5 dysfunctions of a farm

Shay: Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today you have Shay Foulk, and I'm going to be talking with you briefly today about 5 dysfunctions of a farm. And some of you might be listening to that and thinking, oh, there's only 5, that's, uh, it's not too bad, we'll get through this pretty quick. And solve the farm's issues and, and move on. And it's not quite that simple, unfortunately. But today's discussion comes based off of an article that I wrote recently looking at the book, uh, Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. And it's a great book. It's about 3 hours and 45 minutes or so. Highly recommend it as a read. This is one of those things when we go to farm operations to work on business structuring or transition planning or some of the team health aspects.

There's a lot of great information in this book that we pull out of that to apply to your farm. And the premise of the book, which is a fable or a story, is a team setting where you have all these different personality types and struggles to work with. And it really focuses on how do you build a team environment, and it highlights over and over again different employees wanting to work on. Here's the issues at hand. We're not doing sales well enough. We're not doing marketing well enough. We are putting too much resources to this area. And it might sound familiar when it comes to your farming operation, thinking about, you know, where do we spend the money? Do we spend it on marketing or better agronomy or tractor upgrades and equipment? And these decisions that we make day in and day out can truly affect the the efficacy of our farm and how we operate as a team.

And so I'm going to jump into some of the dysfunctions and the keys that the book outlines. Again, for 3 hours and 45 minutes, if you're on a long drive, I listened to it the other day while I was on a long drive and made it pass by pretty quickly. Really enjoyed it and highly recommend it as well. So dysfunction number 1, one of the key dysfunctions that we see within farming operations is lack of trust. And if you imagine a pyramid, this is not a pyramid scheme, but if you imagine a pyramid at the base of that, uh, trust is the foundation of everything that we do in daily operations. And whether it's our daily to-do lists, uh, input purchasing, who drives the combine, who's, uh, handling the estate planning, there's a huge amount of lack of trust in a lot of operations. And this distrust often between the older and younger generations creates disparity.

It creates hard feelings and it really reduces the efficacy that we have as a team in a farm operation. And unfortunately, you would think it might be better sometimes within family, but more often than not, we see that that can be a bigger issue because there's different expectations. And so that trust as a foundation among the team really builds on some of these next things that we're going to talk about. And we'll get to how to manage that trust and some key aspects of that. The second thing is, second dysfunction is fear of conflict. Now, personally, I love conflict, and that's not a sadistic thing. I think conflict is definitely a driver for growth. And anytime you're uncomfortable having difficult discussions, you have growth in the farm operation, growth in your business, and growth among your family.

Now, conflict is not to be confused with other things such as yelling matches or a silent treatment, arguing with each other, or just having an attitude, "Well, I'll just ask for forgiveness and not permission." That's not conflict. Conflict is having those hard discussions, the heartfelt ones that are at the core of what's going on in your farming operation. And for some reason, agriculture has come to fear conflict. And part of it is, you know, seniority within an operation, or it's just too difficult, it's too painful to have that, particularly within family operations when you don't want to hurt each other's feelings, or people just being too cautious of others' feelings and worrying too much about what they think or how they might react and sometimes getting in their head about these situations. And conflict is a really good thing.

You know, if you have trust within an operation, that certain level of trust allows you to have good conflict. And when you think of the root of the word or what the word actually means, it's not that we totally disagree. It's just that we have opposing viewpoints. And if you can come to an agreement moving forward, you have a lot more commitment, which is dysfunction number 3. So dysfunction number 3, a lack of commitment, is if you've ever made a decision in your business and you didn't really feel like you had buy-in from the farm operation. You know, maybe your, your son didn't agree with what you said, or your wife wasn't happy with the accounting practices, or, you know, it could be any number of things. But if you don't have buy-in in an operation, it's really hard for people to have that commitment.

And One of the ways to get buy-in is so that everybody has their voice, and that occurs with conflict. You wanna make sure that everybody can voice their opinions in a comfortable environment, that you can have a key discussion around it, and more importantly, that you can solve the issue at hand. And once you've solved that issue, you commit to the purpose, the, the task that you have in front of you, you're going to be on the right path to success. Dysfunction number 4 is lack of accountability. And farms and agribusinesses are often lacking when it comes to things like business structure, roles and responsibilities, and decision rights. More often than not, this initial lack of organization makes accountability extremely difficult.

So whether you're a sole proprietor that's farming alone or you're a farm operation, farm business, uh, with family as a part of that, but you don't have clearly defined roles, or you don't have someone that you're accountable to, or you don't know who has what decision rights, how can you have good accountability of that within the operation? So if you don't have that trust, you don't have lack, you don't have commitment, you don't have accountability, it makes it really, really hard to drive towards results. So dysfunction number 5 is inattention to results. And there's areas in farm operations that we don't pay near enough attention to. These are different measures and metrics that as an operation you sit down and define how, how is our growth determined, or how, how do we define growth? What metrics do we need to look at? Is it our cost of production? Is it our efficacy in marketing?

Is it the yield that we drive out of the operation? It can be any number of things, but you have to pay attention to those results. And again, imagine that pyramid, right? Without trust, you're not going to have conflict. Without conflict, you're not going to have commitment. Without commitment, you're not going to have anybody to hold you accountable. And if no one's accountable for anything, then how do you even, how do you even start to focus on the results that you're looking for in the operation? So, you know, having this discussion, you might be thinking, okay, this is great. I identify with a lot of things. Lot of these things, but what am I supposed to do about it in 2021? So step number 1 is read the book. You know, Patrick Lencioni has this awesome book that applies not only to farm operations but to other businesses.

