By Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s Co-Founding Partner

Why understanding the ways of beekeeping can help you become a dramatically better leader.

Many businesspeople spend most of their time doing what we call working in their business, i.e., doing the day-to-day, hour-to-hour tasks that make up the bulk of the activity in any organization. But what they don’t schedule time for is working ON their business—long-term planning, reviewing and improving production processes, redoing a performance review system for staff, designing new (or redesigning old) training systems and so on. Though this part of running a company is critical to long-range growth and success, it is continually pushed aside for the fires that always seem to need putting out.

Working on your business is more than simply carving out time each week for long-term strategizing (though that is critical): It is about how you view your role as a leader. Are you most effective rolling up your shirtsleeves and solving each and every problem in your store as it surfaces? Or should your role be less about crisis management and more about creating a successful environment and structure for your business to thrive? As you can guess, we at Zingerman’s believe in the latter. Which is how we get to beekeeping.

Yes, beekeeping. I know it seems illogical, but stay with me here. By learning some of the tenets of successful beekeeping, including the role of the beekeeper, you can create a new view of leadership and how to keep your hive, I mean your business, thriving. Take a leap of faith with me and read these ten reasons why beekeeping is a beautiful image to use to help us all stay focused on effectively working on our organizations.

1. Beekeepers don’t make the raw material.
The worker bees are the ones who fly to the flowers, bring nectar back to the hive and make even the tiniest drop of honey. All the beekeeper can do is work on the hive, on managing the space and the systems, on supplying the resources the bees need. It’s a helpful analogy for leaders to draw on when faced with the desire to jump in and do the work faster, easier or better themselves. If you think of your role as a leader being akin to that of a beekeeper, then you must stand aside and hope that the insects and the weather and all the other elements will cooperate to help the business thrive.

2. If managed correctly, the beekeepers and the bees win.
Good beekeeping keeps everyone happy. The better the bees are doing, the more plentiful the honey will be and the more successful the beekeeper will be. Similarly, here at Zingerman’s we adhere to a business model of always working towards win-win outcomes, a mutually beneficial preferred future that all involved contribute to and gain from. In beekeeping and in business, the best protection against competitors or outside attacks is a healthy organization.

3. If success isn’t shared with the workers, the hive dies.
The old-school business model of giving workers as little as needed in order to extract as much from their efforts as possible simply doesn’t work with beekeeping. If we take out all the honey, the bees can’t keep going, they need it to eat and continue. If instead, the bees are treated with gentleness and care and respect, the hive thrives. The same is true with business. Being able to have a respectful, meaningful relationship with staff without confining or even restricting them in their work is a big piece of what makes good leadership.

4. You can’t make bees do anything.
When it comes to bees no one will argue this statement. But while it’s easy to argue the opposite about your own employees—“we’re paying them,” “I’m the boss,” and all that—the truth of the matter is that managers have as much chance of making employees do something as beekeepers have of forcing the insects to make honey. Both staff and bees do what they do only by choice. With that in mind, here at Zingerman’s we long ago arrived at the approach that we treat our staff as if they were volunteers. Why? Because although they do get paid, just like volunteers working at your local neighborhood nonprofit, they only show up and work hard when they want to. We can’t make them do anything. It’s all out of our control; all we have are varying degrees of influence. Great beekeepers and great leaders alike know this and act accordingly.

5. Sometimes the bees don’t behave.
Given that it’s all out of our control, let me (re-) state what I’m sure you already know. No matter how good the beekeeper, no matter how much we want good outcomes, no matter how at peace the beekeeper is with the bees or herself, things don’t always work out. Projects fail, people we’ve trusted trip up, folks who promised they were going to work with us for years up and leave with no notice. It’s incredibly frustrating when those things happen. But sometimes that’s just the way it is. And when that’s the case, the sooner we make peace with the reality of that fact, the less stressed out we’ll be, the more likely we are to reverse the trend and slowly but surely start to get better results down the road.

6. Even the kindest beekeepers sometimes get stung.
Like it or not, there aren’t any guarantees—sometimes worker bees sting you even when you haven’t done anything to deserve it. Experienced beekeepers, however, get used to the occasional sting. They learn to absorb the blow, stay centered and quickly refocus on what needs to be done. They also learn to be prepared for when they do get stung. With bee stings, ice and Benedryl can help. (Incidentally, so can a cut garlic clove, as I learned from Enrique, a beekeeper for Ulmo’s blossom honey, who was one of my inspirations for this beekeeper leadership analogy during a trip to Chile last winter.) For managers and leaders, having support around us—good people, caring colleagues, folks who will listen and offer insight and help us unload stress—is a huge help.

7. Sound structures and systems are essential.
The biggest factors in the quantity and quality of honey produced are: a) nature, and b) the way the beekeeper manages the location, size and scale of the hives. We know we can’t control nature but we can and need to adapt to it or we’ll get next to nothing done. The skilled beekeeper makes adjustments based on sun, rain, wind and other environmental factors including how high the boxes are stacked, how large he leaves the openings for the bees, where he places the hives in the first place and a hundred other little things that will have a big impact on productivity. Just as the construction and management of sound structures and smoothly running systems is the bulk of a beekeeper’s job, so is it for a business leader. If you work on your business to create systems and structures in which the workers are going to do well, then workers are going to have a high likelihood of success.

8. Effective beekeepers embrace the hive’s diversity.
It takes a range of contributors—the queen, the drones, the worker bees—for the hive to function. Clearly the same is true in our businesses. Peppe Avola, a smart Sicilian beekeeper told me that, “Every bee is like a cell of a single body. Its work changes as it gets older. When it’s born, it cleans in the hive. Then it makes royal jelly. Then it feeds the royal jelly to the queen. Then it makes the wax. Then it defends the nest. The last thing it gets to do is collect pollen for honey making.” His appreciation of his crew, and his ability to manage them as they develop and do their evolving jobs fascinates me. The same understanding is necessary in your business: The leader has to learn to handle and enhance the work of wholly different types of people to bring the business to greatness.

9. Better beekeepers bring out better honey.
Less skilled beekeepers may get good results in any given year, but over time the most success comes from those who continue to build their knowledge, who grow ever more at peace with themselves, with the bees and with nature, and who make small, subtle, meaningful changes to the way they work. These beekeepers (and leaders) get more flavorful and higher yields of honey every year.

10. Beekeeping is hard work, but it does work.
Although we as consumers mostly just enjoy the sweetness of the end product, the reality is that beekeeping is hard work. While anyone could do it, it takes a lot of focus, enormous attention to detail and a lot of small day-to-day work to create a superior product. As my partner Paul Saginaw said to me long ago, “Successful businesses [or in this case, beekeepers] generally do all the things everyone else knows they should do but don’t feel like doing.” Most leaders know what they ought to do; but for whatever combination of internal reasons and external pressures, they choose the easier path, and settle for similar, if not equal results by staying with the mainstream of the market.

Final Thoughts
The thing I most like about this comparison between beekeeping and working on your business is that it’s just so black and white. Quite simply, the beekeeper only works on the business of the hive, the bees only work in it and the better the former does his work, the more likely it is that the latter will bring good results. So the next time you start to feel that old familiar feeling, the almost innate desire most of us have to just get in there and do “it” yourself (whatever “it” may be), I want to encourage you to “be the beekeeper.” Pull your mind back from that old instinct and put your energy into assessing what’s going on, then start looking at ways to improve systems to enhance results.

Ultimately, I think that’s our work as leaders. Because just as better beekeepers almost always bring out better tasting honey—and more of it—with better business leadership, better self-discipline and a big picture outlook, everyone wins.