Leadership

My concise leadership philosophy? Give. Everything.

An illustration by Randy Rackliff of a photograph taken by Jeff Lowe. The overlaid text is from an essay titled “Glitter And Despair” … me telling how it is, or was.

I recently read this — the 59th essay in the second edition of POISON — and decided it could be more clear so I edited and added photographs to illustrate it. I believe the topic is important because genuine leaders are few while influencers are many and these assume the title of leader simply because they have followers. A Pied Piper is a trickster, not a leader.

Anyway, a former student separated from the military and as part of his university program asked to conduct an interview. The stated topic was leadership but we covered a lot of terrain. I extracted the relevant ideas and exchanges from the interview to make this essay..

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What leadership lesson or lessons did you learn in the mountains that you find it most important to impart upon your trainees as you help them “improve [their] spirit” through your training regimen? If you had to define your leadership philosophy in as concise a manner as possible, how would you characterize it?

If we use the definition of leadership I believe most people hold in their heads then I don’t think one chooses to be a leader. In the mountains, of course we define leader as the one on the sharp end of the rope, finding the way, making decisions about his or her own safety in the moment, that of the team, managing overall risk, and also keeping the objective in sight, allowing it to influence those decisions. Democratic teams share that role 50/50, swapping leads equally. Smart teams put whoever is most capable of leading at any given moment in that role. Often though, someone just needs to take over and tell others what to do and when. In any situation — if you open your eyes and ears and get beyond ego — it is often clear who is capable of that. If the objective is important to the team then whoever can best achieve it should lead regardless of title, or rank.

I am reminded of an exchange between Hemlock and Meyer in The Eiger Sanction:

Hemlock: “Karl really likes to lead, doesn’t he?”

Meyer: “Even more, he likes the title of leader. As if that makes him a leader.”

To learn the truth of my own character, I went to the high places, often alone, to put myself into situations where I couldn’t lie about capability, where imagined traits were vaporized by risk: the clearest mirror in the world.

Later (in my climbing career and life) I understood that risk was only necessary as a lens to examine myself if I remained deluded or insensitive, unwilling to assess myself clearly. Along with maturity came the will to ruthlessly interrogate myself and accept the outcome honestly. For me, accurate self-knowledge is the foundation of leadership; if I am constantly questioning my own abilities and understanding in front of those I’m leading then I expect them to question me as well. However, when I am certain of what I can and should do I project it and their questions cease.

What the mountains taught me about leadership is what they taught me about being a man; you don’t get to quit. The mountains can make it harder to quit, or more dangerous. So keep going. And keep going again the next time you want to quit. Be the man you imagined yourself being (or becoming) when you said you wanted this.

My concise leadership philosophy? Give. Everything.

And maybe reinforce that with Ludendorff’s concept of “total war” as interpreted by René Desmaison who applied the spirit of “total alpinism” to the mountains, defining the term as utter commitment of all available resources to the task at hand. Assign enough importance to the outcome and you will give everything. Anything less, is less. And if it is that’s OK — as long as you admit it.

Whereas some training institutions tolerate sloppy and often unsafe form in the name of intensity, during the seminar I attended, you emphasized that a bad repetition doesn’t count at all. I read that you did the same for the cast of “300”. When programming for your athletes do you think it is most important to prioritize safety, speed or, “tackling the problem at hand” and how are you, as a leader and a trainer, responsible for ensuring the hierarchy of various priorities is maintained?

Distilled, my personal training philosophy is simple:

Find the problem. Fix the problem.

Solutions manifest differently for different problems, and also according to the different temperaments of the individuals involved. Being limited by a single solution — because it’s all one knows or it has proven profitable in some circumstances — limits the scope of the problems you can address and what you can learn. Ultimately, a fixed style or solution is a dead end. Sure, I can SELL it now but it’s not philosophically sustainable so it will not last. The human adherents evolve out of it.

