When the Bear S**t Hits The Fan. Leadership Lessons From Trouble on the Trail

“She has fallen off the trail, she has fallen quite a ways. Her head is bleeding.”?This was not the text message I wanted to see at that moment. Not ever really. I was already one beer into my post hike celebration, having safely brought my team of hikers off the mountain, and to the finish line at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in N. Carolina. We were at the end of a long day of hiking and fund raising to cure Cystic Fibrosis. Hikers were nursing blisters and recanting trail stories of the day as if we had been hiking for weeks. Now one of us, one of our own, was in trouble on the mountain. Here is how it played out and the lessons we can all take into our business life.

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation

Know your limitations.

Coming into the day, a serious injury was not on anyone’s mind. Blisters, scratches, sunburn, and insect bites were the hard-won battle scars of a full day of hiking, but nothing more than that. Except, that in planning for this long hike event, we did expect more than that. In fact, we planned and prepared for as many scenarios as we could, to ensure that all our hikers would have a safe day. ?

My Royal Air Force veteran brother told me they always planned missions with the mantra ‘don't expect rescue.’ I’m not saying that was our design point, but it’s not a bad starting place either.?Our planning started 6 months earlier with a team of coaches hiking the full trail to map it out firsthand. This was then followed up with careful planning for where hikers could be extracted along the way if they couldn’t go on. On top of that, we notified local authorities that we would be out there well in advance of the actual date. The night before we started the hike, I gave a full safety briefing to all the hikers. Not only did this include vital tips on how to poop in the woods, and what to do if you see a bear, but also the critical information on what to do if someone did get injured. Crucially we also had a ‘no one hikes alone’ rule, and coaches, like me, who led and swept from behind to make sure no one got into trouble.

The trail continues to teach me lessons and re-enforce ones I’ve previously learnt. In this case, it was a full-on lesson around preparing correctly for what is to come. Doesn’t matter if it is a client presentation, a team meeting, or longer-term project. The better one prepares, the better the outcome will be. This is important for me as preparation really isn’t my strong suit. From a business chemistry perspective, I am, unsurprisingly, a Pioneer. This means you are much more likely to hear me say “yeah, let’s do it!” and then go do it, rather than “yeah, let’s go do it, but first we should pull the right people together and figure out what we need.” In business, much like the trail, there is little room for error. A strong leadership skill is the ability to recognize your own weaknesses, and then adjust your behavior to account for those.

I am fortunate to have colleagues who I can rely on to help with the prepare piece. It's also important that I recognize that in myself, and remain open to the help and thankful for it too.

Stop the Bleeding First

Prioritize and focus.

The coach who was hiking with our injured hiker must have been terrified in the moment. Watching her friend tumble 30ft down into a ravine took just an instant and must have felt like it latest a lifetime. However, it’s in moments like this that hero’s rise to the occasion, which is exactly what she did. Following her first text message alerting the rest of the coaching team, she followed up with the location of the incident, and within 2 minutes, help was on the way.?While she waited for help to arrive, she climbed down to the injured hiker and assessed the situation.

Almost exactly a year prior, I had been fortunate enough to hike this very section of the Appalachian Trail with a 20-year combat medic who was just out of the Army. He told me all about how you assess someone for injuries when you first find them. I wish I had listened to him more intently. However, our coach on the scene rose to the situation and did a wonderful job of assessing what was going on. She updated the team with a text message indicating a head wound and an arm wound. She then set about bandaging up these key injuries that she could see to stop the bleeding.

Sometimes the sheer volume of things coming at you in a work environment can be overwhelming. Not sure where to start, you might go with the time-honored traditions of procrastinating, making a to do list of things you’ve already done or just picking something easy to do. While quite satisfying, none of these approaches really solve the problem.?Great leaders will be able to delineate what’s critical from what’s important, and what can wait. The word 'triage' comes from the French meaning to ‘sort out’ or to put things into tiers. It’s a useful word. Tres bien France. Triaging a complex workload into clearly tiered workstreams is a strong sign of a good leader who can help create the clarity, that can break the inertia, that ‘too much to do’ can sometimes instill. It’s also useful to be able to explain the why behind your sorting. This can help you or your teams understand more about the process, and the reasoning, and help educate for similar situations in the future.

Me: “Help!” – Trail: “I got you”

Do not be afraid to ask for help.

Our downed hiker was approximately 2.5 miles from where I was at the finish line. Our team medic, and another coach, immediately ran up from the finish line back onto the trail. Thankfully one of our best coaches, the kind of guy I want next to me if something goes wrong, was about 3 miles further back from the incident. He sped towards the location. On his way, he passed a campground where thru hikers were starting to set up their tents for the night. He paused and called out asking for help with the trail proven cry of “injured hiker!” Although they didn’t need to get involved, 5 of those hikers rallied to his cry, and followed the trail downwards towards where our friend lay. While our coach had no way of knowing this, these five good Samaritans were critical in the rescue that was to follow. Not only did we need their manpower/womanpower, but also their skills.

