I went for a walk to the bottom of our garden today and noticed something I’d somehow never seen before: A single stem, standing proud among the leaf litter, topped with an extraordinary cluster of berries changing from green to brilliant scarlet. Curiosity got the better of me.
A little further on I found another. Then another. Eventually I discovered an entire colony quietly growing beneath the trees.
The remarkable thing wasn’t that they were there. It was that they’d probably been there for years. I’d simply never noticed them.
It reminded me how often we measure growth by what we can see.
Sales figures.
Promotions.
Awards.
Followers.
Revenue.
Titles.
Those things matter. They’re visible. They’re easy to count. But some of the most important growth happens underground.
This plant spends much of the year hidden. It develops quietly beneath the surface before emerging for a brief season with something impossible to ignore. Leadership can be remarkably similar.
The conversations nobody applauds.
The mentoring that happens over coffee.
The difficult decisions made with integrity.
The lessons learned through failure.
The character built when no one is watching.
Those moments rarely make headlines. Yet they’re the roots from which everything else grows.
Looking back over my own career, I’ve realised that the moments which shaped me most weren’t the promotions or the milestones. They were the countless conversations with mentors. The questions that challenged my thinking. The opportunities to try something new. The mistakes that taught humility. The people who believed in me long before I believed in myself. Like these plants, their influence remained largely invisible until much later.
Perhaps that’s what stewardship really is. Planting seeds you may never see fully mature. Creating opportunities whose greatest impact will be experienced by someone else. Investing in people without needing recognition.
The world often celebrates visible success.
Nature reminds us that lasting growth usually begins where nobody is looking.
So today, a small wild plant growing unnoticed at the bottom of our garden gave me an unexpected leadership lesson. Maybe there are hidden signs of growth around us every day.
We just need to slow down long enough to notice them.
