Tree Planter’s Guide to Impressing Your Crew Boss and Building a Great Reputation
In the tree planting industry, being a valuable employee can often require more than just high productivity every day. It’s also highly dependent on your likability, reputation, work ethic, and communication skills. This is especially true for companies that serve particular niches in the Silviculture Industry. For example, Leader Silviculture primarily focuses on planting trees on technically challenging land. Our work has a lower margin of error, but a higher price per tree, which makes it perfect for people with a few years under their belt. Because our niche requires more experienced planters, our aim to build long-term relationships with our employees, allowing them to build their skills, learn how to do our work more effectively, and become more efficient over time. Because our goal is to keep our employees for several years, we can be quite selective about who we bring on, and our decisions go much further than just tree-planting skills.
Regardless of whether you’re a first-year who’s looking to make a name for yourself at a rookie mill, or you’re a veteran looking for a company where you can spread your wings, a great first step for tree planters to build a good reputation is to get in your Crew Boss’s good graces. If your crew boss likes you, they’ll say good things to those above them. If they don’t, that news travels just as fast. In an effort to help you make a great impression this year, we’ve outlined some key traits that we love seeing in our tree planters, and hope they will help you start creating a great reputation for yourself in the industry.
Traits of a Successful Tree Planter
Self-Motivated: The goal of a great manager, counterintuitively, is to do as little managing as possible. The less your crew boss needs to chase you around making sure you’re on task, the better. If you’re someone who can consistently be relied on to be in the right place doing the right thing, that’s a great way to start earning your crew boss’s respect.
Reliable: Our favourite employees are the ones that we can trust will follow through with what they say they are going to do. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of making promises you can’t keep to your crew boss because you know that it’s what they want to hear. The irony, however, is that we would way rather you not make promises than let us down after giving us your word. A great way to improve your reliability is by underpromising and overdelivering. When agreeing to something, make sure you give yourself some extra buffer time to account for any issues you experience along the way that slow you down. That way, even if things go slower than you originally thought, you can finish by the time you said you would.
Quality-Oriented: Especially for the work Leader Silviculture focuses on, ensuring all your work is top quality is a must. If your team’s checker is constantly making you redo work, that’s a huge problem that your crew boss will notice. In general, we would rather you plant 350 trees with no mistakes, than plant 800 trees, of which you’ll need to redo 450.
Receptive to Feedback: The only thing worse than a tree planter that has to redo all of their work, is the tree planter that has to redo all of their work but won’t admit that they did anything wrong. The ability to accept feedback and take advice is crucial to being a teammate. Our checkers and crew bosses are only there to help you improve, and are generally in those positions because they know what they’re doing. Don’t be the person who takes feedback personally and gets defensive. Instead, take the advice, try it out, and ask questions if you have issues down the line.
Self-Aware and able to Self-Regulate: On top of being able to manage your emotions, successful planters also have physical self-awareness. Physical self-awareness means that you’re constantly aware of your surroundings and can navigate your environment to keep yourself and your teammates safe. It also means that you keep track of how your body feels, and rest regularly to ensure you aren’t overworking yourself. When you do feel abnormal aches or pains, you make sure not to do anything that will make it worse and give yourself time to heal properly, taking time off if necessary. If you want some tips on how to prevent Tree planting injuries, click here.
Emotionally Intelligent: It doesn’t matter how many trees you can plant per day… If nobody likes you, you won’t last very long. Even though tree planters spend a lot of their day working independently, the ability to work in teams is still important.
Planters often live in motels or camps, meaning you will spend a lot of time together, whether you like it or not. That’s why it’s important to be someone others enjoy being around. Emotional intelligence means you’re able to regulate your emotions, empathize with others, and conduct yourself in a professional way that minimizes conflict and builds camaraderie with your team.
Being a good neighbour is also important. During downtime, make sure you’re respectful of other’s privacy and space, and do your best not to keep others up with loud music and conversations late at night.
