Empowerment and Trust: What the Shagris River Taught Me

I slowly waved my hand in front of my face in the darkness, but saw nothing. The Panamanian night enveloped us all in a shroud of tangled mangrove roots. Somewhere ahead, I knew the steep river bank would launch straight up from the oily water, but all I could do was slowly feel my way between the outstretched roots.

Five minutes earlier, I had stepped blindly from the ramp of a lumbering Chinook helicopter, following my three infantry scouts into the black night. Thirty feet above the dark water of the Shagris River, I was the last member out of the bird.

My entry into the water had been less than graceful and the chemlight attached to my chest was ripped from its lanyard. I had barely surfaced when I glanced around, trying in vain to locate the other scouts. I saw nothing and heard no one.

We’d each in turn stepped into the night sky with a two second lag between us. How on Earth had we been separated? Rather than ponder this further, though, I struck out to my right, knowing that the shoreline should lie roughly a hundred yards in that direction.

It was when my hands first struck the mangrove roots that I began to get pissed. If you’ve ever seen these fantastic trees, you’ll understand how difficult a task it would be to swim/crawl through their roots. Now imagine having a rucksack on your back, with gear and camouflage netting grabbing onto anything and everything imaginable as you moved. It took nearly ten minutes to navigate through the roots until my hand impacted the warm, squishy mud of the bank.

Now I was stuck. Feeling upward, I realized the bank was far taller than me, probably extending five feet over my head when fully standing. And it was a complete drop-off from the tangled jungle above. On top of that, the waterproof liner of my rucksack had ruptured on impact with the water. So now, my gear had doubled its weight with muddy jungle water. There was no way I could get out, and I hesitated to retrace my way through the mangroves. So, I sat there in the waist-deep water, my mind nicely reminding me of the population of cayman alligators that called this river their home.

Nearly three hours later, as the sun lightened the Central American sky and the dripping leaves of the encompassing jungle became visible, my team “rescued me.” As a group, they had remained together throughout the night. That I had been separated, we later discovered, was due to the speed of the current at precisely the spot I had jumped from the helicopter. The rest of the team had ended up in the merging (and much faster) waters of a tributary to the big river. Conversely, I had landed in an eddy, actually pushing me up-river several hundred yards. So, by the time we all got to shore, I was literally a quarter-mile of darkness away from them.

So, why do I tell you this story? Because it was one of the earliest examples of my realization of trust and empowerment I encountered as a young leader. At 22, I was by far the oldest of the bunch. I had three teenaged scouts under my command, and I was forced by the situation to completely rely on their abilities, judgement, and training without direction from me.

When I was finally hoisted out of the muddy water and had an opportunity to regroup and get debriefed by my soldiers, I was immensely proud. Not only had they remained together and not panicked at the loss of their leader. They had reached the objective, conducted the desired reconnaissance just as rehearsed before returning to find me. That I was not their first objective when they reached shore indicated their own trust in me to survive on my own until such time as we could regroup.

As leaders, we need to trust that the team we have built, and the training we have provided will suffice when it is needed. After all, leaders are meant to provide guidance to the point of competence, and then step out of the way. Empower your troops, and they will inevitably surprise you, just as my guys did on the Shagris River nearly two decades ago.

Courageous Leadership: A Manito-Wish Example

In a slightly pensive mood this evening as I write this blog.  For the past week, my fifteen year-old daughter has been embarked on a 14-day backpacking trip on Isle Royale, a little-known National Park situated smack in the middle of Lake Superior.  As a teen, I completed a nearly identical trip, with wonderful memories of the isolated northern wilderness, the spectacular lake vistas, dozens of moose sightings and the nightly calls of the grey wolves on the island.  It was a defining moment in my teen years.  So, it was with such excitement that I dropped my daughter off for her own adventure.

Late last evening, I received a call from the camp.  My daughter had injured her knee, and despite wanting to press on, had been ferried back to mainland on the sixth day.  As it turns out, with a 40 lbs backpack on her barely 5-foot frame, she managed to limp through three days and twelve miles of wilderness before her trip leader made the call.

So, what’s this got to do with organizations and leadership?  Well, it’s a story of real courage, but not just of a fifteen year-old determined to press on despite her pain.  It’s also the courage of a college-aged wilderness leader, forced to adapt, motivate, and nurture a relatively novice adventurer.  And it’s the courage of that leader to eventually reach the decision to end my daughter’s trip, not because she couldn’t have struggled through the remaining eight days.  She likely could have.  But rather, the leader made the call because adapting the trip for my daughter would have too heavily impacted the experiences of the other five girls on the trip.  It was the courage to face the potential criticism of parents, who had footed the costly expense of the trip.  Yet, she made the decision anyway.  And in my opinion, it was the right decision.