There is an inherent problem with trying to extrapolate the micro — today’s workout, and acceptable standards within it — to the macro, which is one’s overall philosophy of training and living from which a particular objective manifests. The micro is not necessarily an expression of the macro or an effective step taken towards it but we can easily pretend it is. And when we arbitrarily assign great importance to the result of today’s effort, the micro, most folks will accept poor form, adjusted standards, etc., in order to have a ‘winning’ outcome right now. This may be detrimental to the long term goal.

Some cite the risk of injury as the reason that sloppy form should be avoided. I can agree, and should, if only for the sake of immediate safety during a training session. However, I believe learned behavior is the more important issue; we develop habits quickly, bad and good. If I am looking to improve performance in high-risk sports (climbing, fighting, etc.) or in a military context then I want to program good, safe behavior consistently enough that it becomes unconscious. When fatigue or stress is great enough to prevent consciously directed movement patterns then whatever is habit — automatic — damn well better be safe, and efficient. To me it always comes down to training FOR something. That thing is greater, and more important than what goes down today, or tomorrow. Keeping the goal in mind and present to influence daily behavior is paramount. Most folks aren’t thinking ahead. They aren’t chess players. They want it now and think what they can get right now matters. I prefer to ask if it will matter in ten years?

The leader must keep the goal in sight, let ego run when appropriate and rein it in when it isn’t. My job is to know the trainees, to understand what drives them, what each needs, how each responds to training, to feel how they are feeling, to know what has happened in the near-recent past in other aspects of their lives and training, to know too about last week and last month, their injuries, etc. But I must also understand their ambitions, and whether those might be more important than the injuries or other aspects of their lives. And then I figure what to do with all that, constantly adapting, on the fly, in the moment.

I don’t treat the actor, athlete or soldier differently. They are all human beings and as such respond similarly to stress and motivation and expectation.

I may have led the way but they did the work.

How did your gym project continue to ride the wave of notoriety that you gained following the “300” movie? What was so intrinsically different about your training philosophy that made it so “sticky?” What do you think resonated about what you were doing?

Deep inside I believe we all know that what is needed cannot be bought or sold, but we swallow the bait when the snake oil salesmen come around because we are human and hopeful.

I don’t have a solution to sell or make unrealistic claims, and I don’t promise miraculous, time-compressed solutions. People know the truth; hard, smart work produces good outcomes but they are led astray by their hope for an easier path, and by the promises of folks who only have the dollar value in mind. In this context I believe people want to be told the truth, even when it hurts. What they do with it is entirely different. Hello horse, here is the water. If you want to drink we can help. If you don’t that’s fine too. Leadership is knowing what you can and can’t do for someone. Leadership is partnership. We meet partway, halfway, somewhere on the way. I need to be capable. You need to be willing.

There is a huge gulf between an unaccomplished but attractive influencer saying, “It’s easy”, and someone who has actually done it saying, “It’s hard but it IS possible.” You know the hard way is real and it arrives at the goal. It rings a bell that resonates in the spirit while the sales pitch is just a tickle, a hit of dopamine, addictive but fleeting.

At some point, after years of beating my head against the brick wall of commerce-driven media, I became optimistic when, in interviews, I said “hard work” and the magazines printed it. I said “no instant miracles” and they wrote it. I said “long term dedication” and it went out on the wires. I made it clear that we aren’t selling an easy solution, and that there isn’t one. I said, “Yes, we sell something, it’s called education. Knowledge. It’s up to you to put it to use. No one is going to do it for you.” And people heard it.

That trend was transitory, or fake. These days we’re conditioned to impatience by hacks and accelerants. The truth of hard work and durable attention has been overrun by the assault of convenience, its message drowned out by whoever is loudest, with the greatest number of followers.

One truth remains though, if you want to lead effectively, if you ever hope to be a leader for longer than the fifteen minutes you’re entitled to then you better not be full of shit. Because real people see right through it.