What Redwood Trees Can Teach Us About Supporting Each Other at Work
Redwood trees are among the tallest trees in the world, some reaching more than 300 feet and living for thousands of years. What I love about these trees is that the key to their success lies below the surface. Despite their amazing height, redwood roots are relatively shallow, only about 10 feet deep. But these roots wrap around the roots of the trees growing next to them, forming a support system that holds every tree steady when a storm or flood hits.
A redwood on its own, with nothing to anchor it, would be far more vulnerable to exactly the kind of weather these trees are famous for surviving. It's the network of support beneath the surface, not the height above it, that explains how they last thousands of years.
I think about these trees a lot when I talk to teams about how they work together.
Collaboration isn't the same as support
One of the phrases I share regularly is that work is better when you work together. But building a workday that holds up when things get difficult takes more than that. It's not just how well you collaborate with the people around you; it's whether you actually support each other, and those are two different things.
You can collaborate well with someone and still know almost nothing about what's going on for them. Support is different. It can be being the person who lightens someone else's day without being asked to, showing a colleague how to do something new, even when it would be faster just to do it yourself, or taking a more junior member of the team under your wing because someone once did the same for you.
Most people I work with want relationships that mean more than getting through the work. But between the meetings and the to-do list demanding your attention, it's easier said than done, and I think that's why we need to talk about it. Teams that only collaborate, without ever building that underlying support, tend to look fine on the surface right up until something goes wrong. Then you find out how shallow the roots actually were.
Making it part of the job, not a nice-to-have
Everyone I talk to agrees that building better relationships with colleagues is valuable. The question is, when will you do it? What I've seen work is people putting time on the calendar for it, or adding a task with a colleague's name on it, so supporting someone becomes part of the role rather than something that happens if there's time left over at the end of the day.
It sounds almost too simple, but the point isn't to make connection complicated; it's to give it the same importance as everything else competing for your attention.
What I'm seeing in the room
I'm seeing more of this happen, and it's a change I'm glad to be part of. Every workshop I deliver now has more built-in time for people to get to know each other, and every online session leaves more space for the kind of light conversation that used to get squeezed out in favour of the agenda. The feedback backs up the value of this space to connect. When I ask people what they got out of a Better Workday session, getting to know my colleagues better is one of the most common answers I hear back. That connection, that familiarity, is what makes someone more likely to reach out for help, or offer it, or just show up for a colleague when it counts.
So the question isn't really whether your team collaborates well. It's whether you're building the kind of roots that hold when things get stormy. What's one Redwood relationship you could be more intentional about this month?
