Archive for category It Takes a Team to Tango Blog

My family doesn’t do Christmas (or Hanukkah, or anything remotely similar).  We dropped it about 20 years ago, when some of us began complaining about crowded shopping malls and long to-do lists and holiday stress.  None of us have children, so really, we can do whatever we want.

Once we made the decision, a great tradition was born.  Every year at Christmas we would go somewhere and eat Chinese food and watch a movie, or sometimes go skiing.  One year we spent the holidays in Austin, Texas, where I was living at the time, and went out to see the premier of Pulp Fiction.  Another year we went to Portland, Maine where my brother was living and ate sushi and stayed out late.

In more recent years the tradition has faltered because I was teaching skiing in Colorado and always had to work over the holidays.  But now I’m back home with the family, so this year we’ll do the dinner-and-a-movie thing again.  I’ve been watching my friends frantically buying and wrapping presents and decorating their homes and baking cookies, and while some of them are certainly having fun some of the time, most of them seem to be having no fun most of the time.  They look just as harried and over-worked as they were in their offices before they went out for their holiday vacations.  They looked forward to a break and then they saddled themselves with even more responsibilities than they had before the vacation.

Meanwhile, I’ve been having a relaxing week, catching up on work projects in the mornings and hiking with my dog in the afternoons.  I plan to do the same all through next week.  When everyone returns to their offices on January 3rd and pulls their hair out over how much catching up they have to do (and how tired they are from the vacation to-do lists), I’ll be feeling ahead of the game and well-rested.

I’m not saying it could work for everyone.  If you have kids, you probably gotta do the holidays.  If you’re a devout Christian or Jew you may feel strongly about maintaining some holiday rituals.   But sometimes we think we have to celebrate things in traditional ways just because it’s the done thing.  What the holidays really mean to me is spending time with my family.  That doesn’t have to include the trappings of Christmas commercialism, does it?

Many people have already reviewed this great book, but for reasons different than my own.  The focus is usually on Don Mann’s experience in Seal Team Six, and in special ops in the Middle East since his retirement; and rightfully so.  This is not only where mainstream interest lies, but where Don’s greatest contribution to American society lies as well.

My reaction to the book was very personal, however.  I’ve known Don for about ten years.  I’ve always referred to him as my “adventure racing mentor,” because when I first got into the sport I attended his six-day adventure racing academy in Virginia.  I came home from that week completely jazzed about the sport, and I don’t believe it was solely because of the attractions of the sport itself (although I must confess that the idea of traveling through the wilderness, for days on end, in co-ed teams that must survive through team work, strategy and sheer toughness was always very appealing to me).   But it was also because of Don’s presentation.  He conveys passion in a quiet, mild-mannered way; he has seemingly endless reserves of physical endurance but also of sensitivity; he is the paragon of toughness, but also of patience and kindness.  I remember during the registration for my first race, the difficult two-day Endorphin Fix, a swarm of racers thronged the site and Don must have had a million things to take care of.  I told him I was having trouble packing my backpack and he made me feel as if he had absolutely nothing else to do at that moment but give me a lesson in gear organization.  That’s how he is.

I laughed and cried throughout the book.   My own childhood was also fraught with what Don calls, in the early pages of the book, “a craving for danger, action and adventure.”  And like Don, I found it in all the wrong places initially; things that could have gotten me killed or arrested.  Don says, “I was a bat-out-of-hell, shit-kicker motorcycle punk” and describes scenes of New England biker bars, hair-raising cop chases, drugs and violence.

But eventually he learns to channel all the fire into something truly useful.  And there’s a lesson for all of us in his life story.  “Most people have no idea of what their full potential is,” he says memorably.   “One of my mottoes is Blood from Any Orifice.  Because I figure that if you don’t push beyond what you think your limits are, you’ll never know your true abilities.”

Could anything ring any truer?  And I realize that even as a corporate dropout, world traveler, expedition-length adventure racer and volunteer mountain rescuer, I never managed to push my limits the way Don did.  Few of us have, in fact.

