Taking New Ground
The Leadership Journeys: Taking New Ground
When I was 12 years old, my family moved to a middle-of-nowhere town in rural Michigan. Before that move, I lived on crowded military bases.
Base life is a unique scene. It’s city life on steroids—mobs of kids running around wreaking havoc while dad or mom are off somewhere far away keeping us safe from “The Red Threat” of Communism (I was an 80s kid, FYI). The parents left behind were always outnumbered. We caused trouble uncontested. We disrupted traffic by playing ball and riding skateboards in the streets. We got into the dumpsters. We played uber-violent versions of “king of the jungle gym” at the local park. We broke into abandoned base structures and found some pretty dangerous military things to play with. It’s amazing I’m alive today, looking back on those days at the base.
Then one day, I was a base kid no more. My dad retired from the Navy after putting in his twenty years and moved our family to a middle-of-nowhere farming town in Michigan called Brown City. Why they call it a “city” I still don’t know. To this day, there is not one stop light in town (maybe there’s a blinking yellow light now). There are no major shopping outlets for 30 miles around—just mile after mile of corn and bean fields as far as the eye can see.
So there I was, a city kid living on 10 acres, surrounded by farm fields. No dumpsters to dive in, no old buildings to explore, no base kids to get into trouble with. It was just my brothers and me in the middle of nowhere.
It was time to take some new ground.
There was a fishing stream bordering our 10-acre property. Our grandpa, a local to the area all his life, was quick to show us the basics. He got us going and left us to our own devices. We were catching monsters—well, hand-sized sunfish and bluegills anyway. But hey, to a city kid, any fish in the hand is a monster!
It didn’t take long before we did something we should have known better than to do. We got into the creek and decided to go for a swim. Sounds innocent enough, right? Well, that’s when us base kids learned about a little critter called a leech.
My little brother Nathan noticed first. A little black wiggling thingy hanging off his underarm and a small stream of blood flowing from the attachment. Ugh! He screamed. I will never forget it. My older brother and I rushed to help. Until we found ourselves in the same nightmare. Dozens of leeches everywhere on our bodies! We feverishly plucked them off one by one for a good half hour while constantly steadying our hands between fits of tears. But hey, what did we know? We were city kids in a country world.
I could tell you about another time we took new ground in the woods. We found a bunch of wooden boxes and decided to kick them all over, only to discover they were beehives! We had no map or compass, but we were determined to master our new environment.
This is what Rootstock is all about. We live to meet people when they’re taking new ground and make sure they’re ready to face whatever comes their way.
Whatever ground you're taking, you need to do three things to be successful.
You need to be a person worth following.
You need to provide crucial clarity.
You need to build a great team.
Being a person worth following is all about being authentic and approachable. Being authentic when you’re taking new ground looks like being comfortable in your own skin and being okay knowing that you don’t know everything that lies ahead. Being approachable is about having the humility to be open to feedback and being able to take advice and tweak your plan when it makes sense.
You will also need to provide crucial clarity in the areas of purpose, vision and values. You will need to have a compelling “why” for your new venture, the inspiring reason people would come along with you on this new journey (purpose). You need to have a clearly defined destination that is simple and bold (vision). And you will need to hold the line on what kinds of behaviors will be tolerated, celebrated and rejected along the way (values).
You also need to build a great team. You need to get the right people in the right seats. You need to motivate and develop them. You need to give them a path to grow. And you need to help them lean into healthy conflict—when necessary—to maintain a healthy culture.
That’s a high-level overview of what it looks like when you’re taking new ground. A five-phased approach on the “how” and “when” is codified in the Rootstock Taking New Ground Journey Map.