There's going to be times in there that you're thinking, well, this isn't, you know, all that relevant to me. It is a fable, it is a story, so you have to pay a little bit more attention than an article or a podcast like this that's saying, hey, Hey, here's some of the keys. But what you can draw out of that is something that you can apply to your life. Okay, so aside from listening to the book, uh, number 1 is just fostering more trust, uh, on your farm and in your team. What that might look like for you, uh, maybe you need to take a step back and loosen the reins a little bit. Sometimes, uh, we see farm operators that want to have a, a huge sense of control, and that can be seen as micromanaging. And therefore, in particular, it appears to be a lack of trust.

Whether you believe that or not, subconsciously to the other members of your team, what you're saying is, ah, I don't trust you enough to do this as well as I can, so I'm going to do it moving forward. It's difficult, but letting people make those mistakes and then coaching them, you know, most importantly coaching them when it matters most. So when that combine's broken down in the field and you got 60 more acres to do before it gets dark or the rain comes in or the dryer gets caught up or whatever else, it's important to take the time to teach people in the operation to build trust in them and to loosen those reins as it moves forward. Think about ways that you can encourage trust, that you can show trust and demonstrate trust within your team as we move into planting season. Number 2, managing conflict. What I want everybody listening to this to do is welcome conflict.

And it's hard, it's difficult, it'll make your stomach turn sometimes. It's an unpleasant feeling. Unfortunately, a lot of people lose sleep over conflict, but I would argue that's conflict that's poorly managed. So you want people to know that they have a trusting environment where they can bring issues up, issues and concerns and opportunities or threats that they see in the business, that they can bring those to the table and have a good discussion about it. And even if everybody doesn't agree with it, that you can make a decision moving forward. And that decision is so crucial because a lot of times what we do is we sit down at the table, we talk about our issues, we identify what they are, we discuss them, but we don't solve them. And and then everybody leaves, no one's real happy, things don't get done, and the conflict was pretty fruitless.

If we're going to have conflict and we have important discussions that need to be had, we need to solve those and make a decision moving forward. Step number 3 is committing to the decision. So whereas you may not have had that buy-in before, even if you have had conflict and there's still a decision made that not everybody agrees with, Everybody has had a chance to voice their opinion. They've brought it to the table in a trusting environment, and a decision has been made moving forward. Now, what I want to be careful with here is this does not mean that you as the president or the CEO or the main operator of your farm operation, that doesn't mean you get to make all decisions just because, well, I heard everybody's opinion and I'm still going to do what I wanted to do anyways. Be open to change, be open to the process of conflict, and establish trust.

If there's a better idea out there, swallow your pride, grab onto it, commit to the decision, and move forward. The next step is holding each other accountable to those decisions. So if you haven't mapped out roles and responsibilities and decision rights in your team, and you know you need to, stop listening right now. Stop the podcast. Get a piece of paper out and start mapping out who does what on your team and what roles and responsibilities should they fill. It's really that simple. It doesn't have to be perfect. What we see is farm operations and agribusinesses sometimes get overwhelmed by the task of clearly identifying who has what role, what are their responsibilities within the roles, and what key decision rights do they have.

We can avoid anywhere from probably 50 to 60% of daily conflicts or recurring issues that we have in an operation that really drags down our efficiency by just clearly identifying some of these things. And then having those who are responsible report back to the team. And that, you know, that's the last step that we have here is pay attention to your results. So if you have clearly defined roles and responsibilities within your team, maybe someone on the farm is responsible for marketing and someone's responsible for input and decision-making. Someone's responsible for financial planning and lender relations, and someone is responsible for landlord relations, for instance. Get together once a month or more frequently, as is needed, with your team and report back on that.

You know, you said, hey, Joe, last month, you know, you talked about meeting with these 3 landlords and having a discussion, seeing what they'd like to see different, you know, land rent negotiations. How did that go? Report back to us. And by having the accountability within the team, it fosters discussion and it builds trust knowing that those team members are following through. So pay attention to those results. One of the biggest things that we see is knowing cost of production. You know, 80% of farm operations think they know the cost of production. Probably 20% of those actually know it really, really well. Have it dialed in. And for the most part, everybody else, you know, maybe doesn't have as good of a pulse on it as they should or needs to dial it in a little bit better.

Identify someone on your team that can focus on cost of production or focus on your marketing or focus on this input buying and decision making to really improve efficiencies. And if you're a sole proprietor or if you're out there farming by yourself or you only have a couple people on your team, You might be thinking, oh, that's great if we had a team of 7, 8, 10 people in the operation. You don't have to have that many people, but mapping out who has the roles and responsibilities, even if it's only 2 people on the team, I would argue that in family instances, if you have a clear decision on how those— or a clear process on how those decisions are being made, you're going to be much better off. More importantly, when we look at this attention to results and attention to the decisions that are being made, You can't improve what you don't measure.

So start improving the things that matter most in your operation. Again, these are just 5 dysfunctions that we see on a farm operation. We hope it provides you a little bit of value and a little bit of perspective. If you have any questions on that, please reach out to myself, reach out to Chris. We're available anytime. Uh, you can visit AgViewSolutions.com, look at some of the services that we offer. Talking through some of the team health, the safety, uh, business structuring, transition planning. These are things that we work with, with farm operations. All across the country and Canada every day. And these are some keys that we identify as 5 dysfunctions, not only on a team but in a farm operation. So again, give the book a listen, reach out to us if you have any questions. Thank you everyone for listening, and we will catch you next time on the EggView Pitch.