Dandelions & Orchids: How Organizational Texture Creates Value

When I was expecting my first child, a good friend shared with me some advice about children. According to him, children fall on a spectrum of needs with the poles illustrated by an Orchid and a Dandelion: Orchids are delicate and require deliberate care and specific conditions to grow, but once their desired environment is found, they grow into exceptionally beautiful flowers. Conversely, Dandelions, while beautiful in their own right, are weeds: less discerning in their conditions, taking root and blossoming in any number of environments without special preparation or care. As a parent, he said, you should recognize where on the spectrum your child falls and set the conditions in which he/she most thrives.

Nine years and three children later, I think of this advice often; not only in the context of parenting, but also as it applies to organizational leadership. With accelerating demands on companies to automate, centralize and find efficiency, leaders may feel compelled to fill their ranks only with Dandelion employees who are resilient, durable, and fungible. These are obviously valuable traits and lend themselves to agile workforces that can withstand ever-changing technologies and uncompromising shareholder demands.

But what happens when organizations, either deliberately or inadvertently, weed out all their Orchids in pursuit of a monoculture of Dandelions? What is lost when these unique and valuable employees, with their idiosyncratic preferences, skillsets, and working styles, are cast aside to make way for ever more adaptability and efficiency?

For example, what happens to a Strategy Manager’s morale who takes immense pride in creating beautiful slide presentations to formulate and communicate her viewpoint to others when she is told that new AI tools can create slides quicker and more efficiently than she ever could? How does a Senior Leader maintain her strong reputation and team culture when her HR Business Partner whose effort spent coaching her through high-risk situations is seen as an unwise use of time since it can’t easily be measured or scaled? Or take the recent Software Engineering graduate who excelled all throughout school to pursue and perfect the once-considered valuable skill of coding – now without the organizational backing to do the work for which he is uniquely qualified and instead forced to pivot to a world of workflow orchestration, output validation and guardrail design.

Organizations face an unprecedented environment for talent decisions in the age of AI. The downstream impacts of those decisions will be reskilling, redeployment and possibly exit scenarios for employees. Any of those pathways may well be the right ones for a particular line of business, function or team at a given time.

But no matter how change unfolds in an organization, its leaders will almost certainly want to know that their best people, doing their best work, will remain. They will also want to select for diversity: retaining both the Dandelions and the Orchids, not only with collective resilience, durability, and flexibility but also possessing, together, those essentially human qualities that provide a bulwark against unknown and unknowable changes in the operating environment.

Leaders should recognize and nurture the valuable organizational and intellectual texture that comes from having a highly varied and motivated workforce. They shouldn’t wait until their best people start to seem mediocre, disheartened or confused before asking whether they still feel as though they are thriving and valued for the work they most enjoy. By maintaining this awareness, leaders may be able to set these high performers on a renewed and invigorating path, rather than see them leave the organization without ever understanding why.

Building an enduringly strong organization is no easy task. Success requires a focus on leader and team effectiveness to develop and pursue a vision, chart the course to get there, and model the desired behaviors to do so effectively and ethically. It requires coherent organizational strategy, reporting structures, communication channels, and routines. Finally, it requires a forward-looking, yet human-focused talent strategy to identify, develop and retain the best people for the work that’s needed now and in the future.

Taken together, these mechanisms nurture the organization (dare I say, an Aqueduct?), ensuring that all flowers – Dandelions, Orchids or anything in between – can grow and thrive.