May 19, 2026
by Ralph “RJ” Johnson
Driving change is hard and takes considerable effort from leadership. The easy path is to maintain the status quo and not create waves in the organization. The problem with this is that there is only one true constant in life: change. People and organizations must evolve to remain relevant and maintain a competitive advantage.
Cultivating conditions for change can be likened to the work of a gardener. Leaders often approach change with directive techniques such as issuing an order, setting an expectation, or enforcing compliance. But real, lasting change does not work that way. Leaders can command action, but that doesn’t lead to belief or ownership.
Just as a gardener cannot force a seed to grow, a leader cannot force transformation to take root. Growth is not imposed, but cultivated.
Leaders must view their organizational climate and culture like soil. If the ground is hard, dry, and neglected, even the best seeds will fail. But when the conditions are right and the ground has been prepared, nourished, and maintained, growth becomes inevitable. The leader’s role is not just to plant change. It is to encourage growth along the seven steps of gardening to move an idea from seedling to bumper crop.
1. Preparing the Soil: Setting the Conditions for Change
A gardener will spend copious amounts of time preparing the soil before a seed ever touches the ground. They break up the hardened earth, remove rocks and weeds, and enrich it with nutrients. The gardener knows a seed hitting hard ground is a wasted investment or initiative.
In organizations, “soil preparation” is climate and culture. If a unit lacks discipline, trust, accountability, and clarity of purpose, new initiatives will fail not because they’re flawed, but because the environment rejects them. The simple questions leaders should ask are:
- Is there trust in the organization?
- Are standards clear and enforced?
- Do people understand the purpose and direction of their actions?
- Does everyone have a clear understanding of the environment, and can we clearly describe the vision to reach our desired end?
Preparing the soil by breaking it up is uncomfortable and can be physically and mentally demanding. It means confronting complacency, eliminating toxic behaviors, resetting expectations, and maintaining a relentless commitment to leading by example. This is where most leaders fail.
Many would rather avoid confrontation and choose the easy path. The problem is that when trying to drive change, they plant new ideas into unprepared ground and then wonder why nothing grows. If leaders want successful change that endures the inevitable drought and harsh conditions it is bound to face, they must first prepare the soil, like a gardener.
2. Planting the Seeds: Introducing Change with Intent
Once the soil is ready, the gardener plants. Planting seeds is not done randomly, excessively, or all at once. The gardener chooses the right seeds for the right season and plants with deliberate precision.
Leaders must do the same in their organizations. Every initiative, policy, or cultural shift is a seed planted in the organization. If you plant too many at once, the chances of them taking root diminish. If you plant without internal and external alignment with your team, the roots will overlap and choke one another.
Leaders must approach change with discipline and precision, ensuring they are prioritizing what matters most before executing, sequencing things deliberately, and communicating intent clearly and routinely to their teammates.
Gardeners don’t force seeds into the ground; they plant with intention. But the act of planting is merely one step along a journey of change.
3. Watering and Sunlight: Providing Consistency and Reinforcement
For the gardener, planting is not the end; it is the beginning of a new start. A planted seed needs consistent monitoring and care to ensure it grows as designed. Gardeners use water, sunlight, and time; change agents use effort, talent, and sequencing.
The water represents the leader’s effort through direct actions to ensure that change is progressing. This is leadership reinforcement: what gets attention grows, and what gets rewarded spreads.
The sunlight is akin to a leader ensuring they place the right team in the right place at the right time with the right resources to push change through. This requires consistency. If a leader says risk-taking matters but punishes mistakes, their credibility withers. If a leader says accountability matters but tolerates poor performance, standards erode. Without consistency, even the strongest seeds fail.
Finally, time is the leader’s throttle. They must push forward at decisive moments and pull back when required. The best leaders sequence efforts at the right place and time.
4. Pulling Weeds: Protecting What Matters
In the garden, weeds are inevitable. They rob the plant of nutrients, choke its growth, and spread quickly if left unchecked.
In organizations undergoing change, weeds represent the behaviors of people pushing back against new initiatives. These behaviors include seeking the status quo, maintaining low standards, and resisting change. If left ignored, they will spread like cancer and erode the organization’s ability to achieve results. Every moment a behavioral weed remains, it steals energy from what leaders are trying to grow.
Pulling weeds is not comfortable, whether in the garden or in an organization. It requires confrontation, discipline, and sometimes removal. Failing to act, taking the comfortable way out, is a guarantee that invasive ideas will thrive over organizational vision. Leaders must act with courage and remove weeds. A garden overrun with weeds is not an accident; it is a failure in stewardship.
5. Pruning: Refining for Strength
For the gardener, growth is not enough to ensure a healthy environment. Healthy plants need pruning, not because they are failing, but because they become stronger through this painful process. Gardeners prune plants to refocus growth energy to where it matters most.
Leaders must do the same in their organizations and teams. Not every good idea should continue, and not every effort should expand. Pruning for leaders means eliminating distractions, refining focus, pushing high standards that are often uncomfortable, and doubling down on what works. Sometimes, things serve their purpose for a specific time horizon and are then let go. Think of space shuttle rocket boosters jettisoned at high altitudes. They served their purpose and are pruned away.
This is where we need maturity in leadership. Amateur leaders try to grow everything, but experienced leaders know what to cut and, more importantly, when.
6. Watching the Fields: Using Patience and Discipline
The gardener cannot rush the harvest. No amount of effort today will make a plant grow tomorrow. This is where a leader can lose organizational discipline by expecting immediate results, abandoning initiatives too early, or mistaking slow growth for failure.
Real change takes time. Deep and strong roots grow before anything is visible above the surface. A leader must have the discipline to stay consistent when progress is not immediately apparent. The key is patience, discipline, and ensuring there is a deep understanding and a respect for the process.
7. Harvesting: Stewarding the Outcome
After the gardener has meticulously gone through the steps outlined above, the garden will eventually produce, not because of a single action, but because of consistent stewardship over time.
The same is true in organizations. Leaders do not create high-performing teams through a single directive, speech, or initiative. They create these teams by preparing organizational environments, taking intentional action, providing consistent reinforcement, and maintaining disciplined leadership. The harvest that matters the most is culture. An organization with a team culture rooted in strong values is adaptable to changing times.
Be the Gardener
Leaders must understand that we do not effectively drive long-lasting, meaningful change through pure force or will. The truth is more powerful and humbling; we are the gardener who set the conditions where growth becomes possible. If the soil is right, the seeds take root. If the garden is tended to, pruned, and weeded, there comes a harvest. When done correctly, this process can persevere through the most difficult times. As we lead like a gardener and steward our valuable resources, the initiatives of our organization can thrive.
Closing Reflection
What are you allowing to grow in your organization, and what have you failed to remove?
Ralph Johnson is a native of Texas, husband, and father of two, serving as an Air Force Special Warfare Tactical Air Control Party officer. He recently graduated from Air War College and is the new U.S. Military Assistant to the Allied Commander of Joint Force Command Brunssum. When he is not spending time with family or working, he enjoys fitness and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Additional articles by RJ Johnson:
The Trust Bucket: Unlocking Initiative and Risk Acceptance for High Performers
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of the Air Force, Department of War, or the U.S. Government.
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