If you walk into any leadership class in the country, the instructor will tell you to realize your strengths, and minimize your weaknesses. Investment in ourselves is best spent where we can make easy improvements; when it comes to human resources employ them in areas where you are weak. It makes sense, and it often seems like something that would be easy to do. But I wonder as an industry if we have just become adept at pushing our weaknesses under the rug, instead of addressing them. I don't know that we make much effort to fill out our weaknesses, instead surrounding ourselves with people that see the world through the same lens.
Any meeting of pork producers I attend, I can see the similarities between us. We are fully committed to agriculture- we can't see doing anything else, nor do we want to. We are thorough and we like to follow a plan. These are all great qualities in people whose business's ride on a very volatile market. We have the patience to weather the hard times.
At the same time, these traits are holding us back. We don't put ourselves out there to be judged. We try to hide from curiosity and scrutiny, not without reason. We don't engage an audience very well because we tend to get stuck in the data. We like numbers and hard answers. Sometimes looking at the big picture, the one outside our own driveways, is a big challenge. Sometimes when we hire workers, we try to hire people who will "fit" on the farm. There is merit to that, but its also good to have people in your company who have a different perspective. They can see obvious consumer problems we as farmers may not realize. We need both workers and dreamers, traditionalists and visionaries.
With fewer children growing up on the farm, we are being forced to look outside of our normal circles for talented employees. The problem can be however, that the talented students aren't all looking for jobs in agriculture. We need to work to capture their imagination, and present agriculture industries as a viable option for a career, for personal success. As a young, starting farmer, I can say that people my age want a career where they feel they can make a difference. They want to feel like they are part of a bigger picture. We see our own fields as an obvious place to make a difference in the lives of our neighbors, but most young people see them as a thing of the past. It's manual labor that doesn't involve any strategy for innovation. We need to work past the picture of what a farmer "used to be" and define what it means to be a farmer now.
