Farmer in red cap and blue shirt operating riding mower on lush green pasture under clear bright blue sky with farmhouse visible in distance, actively mowing and maintaining healthy grass growth, representing Dr. Joey's metaphor of mowing the mental broom straw where negative perception competes with positive for team's attention and energy just as broom straw competes with spring grass for nutrients, illustrating F.R.A.M.E. framework's M lens that leaders must filter negativity before it poisons team's collective engine like six grains of sand daily accumulating to seize performance, showing why Maya sits in car Monday mornings naming what she's not bringing to team and why emotional contagion spreads like virus within three minutes, demonstrating that deliberate maintenance of mental environment allows healthy positive perception and culture to flourish when leader mows sources of negativity in hallway gossip and meeting opens, with Work Positive Today logo visible.

Mow the Mental Broom Straw

Work Positive Culture
July 19, 2026•3 min read

I climbed onto my tractor one winter day and mowed a portion of our horse pasture.

Broom straw rises as the soil tilts off balance and the grass struggles. It competes with the spring grass for nutrients, water, and sunlight. Horses pick around it because they prefer grass. So I mow it. If I fail to mow, the broom straw wins, and the pasture stops being a pasture.

Your team's mental environment grows broom straw, too.

Negative perception competes with positive perception for your team's attention and energy. The M in F.R.A.M.E. @ Work, the fourth lens, is for Mow the Mental Broom Straw.

Emotion Spreads Like a Virus

Sigal Barsade at the Wharton School demonstrated that emotions move through a team the way a virus moves through a crowded room. One person who arrives carrying negative affect transfers it to everyone within minutes, below conscious awareness.

The mood you carry into the room becomes your team's mood within three minutes.

Your team consumes what you fail to filter.

Six Grains of Sand?

Imagine you drop six grains of sand into your gas tank every morning. Tiny. Hardly noticeable. How long until the engine seizes?

Sooner than you think.

Negative thoughts work inside your team's collective engine the same way. Each one feels harmless. Six a day across a month is a hundred and eighty. Across six months, over a thousand. Then your best people withhold their ideas, meetings get quieter, and innovation flatlines.

Remember the Ice

My friend Bob Nicoll walked into a Phoenix convenience store and saw a sign above the register: "Don't Forget the Ice." Sales were slow, despite the heat. Bob wrote a new sign: "Remember the Ice." Three weeks later, sales had tripled.

"Don't forget" focuses the mind on forgetting. "Remember" focuses it on remembering. Daniel Wegner's research on suppression confirms it: what you resist, persists.

You write signs for your team every day. Do your signs point them toward what is broken, or toward what is possible?

Maya Mows on Mondays

Maya invented her own ritual. Before she walked into her office on Monday, she sat in her car for three minutes and named what she was carrying that her team did not need to absorb. The frustrating email. The Q4 worry. The hard morning at home.

She told each one, "You are real. Stay in the car."

Her team noticed her Monday energy by the third week. They had no idea what she did in the car. They knew Mondays had transformed.

Your Mow the Mental Broom Straw DOT Challenge

This week, audit one source of broom straw in your team's environment.

  • Choose hallway gossip, the meeting open, or your own pre-office self-talk.

  • Mow that one source for seven days.

  • Notice what grows in its place.

Work Positive Bottom Line

Same water, two filters. One person sees mud. A child sees a chocolate ocean. The lens you cleared now needs a routine, so next we establish rituals that stick.

You choose the filter, before anyone else does.

Do One Thing today.

This post is from Dr. Joey Faucette's new book, F.R.A.M.E. @ Work: Five Lenses That Transform How People Leaders Cultivate Their Team.


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