By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to learn how to leverage your resources. Reading time: 3:21.

Study bees and you can glean some intriguing leadership lessons from the way they work together.

You can also learn leadership tips from a variety of insects — from grasshoppers, ants, and fruit flies to caterpillars and termites. Consider these nine ways to “bug” your business for greater success.

Teamwork

Bees have distinct roles. There are the worker bees and the explorer bees.Worker bees are Harvesters and explorer bees are Harbingers, defined as one that pioneers or initiates a major change.” And the explorers (Harbingers) are designed to fly and find new sources that the workers bees can harvest. Leadership Lesson: Don’t try to be something you are not meant to be.

Shake ‘n Bake

In the winter, bees vibrate together to stay warm in the hive while bees on the outer edges of the hive touch their wings together to form an insulating blanket. Leadership Lesson: Working together is more productive.

Adapting to a New Boss

A new queen bee is carefully introduced into the hive.She is placed in her own protective mini cage and then put into the hive. The queen’s mini cage has a hole at one end with a piece of soft sugar candy stuck in it.The bees in the hive will chew the candy in about three days. By then, the bees will get used to the new queen’s special smell over that period and more readily come to accept her. Leadership Lesson: Tread carefully as the new boss.

Specializing

Like humans, insects behave in different ways on the job. There are farmer insects who raise crops. There are architect insects that build living quarters so intricately engineered they achieve year around weather control. There are insect paper makers, carpenters and EVEN undertakers. Leadership Lesson: Leverage diversity.

Extraordinary Performance

A bee can haul a load 300 times its own weight—the equivalent of a human pulling three 100-ton trailer trucks at the same time.An ant can pick up a stone 50 times its own weight. A fruit fly can fly continuously for 6.5 hours. A desert locust can fly continuously for nine hours. And a flea can jump 200 times the length of its own body, the equivalent of a man bounding the length of five city blocks.Leadership Lesson: Strength rises to meet the challenge.

Hidden Muscle

A grasshopper has about 300 more muscles than a man – a total of 900. A caterpillar has more than six times as many muscles as man—a total of 4000! Leadership Lesson: Don’t understate your resources.

High Octane Fuel

From mealworm pizza to cricket bread, nutty-tasting insects provide solid nutrition- no cholesterol and seven times a much protein as beef or chicken.In fact researchers claim that nutrition and tasty insects comprised the “manna” from heaven mentioned in the bible. Leadership Lesson: Probe your resources to gain even more value.

Coping

Getting along with the co-worker from hell. The toad lives with fierce stinging ants. But the larger toad doesn’t eat the ants. Instead the ants and toad virtually ignore each other. The ants simply crawl over it, never stinging or preying upon it. Leadership Lesson: Leverage your emotional intelligence for greater conflict management success.

Resourceful

A blind termite less than one-inch long teams with other blind insects an inch long to build mounds 30 feet high. Leadership Lesson: Don’t underestimate your skill especially in teaming up with others.

Use these nine ways to bug your business. And take the sting out of your competition.

Today’s ImproveMINT

Leverage your resources to keep your
leadership thinking in mint condition.

SUBSCRIBE: Have a Leadership Mint delivered to your E-mail every business day.
It’s free. Just click the SIGN ME UP box in the upper left column.