How Do I Apply the Law of Environment at Work?

Short answer on how to apply the Law of Environment at work: stop trying to fix the whole plant and change the six feet around you. Who you stand next to, what you walk into first thing, and what gets said out loud in your corner. That is your environment, you have more say over it than you think, and you can move it this week without changing jobs.

I had a plant manager years ago named Steve Peterson. Steve walked the floor every morning from seven until about ten. Three hours. Clipboard, coffee, every machine. Everybody said Steve was the most visible manager they had ever worked for.

Here is what I noticed after about four months of it. Nothing ever changed. Not one decision came off that walk. He asked how things were going, people said fine, he wrote something down, and he moved to the next machine. We were all busy. We were all being seen. Nobody was growing an inch.

That is the Law of Environment with the lights on. It is the sixth of John C. Maxwell's 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, and it says this: growth thrives in conducive surroundings. Not motivated surroundings. Not friendly surroundings. Conducive ones. Steve's floor was busy and pleasant and completely sterile, and I spent four months in it getting no better at anything.

What the Law of Environment Actually Says

Maxwell's line is short. Growth thrives in conducive surroundings. Flip it over for the part that stings. If your surroundings are not conducive, your growth does not thrive, no matter how badly you want it to.

Most of us want to argue with that. I did. But put a tomato plant in a closet and talk to it all you like. Light is not a motivation problem.

The thing people miss is that your environment at work is not the building and it is not the company logo. It is mostly four things:

• The people you spend your hours next to.
• What those people expect from you.
• What happens when somebody tries something and it does not work.
• What you feed your head in the first and last twenty minutes of the day.

Every one of those four is partly inside your reach. That is the whole reason this Law is good news instead of a verdict.

Start With the Six Feet Around You, Not the Building

When people ask me how to apply the Law of Environment at work, they are usually picturing something enormous. Change the culture. Fix the department. Get new leadership. Those things may need doing, and you will not do them by Friday.

So shrink it. You have a six foot radius you genuinely control. Your desk, your bench, your truck, your corner of the shop. Who you eat lunch with. Who you call on the drive home. What you listen to. Who you ask for help.

I learned this the hard way at 23. I had a mortgage, a baby, and a full time job, and I had exactly no spare hours to go find a better environment. So I changed the six feet. I started eating lunch with the two guys in the shop who read things. Twenty minutes, four days a week. That is it. Inside a year those two men had changed what I thought was normal, and normal is most of what an environment is.

Five Ways to Apply the Law of Environment at Work This Week

These are in order of how fast they pay off, not how impressive they sound.

1. Change who you stand next to for one hour a week. Find the person in your building who is better than you at the thing you want to be better at, and get an hour near them. Ride along. Sit in. Carry their tools. Do not make it a program. In my first reliability job I asked a vibration analyst if I could hold his clipboard on route. Six months of that taught me more than two classes did.

2. Change the first twenty minutes of your day. Whatever you walk into first sets the air for the rest of it. For a long stretch my first twenty minutes were email and the overnight complaint list, and I was sour by seven thirty. Now the list waits twenty minutes and something useful goes in first. Same job, different environment.

3. Say one growth thing out loud every week. Environments are built out of what gets said. Tell one person at work what you are working on getting better at. Out loud, plainly. "I am trying to get better at writing a clear work order." It feels strange the first time. What it does is make growth a normal subject in your corner instead of a private hobby, and other people start answering in kind.

4. Make failure survivable in your six feet. Most of us cannot control this department-wide. You can control it for whoever reports to you, and for yourself. When somebody on my crew tried something and it flopped, we said what we learned before we said what it cost. It changed how often people tried.

5. Subtract one thing. This is the one nobody wants. There is probably one standing conversation in your week that leaves you smaller than it found you. The guy who runs down everybody and everything, every day, for twenty minutes. You do not have to be rude and you do not have to end a friendship. You can just stop seeking it out. Subtracting is applying this Law too.

How Do I Score My Work Environment?

Maxwell gives ten conditions of a growth environment in the book. I use a shorter version on the floor because ten questions standing up is nine too many. Answer these five honest, yes or no, about your work environment and not the one you wish you had:

1. Is somebody within reach of me plainly better at my work than I am?
2. Did anything in the last month stretch me past comfortable?
3. If I tried something and it did not work, would that be survivable here?
4. Are the people I spend my hours with moving forward, or holding position?
5. Is learning something new expected in my area, or just tolerated?

Four or five yes answers and your environment is not the problem. Your use of it might be. Two or three and the five moves above are your work. Zero or one, and you are in a different conversation, which is the one about whether the Law of Environment means you should quit your job.