There were stories throughout the book that I’d heard Don tell before, or heard through the adventure-racing grapevine, but never been able to place in such a meaningful context before.  Stories about having toenails removed, or passing out from over-exertion after a workout; but also really painful events like when Dawn Mann’s son was shot while Don and Dawn were in the middle of running a Beast of the East race.  There was Mark Burnett’s ruinous railroad operation on Don’s first major race plans, for a Beast in Alaska.  And Don selling his Harley and mortgaging his house to finance Odyssey Adventure Racing.  I realize now that most of these things happened while Don continued to serve his country in overseas operations that he couldn’t talk about.  We were already impressed with Don’s amazing “fire in the belly” and we didn’t even know the half of it!

But my favorite story is one that I’m quite sure I never heard before reading the book.  While competing in his first Raid Gauloise, Don says he hallucinated a beautiful Chinese girl in the river on the paddling section of the race.  Funny.  Because during Primal Quest Utah, the toughest race I ever did and one that Don put on, I hallucinated an Asian woman kneeling on the front of my kayak during the paddling section, and kept telling my teammates we had to pull over because of it.

My friends in adventure who know Don Mann, if you haven’t already read this book, now you see that you must.  But for anyone else this book is a must-read too.  Read it for insight into the elite team of Seals that took out Bin Laden; read it for the great lessons it can teach our youth who don’t know what to do with their potentially destructive energy; or read it for the inspiring co-existence of a action-hero tough guy and a truly great humanitarian who is not afraid to express compassion and love.  Just as long as you read it.

Yesterday I went for my usual afternoon hike with my dog in an unfamiliar area of the Green Mountain National Forest.   I wanted to hike all the way around Somerset Reservoir, which my guidebook said was “not recommended” because a bridge was out at the north end.  But the guidebook was eight years old, so I figured it was worth seeing if the bridge had been rebuilt.  If not, I could always turn back and go the way I came.

What ensued was a long ordeal that could have been pretty painful if it weren’t for the very nice hunter that rescued me.

What’s funny about this is that I spent seven years as a volunteer rescuer for a search & rescue team, including a two-year stint as the public information officer in charge of our efforts to educate the public on wilderness recreation safety.   And yet yesterday I did everything I’ve always warned people not to do.  I didn’t tell anyone where I was going; I left with no pack, thus no map, compass, GPS or survival gear; and I only left myself about five hours before dark, even though I knew the hike could take the full five hours (as it turns out it would have been more like seven if I’d made it all the way around).  The temperature was in the mid-30s and I had no extra clothing or anything to make a fire with, nor did I have a headlamp.  And the area I was in was completely deserted; I didn’t see a soul all day except for the hunter who finally rescued me.

I ran into the hunter just about the time I realized I had gone wrong somehow.  I thought I’d crossed the bridge that was out, but I was mistaken.  I was now on the West Loop trail heading north, but I thought I was on the West Side trail heading south.  I was going further away from my car, which was parked at the Somerset dam, and it was 3:30, a mere hour from dusk.  The hunter, Greg, stopped to chat with me as he headed in the opposite direction to meet his uncle for a pre-dusk hour of deer hunting.  When I told him where I was trying to go, he scratched his head and looked a little worried.

“You’re an awfully long way from the dam,” he said.  “And you’re going the wrong way.”

“So how do I go back to the dam on the West Side trail?” I asked.

“You can’t really do that without swimming, you have to cross some water,” Greg replied.  “You’ve gotta turn back and go the way you came.”

I looked at my watch.  That would mean at least two hours of travel after dark.  Not a great idea, especially given all the river crossings and rocky terrain.  If I’d had a headlamp it would have been viable, but without one it was pretty hazardous.  As I stewed about my options Greg suggested that I hike out to his truck and wait there for him.  He’d get me to somewhere there was cell phone reception.

Defeated, I hiked out to a dirt road where Greg’s truck was parked.  There was a shelter there, with a small area map on the wall, and I studied it in vain.  I had no idea where I was.  I sat down next to the truck to wait.  My dog, Jave, stared at me in confusion, trying to figure out why we would stop in the middle of a hike and sit on the cold ground.