Was it the right decision because all the facts supported it?  Who knows?  I would argue, though, it was the right decision because on her own on an isolated island, this 21 year-old leader didn’t falter from taking a decisive course of action.  She balanced the needs of the individual with the needs of the group, assessed the situation, and despite the disappointment apparent in the eyes of my daughter, she picked up the satellite phone and called it in.

Leaders twice her age and with considerably more leadership experience frequently fail to properly balance these two (often competing) perspectives.  Instead, they may opt for a compromise that fails to substantially benefit either.  Or they defer to another authority rather than make the decision themselves, out of fear of accountability.

Camp Manito-Wish YMCA is known for its development of first-class young leaders.  Alumni staff members have gone on to positions of prominence in organizations in every sector of American society.  And for those who have experienced this northwoods leadership training grounds, either as campers or staff members themselves, it’s not a surprise that some of the greatest leaders have shared meals in Nash Lodge and watched the summer sunset over Boulder Lake.  For this organization takes its young and passionate leaders, empowers them with both great responsibility and impressive decision-making authority, and them entrusts them to make the right decisions.  And time after time, the leaders do exactly that.

I’m disappointed for my daughter that her summer adventure didn’t work out as planned.  It will take some time for her to understand the positive lessons to be learned from such experiences.  But she gained a role model in this fantastic young leader, and that is something from which my daughter will herself leverage in future experiences.  So, while a disappointment, this summer’s Manito-Wish adventure was far from a failure.

Seeking Standardization? Focus on Accountability, Not Process

For months now, colleagues have been encouraging me to pick up the latest gem by Seth Godin, Linchpin.  Having grown tired of their nagging, I ordered a copy to my new Kindle (a brilliant device, I might add).  Wow…I now realize what I was missing!  Although I’m not quite finished, Godin hit a grand slam with the nuggets he provides in his down-to-earth, refusal to stoop to political correctness fashion.

Early in the book, Seth posits the value of allowing people to use their judgment in accomplishing whatever task is before them.  This got me thinking about the oft turned to rush toward standardization as a reaction to challenges in organizations.

“We’ve just got too many people trying to run their own shows out there!  We need to standardize and centralize control over all these mavericks!”

How many have heard this panic-stricken managerial solution to falling stock prices or quarterly P&G figures?  Months and hundreds of hours of productivity later, standardized processes are rolled out to the workforce.  Flowcharts, decision trees, communications plans, and detailed “best practices” direct the imposed direction on everyone imaginable.  A year later, the continuation of the downward financial spiral prompts yet another iteration of standardization, and so on and so forth. Year after year with manager after replaced manager leading the charge.

Godin shudders at such approaches, to management in general, but even more so just with regard to the attempted installation of a mindless, judgment-restricted horde of worker bees.

The problem isn’t with standardization.  In fact, standards, guidelines, and consistent expectations are exactly what we should be seeking from organizational leaders.  We’re halfway there!

The failure of standardization, instead, results from a focus on processes and decision-making, instead of the real implement of innovation and growth – Accountability.

Just think about it…

Leaders resort to “standardization” when organizational results fail to meet acceptable levels.  They turn, quite naturally, toward ways in which they can exert more control over results.  Put another way, they feel responsible for the lack of results, and out of a sense of personal accountability desire to better influence the next quarter’s figures.

The desire to control, however, moves along two possible paths:

• Discretionary Control – Sure, we can dictate to our people exactly how they will get their work done.  For decades, transactional leaders have done just that.  Workers were expected to follow the rules and produce exactly as told.  And it made sense in a factory setting, where the main product was widgets and screws!  In most of our knowledge society (and increasingly, in an era where a majority of production-line “widgetting” has been shipped overseas), competitive advantage is lost when individuals are prevented from invoking personal initiative and problem-solving.

• Accountability – The alternative is to focus on standardizing accountability.  What this entails is focusing leadership attention on results, not process.  If employees are held accountable for both the quality and quantity of results, there are still allowed (in fact, encouraged) to look for better solutions, faster processes, and more collaborative partnerships.

Clearly, standardizing processes of accountability is tough.  It requires that leadership be willing and able to undertake difficult conversations at times.  When accountability is the goal, uncomfortable realizations of one’s workforce are more likely, but so are the potential benefits to the organization in terms of productivity, engagement, and empowerment.

Leaders who focus on standardizing processes succeed most typically in only shackling the potential of their workers.  In fact, one could argue they have actually abdicated their roles as leaders, opting instead for the adoption of the lesser title of manager.  For, in fact, that is what they have done.  No longer do they lead people.  They merely manage processes, and that is never the route to long-term sustained and dynamic growth in any organization.