Climbing Mountains is Never Easy and Neither is Leadership - Page 2
On my recent climb, I realized that the metaphors between climbing and leadership were most applicable if one was engaged in leadership while actually climbing the mountain. I met a woman on the descent who had been abandoned by her team, which summitted without her. She seemed resigned to the fact that she wasn’t strong that day, but not summiting with her friends will be with her forever. How sad it was that the team wasn’t able to get everyone to the summit. It makes me wonder what the team dynamics were, who the leader was, what the individual and group motivators were.
I also met a soldier on the mountain that had just returned from Afghanistan. In the brief five minutes we chatted, we didn’t talk about the route, the summit or the weather.
We talked about the team he led in war. Here we were in one of the most beautiful places in North America on a pristine day, and this soldier was talking about people rather than nature. I think I represented someone safe to speak with: I wasn’t a fellow soldier, I wasn’t his family, and I wasn’t the press. He told me how he lost eight soldiers as a platoon leader while manning an indefensible base.
He cupped his hands and explained how they were placed in a bowl of mountains and expected to defend it from an enemy that had the higher ground. It was heart-wrenching. Here was a soldier that just returned from combat, and the first thing he did was climb a mountain. I realized that climbing the mountain for him was a cleansing experience, and a place to renew.
For those of us that climb, the mountain serves as an anvil. The inertia of the mountain allows the energy of climbers to be transferred to their very core. Where do you go to renew, revive, and develop the self-reliance required of today’s leader?
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