winners, and prospective students and their parents, visitors, and faculty and staff candidates would connect quickly with a beautifully landscaped campus. But I knew reaching that goal was going to be challenging. Tackling the Grove Cleanup was just the beginning.
Studies have proven that pleasing, safe, green spaces with plenty of plants, trees and grass, like Te Grove, contribute to our mental health.
Beyond the recruiting, studies have proven that pleasing, safe, green spaces with plenty of plants, trees and grass, contribute to our mental health. So how important are the people who contribute to making and maintaining these areas on campus? Very. Maintaining the various needed relationships and developing the employee talent, skill, and purpose are critical in our business.
I often speak to groups about ways to grow their employees to find their personal greatness. Let’s look at this word “greatness” a moment. Depending on which source you use and the way you use the word, it means important, powerful, exceptionally talented, very good, or superior in quality or character; noble. Everyone has the potential for greatness. Taking the time to dig around and discover it is the hard part, but I knew if we were to maintain the momentum, we had to do just that.
In my past jobs, my landscape teams showed up, did their job, and moved on to the next project. We were organized, systematic, and efficient. It works. People do it every day. No vision, no goals, they just do what is expected of them and leave. When Dr. Robert Khayat, then Chancellor of the University of Mississippi, hired me to do what I had always done and develop this campus into a 5-star rating, I had no doubt I could develop the campus into a fine-looking property, but being the best takes more than “showing up to do a job.” It meant taking a team and inspiring them to recognize the impressiveness, the greatness inside of each of them, to be the best of the best, and to work together to create a five-star campus.
In coming to this University, my challenge was clear: Make the Ole Miss landscape the best. It would be the secret to accomplishing Chancellor Khayat’s other goals such as recruiting and retaining top students, including student-athletes, and top faculty in the research centers and classrooms. People want to be associated with
16 TPI Turf News March/April 2019
I had learned who our department was, but felt overall, we were just a bunch of ordinary people who were coming to work for different reasons. Creating the buy-in was going to be the key, and this would take time. Our landscape team tried several times to develop a vision statement. Year after year, we hit a road block. It takes a pecan tree four to eight years to produce pecans. Perhaps it would take our landscape team that long to write the vision statement.
One of our Ole Miss Landscape student workers, Chris Hardy, was watching our staff some years later, working their magic, and he said, “We are cultivating greatness.” Tus, our vision statement was born. Every day we aspire to cultivate greatness that attracts and retains great students, faculty, and staff. We are cultivating greatness!”
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