Let's learn from each other

03 August 2020,  Marié Combrink 638

I realized I can learn from a mountain climber regarding operating efficiently and communicating effectively in these times – Let’s all learn from each other.

Keeping your team aligned can be a struggle. It doesn’t matter if you have an office or if you’re a fully distributed, remote team, it’s hard to keep people on the same page as you grow your business especially during times where team building exercises are limited or  nearly a no go.

This is new to me but we have to learn how to operate efficiently and communicate effectively from a "distance". And also, how to lead teams with diverse skill sets and experience levels through challenging, changing environments.

So, want to keep your team aligned and accountable as you grow?

I read this article and will try so summarize as the writer gives 5 simple steps to follow from—lessons learned from a decade of leading mountain climbing teams in the world’s most challenging environments and translated for high functioning business teams.

1. Define The Objective

The first thing you need to do to align your team and keep them on the same page is to set your objective. 

For a mountaineer, this is as simple as looking at a mountain and wanting to get to the top. In business, these are your project goals, quarterly objectives, and annual targets. 

But the key is to know, before you set out, what you’re working towards and how you know when you get there. To do this, set clear and quantifiable key performance indicators (KPI's) for you and your team. 

This can look like a monthly recurring revenue goal or how many new clients your firm engaged.  You need to clearly define what success looks like for YOUR TEAM. That way, even the newest member of your team can jump right in and know that they are contributing in a meaningful way.

However, success often isn’t defined in a single goal. For example, a mountaineer wants to summit the mountain. But the secondary, and actually more important objective, is to return from the mountain safely. 

What does this mean in your business environment? When building your team, you need to set individual KPIs in addition to team KPIs. That way, everyone owns a responsibility in growing towards your common goal set.

Define both what each individual’s mountain is and what mountain the entire team is climbing, orienting everyone toward success.

2. Establish Roles

This might seem like common sense – but so many times we just assume some one will take responsibility and don’t take the time to proactively define who owns what. 

The result is everyone doing a little bit of everything, and team members not knowing what is expected of them. This leads to guesswork, confusion, and discontent throughout the team. But by establishing clear roles, you get everyone up to speed, on the same page, and working together.

On an expedition up Denali – the highest mountain in North America the writer of the article's rope team consisted of 2 guys he had been climbing with for almost 10 years and another, newer friend.

After years of adventuring with someone, your nonverbal communication is normally perfectly aligned. When you step on the mountain, you know what needs to happen, you know your role, and know exactly how to step into it.

But the new friend to join the team had only ever been on one other mountain with them before. And he didn’t have a set role or understand the existing unspoken ways they communicated and moved through the mountains. 

When they started up Denali, they didn’t think twice, they just went for it.  And that friend didn’t know what was expected of him, when he could challenge a decision, or really how to contribute best to the overall goal. And this was our failure as leaders

This uncertainty led to big arguments in questionable places. But these conversations were necessary to define roles and helped them get up and out. 

As far as doing this with your team, the most effective thing you can do right from the start is write down everything that you do. And each individual on the team should do the same.

This collection of responsibilities, the things that fall to you to do every day or every week, becomes so instrumental to a leader or any other team member understanding who’s responsible for what.

3. Set Your Decision-Making Framework

This could be that you vote and majority rules, that appointed leaders make the final decision or a combination of different decision-making frame.

One time climbing Mount Rainier,  the writer was leading two separate rope teams up what’s known as the Ingraham Glacier direct route—a difficult objective in the best of conditions.

That morning, the ice was thin and sugary snow underneath meant avalanche dangers were high. As they approached the crux of the climb, with massive exposure over huge ice seracs, the leader had to make the decision to turn the whole crew around.

It was 5 AM and they had been climbing for hours, and he knew that when the sun rose and warmed up the ice, this route would be impossible to descend. That decision was left to the one person as the most experienced in our group. This decision had to be taken quickly and because of setting leader responsibilities he could do it and the rest took his lead as they trusted his judgement.

4. Create Checkpoints

In a mountain environment, they call these camps.

When you are climbing to the top of say Denali, you can’t just climb from the base to the summit of Denali in a day, and feel okay. You have to acclimatize at camps along the way. 

But on these higher mountains, you are not just going from one camp to the next. Often you are bringing half your gear to the next camp, cache it, and go back to where you were to sleep low.

Then, the next day or a few days later, you carry the rest of your gear to the next camp and start again. Those efforts allow you to properly acclimatize so you can actually get to your goal.

The same is true in business. You have to establish checkpoints so that you know where you need to stop and evaluate previous decisions and next steps. I like to think of it like acclimatizing your business so you can actually get up the mountain and hit your goals.

Do this as soon as someone new start in your team.

By clearly outlining these checkpoints, like the camps up the mountain, we can provide ourselves the opportunity to reevaluate where we need to be, take steps back, or reassess the established route, if necessary.

5. Document Everything

This goes right in line with proactively building out that Responsibility Matrix, which documents all the things you do and delegate. 

For the writer documenting has innately been a part of everything he has ever done – including these expeditions and this enabled him to tell factual stories after each expedition BUT also to remind or to go back with each new expedition and use the previous lessons learned.

Documenting though is more than just having something to reference, but taking a snapshot of a moment in time and how something was done that you can share and learn from.

And that meant documenting the tough times, too. 

He mentions that his greatest fear when climbing Denali was that they would get caught in a whiteout on the biggest mountain he has ever stepped foot on. Halfway through the expedition, that is what happened. He however remembered in the middle of it even being scared as he was to breathe deeply, he took out his camera, and documented it all.

It is the same when you are a manager, needing to have the hard conversations. You want to have them face-to-face rather than by email or text. But you need to spend the time after the fact to document what happened and learn from the experience even if it is very hard to do.

I think that by proactively documenting most things we have a way to have a complete picture of how you got where you are and how you did what you did.

By being proactive with taking these few simple steps, it’s so much easier to keep your team aligned and accountable, no matter where your team is working from. 

We do not always learn from experiences from businesses in our same field. This article gave me a lot of good and very practical information from some one in a totally opposite position life and work environment wise.... We can never limit ourselves as to where and from whom we can learn something to improve ourselves and our businesses.

 

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