Growing Weeders Into Leaders: Leadership Lessons from the Ground Level

One of America’s most accomplished landscaping professionals reveals his methods for cultivating greatness.

Nowadays, greatness tends to be measured by shortest or longest times, highest heights, medals won, honors given. But as Aristotle taught us, greatness is what we can do every day, without recognition or reward, for the satisfaction that comes from meeting the challenge, creating a team, and overcoming the odds.

Under Jeff McManus’s leadership as Director of Landscape Services, the Ole Miss campus has won professional awards—and been cited by Newsweek and Princeton Review as America’s “most beautiful campus.” In Growing Weeders into Leaders, he relates the principles behind his team’s success. It is an entertaining and thoughtful look into the hearts and the workday lives of ordinary people who tapped into their inner greatness in pursuit of a vision. Creating one of America’s most beautiful college campuses at the University of Mississippi did not happen overnight and, inside these pages, McManus describes the joys, the defeats, the brilliant problem-solving and the best laid plans that are proven worthless . . . until the bigger picture appears. This is the bigger picture as viewed from the ground level—taking you through the practical applications of empowering people to experience not only what it means to grow outstanding landscapes, but also to grow greatness in themselves and encourage it in others.

“A straightforward approach to problem-solving and methods to grow individuals into a team.” —Susanne Woodell, CGM Historic Gardens Manager, Biltmore