Leadership Lessons from the Garden, Part 2: Pruning for Growth

Nurturing growth isn't only about adding more support, resources, opportunities, or attention.

Sometimes growth requires an ending.

That is one of the ideas I took from Henry Cloud's Necessary Endings, and gardening makes the metaphor easy to understand. A healthy plant still needs pruning. Some branches are dead. Some are diseased. And some are perfectly healthy—but keeping all of them means the plant can't direct enough energy toward the growth that matters most.

Leadership has the same constraint: energy, attention, time, and resources are finite.

Not Everything Good Should Continue

Ending something obviously broken is relatively easy. The harder decision is ending something that is good but no longer the best use of limited capacity.

Leaders aren't only choosing between good and bad. Often we're choosing among multiple good things and deciding where energy can create the most value.

Prune Projects That No Longer Earn the Investment

Teams can become attached to work because they've already invested in it.

I want to ask: What have we learned? Is the outcome still important? Is the evidence increasing or decreasing our confidence? If we were deciding today, knowing what we know now, would we start this work?

Stopping a project isn't automatically failure. Continuing work that no longer deserves the investment can be much more expensive.

Prune Process That Has Become the Work

Processes are usually created to solve a real problem. Over time, teams can forget the problem and preserve the process.

A useful process should help the team make better decisions, manage risk, coordinate work, or deliver quality. If maintaining the process becomes more important than the outcome it was designed to support, it's worth pruning.

Prune Priorities So Something Can Actually Be a Priority

One of the easiest ways to exhaust a team is to call everything important.

Every additional priority divides attention. Work starts, stops, waits, restarts, and competes for the same people.

Pruning priorities is not a lack of ambition. It is how ambition becomes executable.

Roles and Responsibilities May Need to Change Too

This is the most human and therefore the most difficult kind of pruning.

Sometimes the answer is development, clearer expectations, a different scope, or a better fit. Sometimes a role itself needs to change or end.

Those decisions deserve care, clarity, and respect. The metaphor is useful only if it helps us make thoughtful decisions—not if it makes difficult human decisions sound simple.

Don't Prune Just Because Growth Is Slow

Gardening also teaches restraint.

Not every plant that looks quiet is failing. Roots may be developing before anything visible happens above the soil.

Before ending something, I want to understand whether it is truly no longer viable or whether it needs time, a different condition, clearer support, or better evidence.

Pruning isn't impatience. It's intentional resource allocation.

A Practical Pruning Check

When I'm considering whether something should continue, I find these questions useful:

• What outcome was this intended to create?

• Is that outcome still important?

• What evidence tells us this is—or isn't—working?

• What does continuing cost in time, attention, money, and opportunity?

• What are we unable to invest in because we're keeping this?

• Does this need to end, or does it need different conditions to succeed?

• If we weren't already doing this, would we choose to start it today?

Necessary Endings Create Space

Pruning is uncomfortable because an ending is visible while the future growth it enables is not.

But leadership isn't only about nurturing everything we've started.

It is also about protecting the finite energy of the organization and directing it toward the work, capabilities, and people with the greatest potential to create value.

Sometimes leadership is planting.

Sometimes it's watering.

And sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is make room for what needs to grow next.