Are You Growing Wheat or Hunting Weeds?
The world doesn't need more critics. It needs more people willing to cultivate what they hope to see grow.
This past Sunday, Father Karl Burns preached on Jesus’ Parable of the Weeds (Matthew 13:24-30).
The story is simple. A farmer plants good seed in his field. During the night, an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. When the workers discover the problem, they immediately want to pull up the weeds.
The farmer surprises them.
“Leave them alone for now.”
That wasn’t the answer they expected.
Most of us are natural weed hunters.
Neuroscientist Rick Hanson describes the brain’s negativity bias—the tendency to notice threats, problems, and mistakes more quickly than what’s going well. In other words, we’re wired to spot weeds.
Left unchecked, we can spend our lives identifying what’s wrong while overlooking what is healthy, growing, and worthy of cultivation.
Father Karl made an important distinction. The point of the parable is not to spend our energy deciding who is wheat and who is weeds—who is good and who is bad. Nor is it our job to pull up the weeds.
Instead, we are called to focus on what we are growing within ourselves: kindness, patience, humility, integrity, and love.
For leaders, these qualities create organizations rich in trust, collaboration, innovation, and ultimately, stronger results.
In a world that rewards outrage, this is countercultural wisdom.
The world does not need more angry, judgmental people.
It needs more people who embody the qualities they wish to see in others.
Father Karl also shared a Lakota proverb that beautifully complements this lesson.
An elder told his grandson that inside every person are two wolves fighting for control. One wolf represents anger, bitterness, resentment, pride, and fear. The other represents compassion, courage, generosity, peace, and love.
The grandson asked, “Which wolf wins?”
The elder replied, “The one you feed.”
That question has stayed with me all week.
Which wolf are you feeding?
As leaders, parents, spouses, friends, and citizens, we often believe our greatest contribution is identifying problems. Certainly, problems need attention. But leadership is more than criticism.
Leadership is cultivation.
This principle applies not only to our personal lives but also to the organizations we lead.
When something goes wrong, many organizations instinctively ask:
“Who caused this?”
But the healthiest organizations ask a different question:
“What happened, and what can we learn?”
Jim Collins has written about conducting an “autopsy without blame.” The purpose is not to identify a culprit. The purpose is to understand the system.
As W. Edwards Deming observed:
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
Instead of asking, “Whose fault was this?” effective leaders ask:
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What can we learn?
How can we improve the process going forward?
This approach assumes people are generally acting in good faith and doing the best they can with the information they have at the time.
When leaders focus on blame, people hide mistakes.
When leaders focus on learning, people tell the truth.
That creates psychological safety—the confidence that admitting an error will lead to improvement rather than punishment.
As Amy Edmondson writes:
“Psychological safety is not about being nice. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other.”
The same principle applies in our families, friendships, communities, and workplaces.
What if we spent less energy assigning blame and more energy cultivating understanding, accountability, wisdom, and growth?
What if we focused less on identifying weeds and more on growing wheat?
The wolf you feed is the wolf that grows.
The culture you nurture is the culture that spreads.
The harvest you reap tomorrow will be planted in what you sow today.
So before spending another day hunting weeds, ask yourself:
What am I cultivating—in myself, in my relationships, and in my organization?
Because the future rarely emerges from what we criticize.
It grows from what we cultivate.
Leadership Reflection
Where am I spending more energy criticizing than cultivating?
Which wolf have I been feeding lately?
What is one quality I want to intentionally grow in myself this week?
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This month's downloadable resource is The Elaine Morris Autopsy Without Blame™ Framework—a practical guide for helping leaders and teams learn from mistakes, missed goals, and unexpected outcomes without damaging trust, teamwork, or accountability. Discover how to uncover root causes, strengthen systems, and create a culture where people feel safe telling the truth and committed to continuous improvement.
Choose an area where results are falling short of expectations.
Use this framework with your leadership team to uncover root causes, strengthen systems, and improve performance.
At your next executive retreat or team meeting, dedicate an hour to working through the process together. Instead of asking, “Who caused this?” you’ll learn to ask, “What happened, and what can we learn?”
The result is greater accountability, stronger trust, and better outcomes.
