What Sustains a Leader When All is Going Wrong?

With the death of Dr. Amy Stine on October 11, 2008, came the realization that one of us died climbing at Seneca Rocks. This realization is so different from book knowledge, or hearing about another deadly season at Mt. Everest on the news. It is knowledge gained through a lived experience. It's the difference between knowing on the surface, and knowing deep down. It is about how I now feel about leading after I have experienced its consequences through the death of someone I knew.

Last Saturday, a mere week after Amy's death, I returned to Seneca Rocks. I had signed up earlier in the term to lead a team of Pitt undergraduate students from the Pitt Outdoors Club. It was a very difficult experience, because everyone knew about Amy and was anxious, and because a lot went wrong on our climb. Joey, Thalia, Toni, and I, took ten hours and fifteen minutes “door-to-door” to climb “Young Ladies”. And although I learned a lot from this climb, I paid a high price for this new knowledge. I am grateful that we made it down the mountain safely and that all of us were in good spirits at the end of the day. The bonfire at the end-of-season celebration was spectacular under the Milky Way, and the company was vibrant.

Leadership becomes different once death is involved. My teachers Donna, Indy, and Bob, have had experiences of falling, injury, and death, on multi-pitch, trad climbs. They grappled with these difficult issues before me, and they shared their thoughts and feelings with me while I struggled these past weeks with my own thoughts about my short- and long-term future as a lead climber. In the wake of Amy's death, they helped me to return to trad leading. But on my first day out, so much went wrong. Will this experience dishearten me?

What sustains a leader when all is going wrong?

Leadership comes with responsibility. To paraphrase the U.S. Army: The leader is responsible for everything the team does or fails to do.

Sometimes the mountain allows us to see what we already knew with greater clarity. What sustains me as a leader when all goes wrong, is my passion to discharge my leadership responsibility to the best of my ability, and my compassion for the people on my team.

I once backed off from a leadership position when the responsibility for the people in my care became too much for me to bear. Yet as leaders in our professional environments, we are merely responsible for our subordinate's careers or livelihoods. Even that can be a heavy burden.

Leadership on the rocks feels much harder to me now than leading in my other arenas, science and academia. Leadership on the rocks can be the difference between life and death.

PS.

Last week, after the outing with POC, Dr. Peggy Heely, with whom I co-teach the Senior Leadership Seminar at Pitt, asked me to come up with a make-up assignment for students who missed a portion of seminar when the class interviews visiting leaders. After each of our leadership interviews, students are assigned to write a reflective paper to connect one question & answer from the interview to a leadership theory which we read and discussed in class as well as to a personal experience; and they must write about how their new insights from theory and experience will shape their own future as leaders. The internet is a rich resource – and I found that

Sir Chris Bonington has this to say on “What sustains a leader when all is going wrong?”