Thanksgiving, as we know it today, is rooted in a harvest feast celebrated by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag in 1621. This marked a moment of giving thanks for a successful harvest after a tough year.
The Pilgrims, who had settled at Plymouth Rock, were ill-prepared for the harsh New England winter. They suffered from exposure, scurvy, and outbreaks of contagious disease, which ravaged the population, reducing the Mayflower’s original 102 passengers to just over 50.
The Wampanoag, a Native American tribe, showed them essential survival skills, including how to grow corn, fish the rivers, and extract sap from maple trees. In gratitude, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag shared a three-day feast. This event is often cited as the “First Thanksgiving,” although it wasn’t called that at the time. It became a national holiday in the United States much later, during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln declared it in 1863.
Since then, Thanksgiving has evolved into a day where families and friends come together to celebrate gratitude with meals, parades, and football games.
In this vein and this time of the year – I wanted to share my leadership life lesson called – The Laws of the Harvest. It’s in the book under Rule #3 – No Surprises! Just like the early Pilgrims understood that a good harvest isn’t’ always a guarantee, we’ve certainly learned in the post COVID years that is true for us in the business as well. We’ve all had to get adjusted to the “new norm” and get some of the best practices put back in place since our world was turned upside down during the COVID times.
Growing up in western Oklahoma, I was pretty in tune with the process of harvest — the term we used when it was time to cut wheat. There are some great lessons in farming, and I feel the laws of the harvest offer great guidance on how to conduct ourselves in business — and in life if we truly understand that a good harvest is a process with laws in place whether you agree with them or not – they exist none the less.
Before you can talk about the harvest, you truly must understand the process. And as anyone who has ever been involved in the whole process knows, it’s not easy. Sometimes, we create our own “Surprises” because of our unfounded expectations. When we have the wrong expectations, it leads to us getting surprised when we don’t need to be.
“You never plant the wheat today and pull into the field tomorrow to harvest the wheat.”
Throughout my career, many people I’ve worked with simply don’t understand that business is the same way. They want to have a meeting to talk about launching a new initiative. The discussion is had, and the plan is put in place. Then, within a few days, if the sales don’t immediately turn around, they are disappointed. These experiences got me thinking about intent, process, and expectations and they inspired me to come up with the Laws of the Harvest as it relates to the grocery business.
Law #1
We Reap Only What Has Been Sown
If you want to harvest wheat, you plant wheat seeds. Here are some of the seeds we “plant” in our business:
If we truly understand how seeds produce crops, we have to focus on the “seeds” in our business that sets us up for a good harvest. And make sure we don’t have “seeds” being planted that will not do anything to help with a good harvest.
Law #2
We Reap in a Different Season than We Sow
There are four seasons in our annual calendar and in Oklahoma, wheat is normally planted in September and harvested around the first of June.
The business connection here is that you need to know the expected “season” that you should expect the harvest to show up. Most business initiatives take months or years to produce a good harvest. In today’s world of instant gratification, it is difficult for some team members and owners to patiently wait for the harvest.
Law #3
We Reap in Proportion to What We Sow
If you buy cheap seeds and plant sparingly, don’t expect a record harvest. In business, I’m always amazed at the high expectations of better sales, better-performing teams, higher customer engagement, and more efficient technology results without investing a single dime in systems, training programs, employee incentives, or better equipment to help produce better results. You can’t be cheap minded and expect anything any different from the results! And in many cases is a simple math problem in our business. Expecting high level results from low level investment – everything has an ROI, everything!
Law #4
We Reap the Full Harvest of the Good Only if We Persevere
You will have circumstances beyond your control. (read that again) You have risk of success of your harvest every year. If it’s too cold, or too hot, or you have too much rain or not enough rain, it will affect the outcome of your harvest. A devastating hailstorm may hit at just the wrong time and wipe out what was going to be a good harvest. In business, there are so many things beyond our control, yet we think when bad things happen, and trust me, they will, we still expect to have the harvest we would have had without those bad things happening. Just think about the devastating storms that have hit Florida and North Carolina recently and the devastating impacts on the expected harvests in those states for years to come.
What are we thinking?
I’d say nothing impacts grocery shoppers more than the weather. If it’s pouring down rain, customers just go home after work and don’t shop that day. If the roads are torn up in front of the store, don’t expect the same sales you had last year when roads weren’t torn up. If you have a new competitor that’s opened a store close to you this year, again, don’t expect to comp sales until their honeymoon is over! In this law of reaping the harvest, you have to learn that the “season” could be up to a year before things turn around and you begin to see the numbers that you hoped for before the event happened.
Law #5
We Can’t do Anything About Last Year’s Harvest, But We Can About This Year’s
The biggest mistake most people make is not putting last year to bed and focusing on this year. You can’t change a single thing that happened last year, but you can change almost anything in the coming year. We had a few harvests in Oklahoma when I was growing up that were just awful, for all the reasons listed above. It was imperative that we put all our focus on the next year’s crop and try to do some extra things in the coming year to help offset the loss from this year.
I’ve experienced bad harvest years in the grocery business as well. The majority of the time, it was due to things happening beyond our control. We have faced things like new competition, hurricanes, supply chain/trucking disruptions, increasing fuel prices, manufacturing interruptions, and employee challenges due to worldwide health issues. Issues like this have recently played a major role for many businesses both large and small. This is a life lesson for everything you go through: don’t be surprised if some years the harvest yield is not what you hoped for.
“No farmer would ever tell you they’ve had 10 years in a row of record harvests.”
Now, to bring this all together.
Celebrating Thanksgiving is more than a nod to history; it’s a reminder to appreciate the present. Expressing gratitude can boost mental well-being, strengthen relationships, and even improve physical health. It’s a chance to pause and acknowledge the positive aspects of our lives, whether it’s our connections, our achievements, or even just the good meal in front of us.
In order to be thankful – we have to keep the frustrations out of our lives, and so many times – it’s about unrealistic expectations adding to this frustration by acting “surprised” when the results come in. If you’re in a leadership role, everyone on your team is looking to you for hope and encouragement when a harvest comes in short of expectations and having a positive attitude about that is paramount to going forward.
So, let’s be thankful for the harvests we’ve had this year, and learn from the changing landscape in our business and our lives and stay focused on the big picture and the main thing – and that’s our people!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