Believe it or not, one was a nurse, one was a member of his hometown mountain rescue squad, and one was a total badass. The badass, an Australian, was not only a combat veteran, but was also the first guy to walk unassisted across Australia, the longways. Just him, three camels, and a swag full of determination. He had been there, seen it, and bought several t-shirts. There is an Appalachian Trail time worn saying that ‘the trail will provide.’ In this case, it surely did.

One thing I’ve learnt from my years of raising donations to help cure Cystic Fibrosis is how to ask for help. Along with this goes, the lesson that you never, ever know who is going to step up to the plate. The simple act of asking yields many surprises with friends, colleagues and strangers stepping in when you were sure they were on the ‘not going to help’ list. As a leader, being open to ask and then listening when people respond, is critical. You might not even know you needed the skill, advice or input someone else is offering, or perhaps didn’t know that extra pair of hands could be so useful.

Lead, Follow, and Sometimes Just Get Out of the Way

Trust in your team.

Everything in me wanted to follow our medic and coach up from the finish line. However, I knew that I could not be additive to the situation at hand. I knew help was on the way to the scene, and at that point I was exhausted from a day that had started at 2.30am that morning. The most I could have done was to hobble on up the trail, and most likely just caused another problem to be dealt with. So as much as I didn’t want to, I stayed at the finish line, and monitored the text message chatter, looking to see if there was anything that I could help with remotely. As the minutes went by, I knew she was in good hands and the flow of information confirmed that.

Being a leader doesn’t mean you always have to be leading from the front. Sometimes that simply won’t be possible. Trusting in your colleagues and teams to get a job done, and done right, is a clear vindication of you as a leader. Building strong capable teams that can deliver on whatever is thrown at them is your job, and trust is definitely a virtuous circle. The more you trust in them, the more they will trust in you.?

Trust me, I’m a professional

Know when you need the experts.

Mountain rescues can be complex. Access points to a downed hiker can be limited, and in some cases, remote.

Thankfully most areas have highly experienced and qualified rescue teams that put themselves on the line to ensure the safety of those that have experienced unfortunate accidents. In this case, it was the phenomenal team at Swain County Search and Rescue team that came to assist. They were able to insert an ATV about three quarters of a mile away from the incident.

Moving the hiker to the ATV was a painstaking 4-hour process that included both low and high angle extractions involving a pully system that had to be moved three times. This is where the AT thru hikers support became essential because the pully system required significant effort to get her up and out.

I'd like to draw the distinction here between management and leadership. I think that one of the key differences is that leaders know instinctively that it’s ok to ask for help. Rather than a sign of weakness, it’s seen as a virtue; an acknowledgement that a leader is someone who inspires and drives everyone, not necessarily someone who knows everything. In contrast, a manager is supposed to be someone who is in that role because they know more than anyone else hence, they might not be as comfortable asking for help.?Working for a consulting company, I see this day in and day out where our clients know that it makes perfect sense to ask for help from us - not because they don’t trust their teams, but rather they know that sometimes you must get the expertise you need externally.

This is especially true when 'close enough' isn’t good enough. ?I’m fairly certain that if you were stuck down a ravine, all things considered, you’d rather a professional rescue squad to show up with all the equipment and expertise needed to get you out.

All’s Well, that Ends Well

Apply what you learnt.

You will be pleased to know that all did end well. Our injured hiker was patched up at the local emergency and after some stiches and a cast on her broken leg, she was released later that night. The next morning, she was there for our celebration breakfast along with our new AT thru hiker friends, our amazing coaches who participated in the rescue, and the rest of our motely crew of hikers. All the preparation and planning we had done was realized into action when it was needed, and I could not be more impressed with the actions of my fellow coaches.

As a team, we really focused on applying what we learnt from the experience - what worked well and what we could improve on or hadn’t even considered. In business, as in life, it’s important to take the experiences of these unexpected events, and use them as powerful learning tools.

‘All’s Well That’s Ends Well’ is a fantastic Shakespearean play. In another of Shakespeare’s rom-coms, ‘A Winters Tale,’ he has the most famous line of direction ever given in a play: “Exit, Pursued by a Bear.”?I really hope that’s not how my time on the trail finishes.

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If you are enjoying this series of articles and feel inspired enough to make a donation to the CFF, you can do so at the following link, and know that your donation will make a significant difference:?DONATE

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If you would like more information on why I hike, please visit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) at?www.cff.org.

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