Why My Overwatered Garden Became The Perfect Metaphor For Modern Work
Overwatering a garden is a lot like overmanaging people.
SilviaJansen | Canva “Overwatering is a classic mistake,” my friend said, standing in his community garden. You do not just spoil the plant, you rob it of the need to grow deeper roots."
If the soil is always wet, the plant does not need to “search” for water, and so its roots can stay near the surface, shallow and weak, which can increase vulnerability to drought, pests, and stress. Without challenge, internal resilience does not develop.
Our ancestors knew how to read the sky and soil and understand the balance of growth and decay. However, I approach plants and landscapes with a kind of unskilled ignorance. Simple lessons — such as how restraint in watering encourages roots to grow deep or how cycles of scarcity build resilience — are often lost. Those lost lessons once shaped not just survival, but could also inform how we thought about adversity, possibility, and growth. These are central life and management skills.
Why my overwatered garden became the perfect metaphor for modern work
Aliaksandra Skaskevich / Shutterstock
Like plants, our shape, performance, and resilience reflect past inputs, resources, constraints, and support systems. Our outcomes also depend on conditions: soil, sunlight, season, and the skill of our gardeners.
Collectively, we are feeling vulnerable, unmoored, uprooted, and adrift. Have we deprived ourselves of the very conditions for growth? Are we drowning our roots and those of others? Nature teaches us that struggle can be the source of growth, and why can’t we accept it in our lives? And in life and at work, too much rescuing and emotional micromanagement can inhibit the development of internal capacity.
So we asked, what can gardening, as a foil to impatience and overstimulation, teach us? Put another way, what can we learn from a world that is seasonal, cyclical, and shaped by limits and observation? And how might those lessons help us manage ourselves and others in a world that is constant, optimized for speed and devoid of friction, and bent on control?
As we turn to the lessons of the garden, consider how these patterns manifest in your own life and work. To illustrate, we have selected a few examples from our book on Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace. They show how stress, repair, and limits apply to sports teams and companies.
Wilting in a world of abundance
In our modern lives, increasingly urban and technological, we have become almost entirely divorced from the rhythms of gardens and the wisdom of nature. For the moment, we are not wilting from drought but being drowned in speed, stimulation, and endless ease.
For many young people, food arrives in a package or via delivery services; convenience replaces patience and observation. GenAI can produce a thesis paper in 12 seconds. Movies and shows are filmed at an ever faster clip.
Even speech is more dramatic to capture clicks and attention. We are not having a hard time at work — we are “quiet cracking,” “quiet quitting,” or engaging in the Covid “great resignation.” But often the data tell a more ordinary story (less than 30% of us are engaged at work since 2006, and just a few more people resigned in Covid than in other given months). Researchers and journalists also convey malaise in louder, faster, and more engaging ways. Similarly, many popular TikTokers emote, gesticulate, and “trauma dump.” Some engage in fraud via postured success.
We have become thespians in our own lives. The modern world makes everything easy, unlockable by a few taps or voice commands. Bored, mad, glad, or sad, there is an app for that. And apps to help you with your app addictions.
This gives us an illusion that things can be controlled, optimized, and “hacked.” Like hamsters hitting the (endless) sugar water in a lab experiment, we are drowning in our quest to get our needs met — at least temporarily. Everyone wants to harvest, but no one wants to be a gardener.
The gift of limits
Nothing in nature blooms all season, but we expect to do so. Maturity is when a plant (or ecosystem) is no longer fragile growth, but has settled into a rhythm — balancing growth with rest, conserving energy, and withstanding shocks.
Growth is not endless expansion. Sometimes, healthy branches must be cut because they can divert the plant’s energy. We do not like to prune or let go of roles or of people-pleasing behaviors that have gotten us this far, but subtraction is often what makes new flourishing possible.
Plants also do not grow year-round. They have cycles of preparation and periods of dormancy. When we are “doing nothing,” we fret — but often the roots are at work below the surface. In nature, performance has rhythms, and managing energy is just as crucial as managing output.
Plants cannot grow endlessly. Sometimes healthy branches must be pruned to channel energy, and fields must lie fallow to recover. The same is true in organizations.
