The fall weather is upon us. The days are getting shorter and nights are getting cooler. Since chickens can’t see well in the dark, they start heading to bed much earlier and sleeping in much later. Even Sven, our sweet rooster, delays his crowing until about 5:30 in the morning (a nice change from the 3:30 AM start in the peak of summer). Hens need about 15 hours of daylight to lay an egg, so unless I add light to their coop, this also means that my egg production is on the decline. The good news is that I do have some pullets (hens that are less than a year old), and once they start laying, they will lay throughout the winter (oh, the joys of being young). So in the next few months, egg production will start to increase again.

However, the biggest challenge for this time of the year is making sure the chickens are prepared for winter. They need enough warmth in the coop during those cold spells we tend to get in the Pacific Northwest. (I know, it’s nothing like the insane winter temperatures the Midwest experiences.)

The tricky part is that I don’t have power available at the coop. So, I’m forced to find other ways to generate heat. Every summer, I completely empty out the coop and fill it with fresh pine shavings. I need to do this early enough in the summer so that the poop the chickens drop on to the shavings as they roost at night has enough time to start decomposing, which generates heat. By the time the cold weather comes around, the goal is to have at least 4 inches of fresh and not-so-fresh shavings on the bottom of the coop.

This all sounds great except that my pullets are currently not being allowed to roost in the coop. They are being forced to cuddle up in the nesting boxes. Last week, I spotted five hens and one rooster roosting on the roosting bars, while the other 11 (a combination of cockerels and pullets) were crammed into the two nesting boxes. If one of them tries to roost, one of the older hens pecks at him. So how do I get my youngsters to start roosting and pooping in the main part of the coop?

I should have seen this coming, as the same thing happened last year, but I neglected to do anything about it. And so, in an effort to stop this vicious cycle, I’m going to fix this issue, once and for all.

This is a common challenge for my clients as well. They know they need to focus on fixing certain issues in the business, but without a strong commitment and focus, things just keep rolling along, albeit with a bit of frustration. One of the tools that I teach them is the importance of setting rocks. Rocks are just 90-day business priorities. The term “rocks” came from Verne Harnish’s concept of life being a glass jar, and we decide what to add to our glass jar. We have rocks (the big priorities), pebbles (day-to-day tasks), sand (daily interruptions) and water (everything else). Most people start by adding water, then sand, then pebbles and ultimately don’t have room for rocks. So, I encourage my clients to start with the most important priorities and then add the pebbles, sand and water.

As the leadership team comes together, they look at their 3-year picture and 1-year plan and then come up with the most important things they need to focus on in the upcoming 90 days. We start with what the company needs to focus on, then expand to what each member of the leadership team needs to focus on. Ultimately, we want to end up with 3-7 rocks for the company and 3-7 rocks for each member of the leadership team. I encourage them to write SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound), or at least define what “done” looks like. Once the team agrees on the priorities, everyone goes back to work with a focus on getting those rocks completed.

In a recent session with a client that has been running on EOS for a while, I was able to observe them really challenge each other on what the priorities were and what they could realistically complete in the next 90 days. It took a while for the team to hash out the priorities to the point that every member of the team was excited and ready to get to work on getting them done.

Unfortunately for me, my hens are not aligned around my rock of getting everyone roosting at night and pooping in the right place. This makes my job quite a bit harder, but I am determined to apply the necessary focus to complete this rock so I don’t let my flock down.

How about you? Do you know what your business priorities are for the next quarter? Is the team working together to ensure those rocks are completed? Or do you feel like you are a bunch of chickens pecking at each other and preventing progress? A new year is just around the corner, and if you want to set yourself up for success for 2024, reach out to me today. I can help your team work together to achieve a vision that is beneficial for all of you!

After erecting a chicken coop we inherited from a professional structural engineer, I was so excited. This coop is built so well and is perfect for three hens who have the opportunity to free range. But as you know, free ranging is not a viable option when you also have two well-trained hunting dogs. So I stared at this beautiful coop and thought, what are we going to do with it?

