is, today’s article is not going to focus on farmland, or crops, or even dairy cows. Today, as promised, we’ll discuss another ubiquitous resident of the farm who also enjoys snacking on all those delicious crops – the humble woodchuck.

The Woodchuck

Woodchucks, also known as groundhogs, are a frequent presence on farms. Professional weather groundhog Punxsutawney Phil is probably the most famous of these field-dwelling varmints, and most farmers consider them a nuisance. In addition to eating the crops, they also dig complex burrows with multiple entrances that livestock or people can step in and hurt themselves. My dad, for example, has a hidden talent for discovering woodchuck holes in this very way.

Woodchucks are a food source for the larger predators that might also populate the many acres that make up a farm’s cropland. Coyotes, foxes, bobcats, and even large hawks would consider them a substantial meal. So in addition to snacking on the delicious farm crops, woodchucks are basically a delicious snack themselves. And with that, congratulations – you have completed your biology lesson for the day.

All this brings us to how we can learn a lesson from a woodchuck. In the simplest sense, a woodchuck has two main responsibilities. Firstly, it is trying to eat as much as possible so it can fatten up and hibernate through the winter. Winters on the farm are long and cold, which means a woodchuck has to work pretty hard to get fat – especially since they are vegetarians.

A woodchuck’s other main responsibility is basically to avoid becoming lunch. Pretty straightforward. Have lunch, don’t be lunch. Check.

So here’s the rub for our friend the humble woodchuck. In order to eat lots of tender shoots of alfalfa and timothy, a woodchuck has to hunker down and put his face in the grass. On the other hand, in order to avoid being eaten by a predator, a woodchuck has to stand up and be watchful. As a woodchuck, if you spend all day at the salad bar, you run the very real risk of being on the menu yourself. But if you keep a diligent eye out all the time, you may not get chonk enough to survive the winter. It is, indeed, a difficult needle to thread.

The Workplace

In the workplace, you have a million things going on. You have to hunker down and grind out some of the tasks that you’re responsible for, but you also have to make sure your team is happy, motivated, and productive. Maybe you’ve got annual reports to write, or data to analyze, or a presentation to give. Maybe you have to rebuild an endcap, push out a truckload of supplies, or complete an inventory schedule. At the same time, you have to give your business partners some guidance, redirect a work team, run a meeting with a great recognition kickoff, or put your mentor hat on and talk an employee through a tough challenge. Again, a difficult needle to thread.

How do you dig in and concentrate, but still somehow stay vigilant about what’s going on around you? How do you get into the alfalfa without losing sight of the predator sneaking up behind you?

Well, that’s a tough question. And if you’re like a lot of folks, you deal with this every day. Many managers I’ve been privileged to work with find that they lack this level of balance, especially when they’re just starting out. They’re pushing through what they need to get done, but their work team gets off track around them. Or they spend all their time working shoulder to shoulder with their people, but the individual deliverable they committed to completing for their boss goes overdue.

The lesson we can learn, as you might expect, is in how a woodchuck manages these two critical priorities. And yes, sometimes the woodchuck doesn’t balance these things well. But a lot of the time they do, and they hibernate happily through the winter to start the process again in the spring.

What’s the woodchuck’s secret?

The secret that our friend the woodchuck can teach us about completing their two fairly exclusive jobs comes in two parts – commit and balance.

OK, I wasn’t entirely accurate when I said we were done with our biology lesson. There’s actually another really important physical advantage a woodchuck has, which helps it complete its two jobs. You see, a woodchuck is physically able to get super low to the ground, but is also able to stand up tall on two legs. Why is this a benefit? Well, when a woodchuck hunkers down to get some breakfast, it gets completely flat, maybe only a few inches high. If the hay is high enough, a woodchuck can get so flat that it becomes invisible to predators, which allows it to comfortably enjoy its meal in peace.

In addition to getting super low, a woodchuck can also stand up straight on two legs, which pops them up above the crop line and lets them look around. They can then make sure that there is nothing sneaking up on them while they have their head down. They can get a good extra foot of height out of just standing up straight, and it gives them great visibility across the entire field.

Commit

The woodchuck absolutely has to commit to doing one thing or the other. Trying to do both at the same time will result in disaster. For example, standing up a little bit, still trying to eat some grass and keep half an eye out will make them extremely vulnerable. They’ll either not get enough to eat, or miss the prowling coyote in the tall grass. They’ll make themselves visible while still not getting the most food they can. They must commit to one task at a time, to get the most out of the time they have doing it.