Leaders, too, must learn when to emphasize subtraction and rest instead of more output. Just as plants weaken when they are never pruned or rested, workplaces falter when people cannot manage their energy, set boundaries, close down initiatives, and accept limits, or when leaders and teams demand constant “watering.”
In this lens, burnout occurs as an ecological mismatch, which is very costly for companies, societies, and individuals. We tend to blame ourselves or individuals rather than the conditions, to get to, ahem, root causes. As the book notes,
“Stress can be defined as ‘the harmful physical and emotional response that occurs when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker.’ Some of the effects of stress include numerous physical ailments as well as mental health problems such as depression and increased risk of suicide.”
Questions for reflection:
- What blind spots exist in your current prevention efforts?
- When you feel guilty about resting, what are you compensating for with your activity and measurable outputs? What is the collateral damage?
- What do you do just because it is rewarding or familiar? What is diffusing your energy?
- What roles do ego and shame play in our unwillingness to accept and set limits for ourselves?
The gift of struggle
In gardening, “hardening off” refers to the process of gradually exposing young, greenhouse-grown plants to the harsher conditions of the outside world so that they can become habituated to them and survive outside a protected environment.
The process is slow, initially taking a few hours at a time, with the duration increasing daily. If this is skipped, plants can go into shock, wilt, or die. However, if done too late, the process will not work as well either. The job of parents, good coaches, and managers is to consider gradual exposure to stress.
The problem is that modern parents, coaches, and managers — just like people in their charge — have gotten used to avoiding pain and feel bad when being perceived to inflict it on others (think of how people stare at you when your kid melts down at the supermarket when it is told ice cream before dinner is not an option). A calibrated challenge can hopefully generate eustress, a positive form of stress that allows for growth and change. In our book, we called it “just manageable difficulties."
“challenges that test and stretch our skills, but don’t set us up for certain failure. Just as intense heat and pressure are needed to turn carbon into diamonds, some stress can be beneficial and challenge employees to grow.”
Timing and titration matter. Sheltering too long becomes overprotection, while moving too fast risks shock. Leaders need to plan for a realistic ramp-up. This means taking the time to get to know employees and accepting that their context may be totally different from the ones that shaped us. Managers often experience stress “shocks” when thrust into new roles without transitional support, and promotions can be major inflection points (quote book). Hardening off — not being tossed in the deep end — is what good succession planning and onboarding should feel like.
Questions for reflection:
- When have you protected someone too long or pushed too quickly? And you feel uncomfortable watching others struggle, is it because they are truly at risk or because you are avoiding the discomfort of their stress?
- Are you offering yourself and your team “just manageable difficulties,” or are you either rescuing or overwhelming?
- What small calibrations could you make — in onboarding, promotions, or feedback — to help people “harden off “positively and sustainably?
The gift of scars
In horticulture, a fragile new shoot can be grafted onto a hardy rootstock, creating a plant stronger than either alone. The graft only works if the joined parts of the respective plants are exposed and aligned so they can build a vascular bridge that lets water, nutrients, and sugars flow between them.
Mentorship is a form of grafting — new growth attached to the seasoned stock. Neither erases the other, but together they create something more substantial and stronger. This requires patience for the process, alignment, and ongoing care and protection until the union can sustain itself.
In a mentoring context, accepting that the other individual’s differences can be a source of strength, rather than a grievance, just because they are standing in the way of short-term efficiency.
In M&A, alignment (of values, systems, and culture is as crucial to enable productive fusion to occur. When they do not align and the “graft” is forced, or the union was not protected long enough to heal, the merger fails. Proper alignment — in mergers and horticulture — can mean making deep cuts before attempting the graft.
Then, the new shoot withers, and the rootstock may continue, not only without the intended hybrid benefits (disease resistance, higher yield, and decoration) but also at a higher risk of disease and pests if the wound does not seal properly. In companies, distrust, disengagement, or cynicism can creep in, weakening the organization as a whole. A mentee is disillusioned; a mentor is stunted in her growth.