And then I had this moment of clarity. We could add siding to the coop, turning the entire structure into the coop, and then build onto it with a fence that allowed the chickens to roam around outside. I hurried back to the house to share my moment of brilliance with my husband. Who, as I found out, was way ahead of me on that thought.

Perfect: we were aligned on the vision. Now we could get to work. I started looking for siding and getting ready to make this vision a reality. Of course, as often happens, he wasn’t too keen on this idea…yet.

The fact is, the end of the summer is not the right time to start raising fryers. This is typically done in the spring. And turkeys take 14 to 25 weeks to mature, so, working backwards from Thanksgiving, we’d want to start turkeys sometime in June. We were late to the fryer and turkey party.

But not all was lost. We just needed to make a plan to get us ready for spring chicks. So we started to develop our one-year plan. This included modifying the coop, adding fencing around the coop so the birds could roam, researching the type of chickens and turkeys we wanted, and learning methods for processing the birds.

In other words, there’s plenty to do in this upcoming year. We just needed to get clarity around what to work on when and who was going to do the work.

I will say that we enjoyed the process as we talked through ideas, debated some approaches and set a budget for all the work. In the end, we were both really pumped about what this next year could bring us.

Planning for raising chickens is similar to setting a one-year plan for a business. As a leadership team, my clients work together discussing and debating the most important things they need to accomplish in the upcoming year. Some of them, not unlike me, want to jump in and get started right away. And some of the ideas can be started immediately. However, there are some things that require planning before getting started.

As I watched a leadership team set their one-year plan a few weeks ago, I noticed they kept circling around their ideas until slowly they narrowed down a few goals. And then they debated, quite passionately at times, what they could realistically accomplish in the upcoming year. They whittled down their list to a set of five goals that everyone was excited about. This was their third annual plan, and the visionary said it was the best one-year plan they had ever set. The goals were concise, achievable and, in his mind, the most important things the organization needed to address.

Do you have a one-year plan that your leadership is working toward? Is your leadership team united around this plan? Did they participate in setting it, or did you develop it in a vacuum? Allowing the team to participate in setting a one-year plan means they are much more likely to be willing to do the hard work to achieve it. As we move into the last quarter of the year, if you need help setting an exciting and compelling one-year plan, I’m just an email away.

Have you ever heard the phrase “One bad apple spoils the bunch”?  Have you ever thought about why that is?  I mean, if all the other apples are fine, why does one ruin it?  Is this some extension of entropy, where the tendency of the universe moves toward disorder? I think about entropy a lot, especially when looking at my desk or my closet, and sadly I would say that both of those “systems” are constantly moving toward disorder.  But I digress.

So, if one bad apple can spoil a bunch, could one good apple improve a spoiled bunch?  Or put another way, could one human-friendly chicken improve a flock of human-scared chickens?

Yep, I just used entropy to talk about chickens.  Didn’t think I could do that, did you?  Anyway, here’s what is happening.  As I’ve mentioned, I recently inherited three very sweet, human-raised chickens.  Whenever I come up to the coop, they come running up to me.  They get so close to me that I have almost stepped on them multiple times.

As you may recall, that is not the case with the chickens I raised myself.  I walk into the coop and they scatter, some of them squawking bloody murder.  I look at them and under my breath whisper, “Drama Queen Chickens.”

But since I have brought those three friendly chickens into the flock, my hens come running up to greet me alongside the three I inherited.  It almost seems like their fear of me is starting to subside.  I keep wondering if these three sweet hens are having a positive impact on my flock.

And then I started to think about my clients.  Could one good hire transform a group of under-performing employees? How many Right People (people who fit the culture and consistently demonstrate the company’s core values) does it take to truly create a great culture?  What is the tipping point where this change happens, if you don’t have it now?  I think it depends on the organization, but the ultimate goal is to get to the point where 100% of your people are Right People in the Right Seat.

I don’t have a single client who doesn’t have a Wrong Person somewhere in the organization. When these people issues come up, I will ask the leadership team three questions: Do you want to Coach Them Up? Coach Them Out? Or Live With It?