Here’s what we can learn. All of us at some point need to get our head down and crank out our individual work, but at the same time figure out how to stay engaged with our team. Obviously, you have to do both things to be successful. The woodchuck does, and we can too. When a woodchuck is eating its lunch, it’s flat, hidden, and busily collecting calories. For you, the same applies when your head is down and you’re pushing through your budget, or cranking out a summary document, or analyzing your reporting. When a woodchuck stands up to take a look around, they’re maximizing their visibility of the entire field. For you, when you’re with your team, be in the moment, all in. Spend the time you have with them to your very best advantage, and don’t worry about that report you have to finish. Commit to the time with your people.

But can’t we just do both? Isn’t that just multitasking? In brief, no. A woodchuck has to commit, otherwise it will either miss a meal or be a meal. We also have to be committed to what we’re working on. For example, if you’re working on your individual task but your team is distracting you, you may not deliver the quality of work product you’re known for. You might make unnecessary errors, or take more time than you need to, because you’re not concentrating as much as you probably should. On the other hand, your team knows when you’re not in the moment with them. If you’re caught up with something else when you should be motivating and engaging with your people, you won’t be as successful. For example, have you ever seen a boss try to listen to a team member and send a text message at the same time? Almost always, the text gets all the concentration and mental energy, and the team member gets what’s left over. That boss is making their people feel like they’re not important, while at the same time not receiving all the information that their employee is trying to communicate.

The first part of the woodchuck’s lesson is to commit to what you’re working on. Whether you’re grinding out a task, or connecting with a direct report, put all your energy into doing a great job in the moment. Doing both with half the effort will waste your time and energy, and you won’t perform to the level you know you can. So, be in the moment, and commit to what you’re doing.

Balance

The other lesson a woodchuck can teach us is about balance. What would happen if a woodchuck stood up the whole time, fully committed to watching out for predators? They’d have a lean winter. Or, if they committed completely to filling up on shoots and greens, they might not even make it to winter. Especially when you’re fully committed to one half of your work dynamic – grinding out your individual tasks or spending quality time with your direct reports – balancing the two is important to being successful in each.

Everyone has had a coworker or leader who isolated themselves, to their detriment. They may have cranked out high quality individual work, but their team probably collapsed around them. Conversely, I’m sure everyone has had an experience with someone who never did the work they needed to do, and spent the whole day socializing. Both of these leaders are committed to one half of their work dynamic, which is good. But they need to figure out how to bring balance to the equation so the other half gets some attention too.

A woodchuck instinctively knows when to push back from the table and take a look around. Similarly, they also know when they can belly back up to the buffet. Similarly, some leaders can balance out all their responsibilities. They just seem to know when their team needs them, and how to get their individual projects done on time or early. However, for most of us, at some point we’ll struggle.  

At times in our careers, balance doesn’t seem to come easily. I find, especially with new leaders, that a good trick is to actively plan for balance. For example, I think many times we only calendarize things we would think of as “events” – conference calls, meetings, and the like. But what’s stopping you from scheduling yourself a two-hour chunk to complete that budget you’ve been working on? Or an hour for hanging out with your new analysts? No one needs to know you planned it. By inserting specific timeframes that are dedicated to working on each of the projects they’re responsible for, a leader can make certain they build in their own balance. This way, they’re guaranteed to have allocated enough of their time to their individual work as well as their team. If they start to feel like one or the other might have too much time, or not enough, they can then just modify their calendars to match.

Of course, there’s always an exception to the rule. Your calendar is only as good as the next disaster that you have to drop everything and handle, right? Life happens. But by intentionally balancing their time, a leader that struggles with completing their priorities can get much farther along by calendarizing their day. Over time, managers get better and better at balancing their priorities, and can do it more on instinct. Until then, intentionally balancing the day between tasks on the calendar can be the difference between successfully delivering on each priority, or struggling with one or both of them.

The Forecast: Six more weeks of success

Groundhog, woodchuck – whatever you call him, the leadership lesson of the farmer’s least-favorite tenant is a pretty good one: commit and balance. It keeps him fat and happy, and keeps us engaged and successful. You can’t ask for more than that.

HR leader Patrick Ingham proudly comes from an operating dairy farm in Northern New York, where honey, apples, and maple syrup are also organically produced. Also, woodchucks are produced there but not intentionally.