What If I Am the Most Senior Person in My Area?

This is the question I get most often from people my age, and I have lived inside it. For about three years I was the most experienced person on my floor by a wide margin. It felt like a compliment. It was a problem.

If nobody around you is ahead of you, your environment has a ceiling and the ceiling is you. Two fixes, both unglamorous.

First, go sideways and outside. The person ahead of you does not have to be above you on an org chart or even work at your company. One of the best growth years I ever had came from a quarterly breakfast with four maintenance managers from other companies.

Second, narrow it. You are senior in general. You are not senior in everything. I was forty-some years into industry and still could not read a financial statement properly, and there was a controller two buildings over who could. Being the most senior person in the room is almost always a category error.

How Do I Apply the Law of Environment If I Work Alone or Remote?

Alone is its own kind of environment, and it is usually a thin one. There is no accidental learning when nobody walks past your bench. So when you work alone, the environment stops being something you are in and becomes something you build on purpose. That means scheduling what used to happen by accident. One standing call a week with somebody in your trade. One group where people are actually doing the work and not just talking about it. Something in your ears that is teaching you instead of just filling the quiet.

It also means being honest that comfortable is the risk. A home office is the most comfortable environment most people will ever work in, and comfortable and conducive are not the same word. If nothing has made you uneasy in a month, the environment is too soft. That ties straight into getting out of your comfort zone at work, which is the same Law from the other direction.

Be Honest About What This Costs

I am not going to sell you this as free, because it is not.

Changing your environment at work costs you comfort, and it costs it immediately. Standing next to someone better than you is an hour a week of feeling slow. I have walked out of those hours discouraged, and I have had to learn the difference between discouraged and harmed. Discouraged usually means it is working.

And subtracting a person costs the most. That conversation belongs to somebody who probably counts you as a friend, and he will notice. I do not have a clean answer for it. Only the honest version, which is that you can stay kind to a person and stop spending your mornings in his weather.

What it does not cost is a new job. That is the part people get wrong when they first meet this Law. They hear "growth thrives in conducive surroundings" and reach straight for a resume, when the first ninety percent of the work is six feet wide and starts Monday.

Common Questions About the Law of Environment at Work

What is the Law of Environment in simple terms?

Growth thrives in conducive surroundings. In plain words, where you are has as much to do with how much you grow as how hard you try. Light matters as much as want-to. It is the sixth of John C. Maxwell's 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, and the practical version at work is that your people, your expectations, and your first twenty minutes are shaping you whether you picked them or not.

Can I grow in a bad work environment?

Some, yes, and slower than you should. I have done it, and I have the gray hair to show for it. But "some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. You can hold your ground in a bad environment almost indefinitely. Growing in one takes so much extra fuel that most people quietly stop trying and call it being realistic. If your five-question score was two or below, the honest answer is that you are spending real energy just to stay even.

How long does it take to see a change?

Faster than people expect, because you are not waiting on the company. Add one person who is ahead of you and change your first twenty minutes, and you will feel a difference inside three or four weeks. A department takes a year or more and may never happen. Your six feet takes a month. Start where the clock is short.

Do I have to leave my job to apply the Law of Environment?

Usually not, and you should not make that call first. Run the five moves for ninety days before you decide anything about leaving. If you have genuinely done them and the score has not moved at all, that is useful information you did not have before, and now the question about staying is an honest one instead of a frustrated one. Most people who ask me this have not yet tried changing anything they actually control.

Reflection Questions

1. Who, inside reach of me, is plainly ahead of me in the thing I am trying to get better at? When did I last spend an hour near them?
2. What are the first twenty minutes of my workday made of, and did I choose them?
3. Who in my week leaves me smaller than they found me, and what would it actually cost to stop seeking out that conversation?
4. Have I told one person at work what I am working on getting better at? If not, what am I protecting?
5. Am I calling my environment the problem because it is, or because naming it means I do not have to move?

The Bottom Line

Do one thing this week. Find the person within reach who is better than you at the work you want to be better at, and get one hour near them. Do not build a program around it. Ask to ride along. That single hour is the Law of Environment applied, and it is the move that pulls the other four behind it.

I spent four months on Steve Peterson's floor being visited every morning and getting no better at anything, and I blamed Steve for a while. Steve was not the problem. I had six feet I never touched, and it took me years to go sit with the two men who read things.

So here is my question back to you. If somebody watched the six feet around you for one week, what would they say you were being shaped into?

This ties back to The Law of Environment — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.