Permission to Feel, Fail, Fly, and Bear Fruit

A late frost can freeze a fruit tree’s flowers and kill the harvest before it begins. The flowers look fine until one cold snap changes everything.

Your work culture does the same thing to your team.

Before the pandemic, 18% of workers said anxiety affected their job performance. During the pandemic, that number jumped to 32%. Among Gen Z workers today, it is 42%. Chester Elton’s research further reveals that 50% of Millennials and 75% of Gen Z have left jobs specifically because of mental health challenges. Not pay. Not promotion. Because their work culture was so cold it harmed their ability to flower and grow.

Three Permissions That Warm Your Culture

Robyn White, creator of the Boss Yourself First movement, offers what she calls Three Permissions, a framework that warms the air in your culture to protect the flowering of your people, much like smelt pots placed in an orange grove on a cold night.

Permission to Feel

This permission creates space for the full range of human experience in your work culture. Your team overexerts energy when they hide how they feel. Emotional honesty welcomed rather than punished frees that energy for the actual work.

Permission to Fail

This permission empowers learning, innovation, and growth. Your people play it safe when they fear failure. They agree even when they disagree. They wait for problems to erupt into crises rather than naming them early. Permission to fail treats mistakes as data rather than crimes, as opportunities to learn rather than reasons for punishment.

Permission to Fly

This permission unlocks potential for full flowering despite the cold adversity of doing business today. When your people have permission to feel and fail, they become free to attempt ambitious things. Jeff Gibbard, author of The Lovable Leader, frames this as “Safe Travels.” You provide both safety and a destination. Safety without direction leaves people stagnant. Direction without safety leaves people afraid. Root-to-fruit cultures offer both.

The Fruit Your Culture Grows

The culmination of your leader soul’s growth is the fruit itself. And fruit carries seeds.

Jeff describes this as lovable leadership, leadership rooted in genuine care for people. Care that is not strategy, “I’ll care for my people so they’ll work harder,” but a genuine orientation toward your team’s wellbeing. When you fake it, you poison the fruit.

Trust grows from care. Jeff told me that trust deposits are small but withdrawals are large. One betrayal can undo years of trust. The fastest path to restoration is owning the mistake fully and immediately.

Care for your people. Create leaders from followers. That is the fruit of a Work Positive Culture.

Your Flowers and Fruits Do One Thing Challenge

Review Robyn’s Three Permissions and do three things this week.

• Identify which of the Three Permissions your leader soul has the most room to grow.

• Focus intentionally on that permission for the next few weeks and share your commitment with your team.

• Name one team member who responds well to your care cultivation and schedule a weekly conversation about their leader soul development.

The Work Positive Bottom Line

Your culture either supports or kills the flowering of your people. Give your team permission to feel, fail, and fly, then cultivate care and creation that seeds the next generation of leaders in a root-to-fruit Work Positive Culture. Do One Thing today.

Taken from Dr. Joey’s newest book, Leader Soul: Grow a Root-to-Fruit Culture.

Keywords: #LeaderSoul #RootToFruit #WorkCulture #WorkPositive #CultureEatsStrategyForBreakfast #MentalHealthAtWork #LeadingWithCare