It really is that simple.  But if you choose to live with it, you could lose some of the Right People you already have, those who want to work for a company that sticks by its core values.

Recently, I had a client who filled a vacant leadership position with someone with a strong background in her field.  Previously, the leadership team depended on the president to make most of the decisions, and while their performance was adequate (or marginal) it was not sustainable for growth.  This new person came into the leadership team with a sense of ownership, focus and energy.  She challenged everyone with her questions, owned her mistakes when she was wrong and put an incredible amount of energy into her department.  Once the team got over the initial shock of working with someone with so much energy, they started to see what ownership looked like in action. In six short months, other members of the leadership team realized the importance of accountability and began to own their own seats.  Finally, the few that resisted realized they had to decide: own their seat or leave.  One year after the new hire came onto the leadership team, the entire team dynamics had changed.  Collectively, the focus became performance, improvement and productivity, and the president began supporting his team members rather than directing them.

If you aren’t happy with the performance of your leadership team, or your organization, I’d encourage you to look at introducing some good apples into your bushel.  You may be surprised at what an impact they can have on your entire organization.  Need help taking that step? Send me an email! I’ll walk you through the process.

If you have spent much time with me, you will know that I love to create things, but I’m not too artistic.  I have this mental picture of what I want to draw, but when it comes to creating that picture with a brush, pen, or Apple Pencil, what actually is formed is very different from what I see in my mind.

When I started thinking about getting chickens, I knew I needed a chicken coop. I was advised not to purchase a coop as they tend not to hold up.  So, during the pandemic shutdown, I realized it was time to build my coop.  The rest of the details that would take us from building a coop to actually getting farm-fresh eggs were a bit fuzzy to me (my husband would probably say they were very fuzzy).  But I didn’t care, I was ready to start that journey.

The reality is that it took me a lot longer than I expected to reach a point where I had the whole Chicken Mama thing figured out.  It seemed like a constant learning process, starting with the fact that chickens can fly (hence the phrase “the chickens flew the coop”).  For the first year or so, I never knew what to expect when I went to the coop, but I knew it wasn’t going to be predictable.

Over time, my husband and I began to come to agreement on what we were trying to achieve.  Yes, the initial goal was to have farm-fresh eggs, but, ultimately, we realized we had a real opportunity to use our property for more than an egg-making adventure.  We agreed to stick to animals that can fly, including fryers (chickens you can eat) and turkeys. And just recently he added the idea of ducks?!?

So we know where we are going long-term, but we need a pathway to get there.  And that is where drawing comes in.  What should Marlee Acres look like three years from now on our way to achieving our 10-year target? We need additional coops for the different chickens and turkeys, we need the skills to kill and prep our birds, we need the time to focus on all these birds and, ideally, we will have dogs that won’t chase and kill our chickens.  In other words, my picture needs to be a bit less fuzzy and much more crystal clear.

This is the same process I take my clients through as we develop their three-year picture.  I like to ask them, Are you ready to start drawing? Then we go to work creating a picture of what their organization will look like on the way to achieving their 10-year target.  This is where we get specific about what they will achieve in the next three years.

Drawing this picture is beneficial because if everyone on the leadership team can see the same thing, the chances of achieving it are so much greater.

During this exercise, I encourage the team to consider all aspects of the business, including their role, the size of the organization, the work being done, the locations and their reputation in the marketplace.

With one of my clients, after we drew the picture, I asked if everyone could see it, and someone said, “No, some parts are still fuzzy.”  The leadership team kept working on their drawing until they could all see it and were excited to be a part of it.

This isn’t an exercise in which you want to just go along to get along with everyone on the leadership team.  If everyone on your team can’t answer “Heck Yes” to the question “Can you see it?” we haven’t done our best work.

When you nail it, the excitement in the room is amazing! And people are excited to get to work achieving the picture you’ve drawn.

If you look at your three-year picture and can’t say “Heck Yes” – email me.  I might not be much of an artist, but I can help you and your leadership team draw an exciting, compelling picture of the future of your company.