In management and coaching, the past cannot be erased, but reframed as the soil for new growth — not starting ‘over’ but ‘from.’ Leadership can follow the same principle, as we reiterated in our book. Leaders who integrate rather than conceal what makes them unique show their teams that what seems like “cracks” are not flaws to hide but part of the visible texture of humanity.
Case study from our book:
Diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at business school, a CEO did not conceal these differences; he built his leadership style around them — spending time with customers rather than in meetings. His impatience drove some people away, but others thrived. Retention was high. “I don’t manage groups in the traditional way,” he said. “I focus on individual players, working one-on-one. I empower them to do a lot of things, and they get it done.” By wearing his differences openly, he turned what some might have seen as a barrier to leadership into a mark of authenticity and a source of strength.
Questions for reflection:
- When mergers, deals, or relationships fail, was it a question of preparation, alignment, protection, or time? What parts did you control, and which parts could you not control? Why and why not?
- When you are thinking of new “fixes” (like wellness programs at work or new self-care routines), consider how to cut, expose, and connect what you already have for less redundancy, more flow, and connection.
Gift of visibility
Here, too, we can learn from nature. Many trees do not heal invisibly. They grow around their wounds, knotting into those ruptures, transforming the damaged parts into texture as an integral part of their essence.
In Japanese kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold. The rupture is not concealed but honored — its fracture becomes the most beautiful part of the object. Another Japanese philosophy, Wabi-sabi, encourages us to see imperfection, transience, and incompleteness as marks of authenticity.
Humans also do not always heal cleanly, and they tend to cover up our wounds (post on leaders) — but what we think is invisible isn’t for others.
Case study from our book:
A former NFL coach admitted that he had realized later than he would have liked that what truly built stronger athletes wasn’t bravado or toughness but vulnerability.
“One challenge of the football arena is a general reluctance to embrace vulnerability and empathy in the locker room. After leaving the coaching world, I delved into the research of Dr. Brené Brown and embraced vulnerability and empathy. I think the practices of these two tools are essential components of building sound athletes.”
Like grafting, he discovered that exposing the wound — naming weakness and working with it — was what allowed new strength to grow. Integration, not denial, was the real glue that held teams together.
Questions for reflection:
- What parts of yourself do you treat as flaws and try to keep hidden, when they could instead be shared as strengths?
- What if we practiced more visible vulnerability and integration rather than practicing emotional severance? How could this benefit you, but also those around you, and make them feel less alone or imperfect?
- What is standing in the way of your doing this? Lack of self-awareness or shame at being “found out”?
The gift of maturity
Unlike plants, we can make choices around pruning, resting, and accepting limits. That requires accepting agency and acting with maturity.
To help us get there, we need to address the most significant risk: emotional immaturity in both leaders and employees, when we develop “adversarial relationship with reality”: deny, distort, or dismiss what they cannot handle, struggle with accountability, and expect others to regulate their emotions.
In the workplace, this can manifest as managers who avoid conflict, capitulate to favorites, or overidentify with direct reports; or employees who spiral into blame, demand constant affirmation, and create an emotional minefield for everyone around them. The result is instability, resentment, and mistrust — the opposite of psychological safety, a concept that is also in vogue these days.
To us, emotional maturity is the hidden competency behind every gardening lesson. It is what allows us to accept stress without shock, to integrate wounds into strength, to let go when energy is diffused, and to act with restraint when the impulse is to overdo, overprotect, or hyperbolize. Emotional maturity, then, is nothing more than the gardener’s wisdom: to know when to stress, when to heal, when to wait, and when and what to let go.
Questions for reflection:
- When was the last time you or someone on your team or family covered something up because you were afraid? What was the response you were afraid of, and from whom?
- What, in your environment, taught you this behavior?
In our modern lives, acknowledging limits, calibrating our struggles, and asking for help or different considerations can make us feel like we are admitting that we cannot do it all. However, when leaders do it, it fosters a stronger culture of collaboration, growth, and support.
Struggle is not the enemy. If nature depends on it, how can we get better at learning from it?
Carin-Isabel Knoop leads the Case Research & Writing Group at Harvard, contributing to over 2,000 global case studies. She co-authored Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace and has written nearly 200 cases and over 100 articles.
