I took the call because I had always enjoyed working with her at the hospital. She shared with me about an opening where she was working now which she believed was a good fit for me. The details about the job were important, but I especially wanted to learn about the organization, so I asked her how she was doing in her new job. She became excited, even animated, over the phone telling me about her new job and how well it was going. It was easy to see that she had found happiness; she was experiencing more joy than she had in her previous job. She said, “I feel like I’ve been transplanted into a bigger pot. I had grown about as much as I could at the hospital and needed a new space with room to grow.” Being transplanted kept her from burning out, or becoming stagnant.

Are you familiar with the Latin phrase, “Qui Transtulit Sustinet”? Probably not, unless you regularly read Latin. I don’t, nor can I even pronounce the phrase. What it means though is valuable for this topic. It means:

 He who transplants, sustains.

It is the motto of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, it appears on the University Seal, and it’s also on the seal for the State of Connecticut. People in Connecticut understand the importance of sustaining.

Transplanting is a way to preserve life or increase growth.

If you leave a plant in the same pot too long, it’ll die because it’ll outgrow the pot and won’t receive enough nutrients to keep it alive.

Today we can transplant an organ from one person to another. Why, because without the new organ, the person will die.

An organization might close their operation in the current location and re-open it at a new one. It’s a form of transplanting the organization. Why? It could be any number of reasons. They may have done it because they were “land locked”, with no room expand their facilities. Or it could be the community surrounding their old location didn’t have enough consumers to support them or there weren’t enough workers.

What does all of this mean for you and for me?

It means professionally you can’t stand still, doing the same thing over and over and over. You need to grow, and growth comes when experiencing new things. We need to get out of our comfort zone to tackle something completely new.

A friend of mine managed a team of leaders in an organization that had both a predictable rhythm to it and very little turnover. His team of leaders had been with him a long time, were content in their roles and happy. They knew their job well and for them, all was right in the world. But my friend knew it wasn’t good for them; knew they were getting stale and wrestled with what to do. On a Monday morning, he called them all into a meeting and announced a “re-shuffling” of everyone’s responsibility. Each Director was given a new role. Immediately they had to learn something new and hand off their old role to someone else. In the next year, he saw amazing growth in his team. They each saw things differently than their predecessor, pushing them to ask more questions, to wonder about different ways to do what hadn’t changed in a long time.

Most of us don’t prefer the feeling of “overwhelmed”, or like we’re “underwater”, but we need it from time to time. Yes, it can be frightening, but when we get through it, we realize we can do more than we thought we could.

Don’t wait for your leader to have the courage to re-shuffle the deck, continually push yourself to learning and growing, even if it means occasionally transplanting to a new role, department or organization.

Wise men and women are always learning, always listening for fresh insights. Proverbs 18:15 (MSG)