What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from Braiding Sweetgrass
Renata managed a twelve-person operations team and prided herself on being fair: clear goals, honest reviews, no favorites. But her best senior engineer, the one everyone quietly leaned on, had stopped volunteering ideas in meetings. When she asked why, he said he felt mined, not managed, called on whenever something broke, never asked what he needed to keep doing his best work. Renata had been measuring the relationship only by what the team produced for her, never by what she gave back. She started closing one-on-ones with a different question: what do you need from me this month, not what do I need from you.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The gift economy Kimmerer describes
Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a trained botanist, describes the natural world in her own tradition as gift-givers whose gifts create an obligation to give something back, not resources for the taking. She offers this as her own inherited perspective, not a universal rule. For a manager, the useful translation is noticing that a team's trust and goodwill are gifts too, and that leadership which only draws on them, without replenishing, runs the same extractive pattern she cautions against.
A manager under quarterly pressure defaults to whichever team member absorbs the most extra work without complaint. Practice: before assigning the next stretch task, name out loud or in writing what you have given that person recently in return for their effort.
Before assigning the next stretch task, name out loud or in writing what you have given that person recently in return for their effort.
Where this shows up in daily life
Kimmerer's chapters return often to how rarely modern life notices what is being taken and whether anything is given back, whether water, food, or the labor behind an object. Inside an organization, that blindness shows up when a leader describes headcount purely as deliverables, hours, output, without registering what keeps people willing to give that effort at all.
Performance reviews reward what was delivered and rarely ask what was depleted to deliver it. Practice: once a quarter, ask each direct report privately what they have been giving that has gone unnoticed.
Once a quarter, ask each direct report privately what they have been giving that has gone unnoticed.
Practical self-application
Kimmerer's own teaching favors small, repeatable practices, gratitude before using something the earth provides, tending even one plant with attention, using fully what is taken rather than wasting it. Translated into management, inspired by rather than copied from her tradition, a leader might name a specific contribution before assigning the next task, or protect recovery time for someone consistently drawn on.
Gratitude rituals feel soft and get cut first when the calendar is packed with deliverables. Practice: end each week by sending one specific, concrete thank-you naming what a person gave, not a generic compliment.
End each week by sending one specific, concrete thank-you naming what a person gave, not a generic compliment.
The larger debate
Kimmerer's book also sits inside a live, unresolved conversation about land stewardship, the place of Indigenous knowledge within environmental science, and land rights and sovereignty. These are real, evolving debates the book engages with rather than settles, and reasonable people disagree on specifics. A leader reading this book meets that debate as background for its reciprocity ideas, not as a position the book asks any reader to adopt.
A manager trying to notice, appreciate, and reciprocate with every team member runs into the calendar: there are only so many one-on-ones in a week, and urgent fires claim the time first. Reciprocity takes ongoing attention, while most management systems reward visible, immediate output instead. Most leaders will manage this well for a few people some weeks, not the whole team every week, and that is a realistic tradeoff, not a failure of character.
Name one thing, honestly
- Which team member have you been drawing on most without asking what they need in return? - What would change if you tracked what you give your team as carefully as what they deliver to you? - Where has urgency quietly replaced attention in how you lead?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
End each week by sending one specific, concrete thank-you naming what a person gave, not a generic compliment.