Build for the Harvest
I'm a novice gardener, and this year, I must admit, I'm genuinely proud of my harvest. Abundance has taken on a different meaning when intentionally growing something. But as a Chicagoan, I find gardening bittersweet as the season changes and my harvesting days are numbered. As the weather changes and leaves fall, something else happens: my view opens up, giving me the clarity to clear beds, feed the soil, and prepare for the next gardening season before the ground sees a seed.
Organizations have this season too.
It's the stretch after the launch, after the hire, after the plan is set, when what you started no
w requires more deliberate effort to become what was envisioned. That can look like formalizing norms as teams scale, and testing and recalibrating priorities to keep them aligned with your goals as conditions shift. Fall is the season of building. And how intentionally you build now determines what the next season can produce.
That's talent infrastructure: the norms, systems, shared beliefs, and markers of success that turn a vision into something real, shared, and repeatable. And infrastructure only holds when it's built to serve something you've named.
That last part is where I watch the most well-intentioned initiatives go sideways. Where systems can be built to create order and feel productive. But that structure without a clear destination is just tidiness. The teams that grow into something plant with the harvest already in mind. Put simply, talent infrastructure is the groundwork beneath a growing team, and like any growing season, it follows a sequence.
Here's the arc, in four stages:
🌱 Name the harvest. Before you build anything, name what the structure is for: the priorities and outcomes it's meant to serve, so it can grow and produce in that space.
🌱 Plant the right people. The right person in the right role is the ground everything else grows from. They set the standard, motivate, and hold others accountable to produce.
🌱 Build the trellis. As the team grows, set the norms and structure that let it climb: roles, expectations, how we behave, and how we make decisions. This keeps everyone moving on the same message and vision.
🌱 Tend and measure. Invest in your people's development, then honestly assess whether it's producing what you named in stage one. If it isn't, the answer is usually to redesign or tweak the structure, not to add more of it.
The through line across all four stages is a single question: how does this produce a good harvest? In other words, in service of what? That question separates infrastructure that performs from infrastructure that merely exists. So before you build, ask it. Then keep asking.
You build the trellis for the harvest you've named.
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