By the time Greg showed up at 5:00, Jave and I were both shivering.  Greg’s cousin Spike arrived a few minutes later and we drove to their hunting camp, a luxurious cabin (by hunting camp standards) with running water and electricity.  There was still no cell phone reception, and the hunters thought my plan to call my brother was silly anyway; he would have a very long drive to get to me, never mind to get me back to my car.  Despite the fact that it would mean an hour drive each way for him, Greg offered to take me back to my car himself.  He even refused the gas money I tried to give him.

The kindness of strangers is a subject I’ve always meditated heavily on when I’ve run across it.  Something about it always brings tears to my eyes.  I’d like to think I deserved this kindness for all the years I volunteered on my rescue team, helping hunters, hikers, skiers and snowmobilers who’d made mistakes.  But I also know that I’m one of the people who has no excuse whatsoever for making those kinds of mistakes in the first place.

And Jave agrees, given that he had to wait three hours to get his damn dinner.

Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, is a popular book about negotiation skills and a favorite of consultants and trainers.  In my mind, the most valuable nugget in the book is “separate the people from the problem.”  When you ask participants in a training or team building session what this means, most of them invariably say it means to focus on the problem and not let people issues or emotional issues get in the way.  But actually, it means just the opposite; the people issues are so important that you’ve got to identify, separate and  deal with them first, or else you won’t get anywhere with the substance of the problem.

I was thinking recently about how to convince stoic employees of this point–employees who believe that emotions have no place in the office.  Here’s a good story: a few years ago, my brother and I were struggling to hold on to a piece of commercial real estate that was no longer cash flowing enough to pay the mortgage.  We’d been forced into a management contract with a company we didn’t want to work with, and we felt they were taking advantage of us and had failed to go the extra mile in getting the property leased up.  It was a situation that had gone on for many years, and we were frustrated and angry, especially with the owner of the management company.

After about a year of negotiating with the bank and looking at various options, it came down to this:

1. We could lose the property to the bank; or

2. We could accept a deal from the management company owner, a man we’d come to think of as an evil manipulator, a deal that would make us more beholden to him and would prolong the management contract–and thus the unwanted relationship– indefinitely.

We chose to lose the property.

Not convinced yet that the people issues must be dealt with first?  Then here’s one more detail: We lost 1.2 million dollars on that deal.  And we still don’t regret our decision.

Jeffrey Saltzman’s blog this week talks about how we tend to base our assessment of organizations not on current performance but on the direction in which they’re moving.  If a company is growing, we like it better than a company that is not, even if the company that’s not growing is bigger, better or more profitable.

He says the same applies to our current political situation.  A politician perceived to be moving things in the right direction will get elected or re-elected even if the status quo is terrible.

The message then, obviously, is that complacency is death.  It doesn’t matter how well you’ve been doing; if you stop setting high standards and moving toward them, public or consumer perception of your effectiveness will decrease.  This is a message I’ve been delivering to teams for years.  So you think you’re a high performing team?  You’ve got it all figured out?  What are you doing to keep it that way?  If the answer is “nothing,” you’re not likely to stay on top of your game for very long.

Does this make it sound like we’re all on a hamster wheel, running to nowhere and never able to stop?  Saltzman says the reason we value improvement so much is that themes like movement, change and renewal get our attention, and his research shows that these tendencies cross cultural borders and seem to be universally human.  That’s an observation that makes it more palatable to me.  It also reinforces another thing I’ve told teams for years: It’s not true that people hate and fear change.  We simply hate and fear change that we perceive to be moving us in the direction of loss rather than gain.  If you can effectively make the case for change moving us in a positive direction, people will buy in.  In fact, they may even be enthusiastic about it.

In a recent training session on federal personnel systems with a government agency, participants kept venting their frustration about a “changing mission.”  I pushed back several times; surely the mission had not really changed, I asked?   Wasn’t it the methodology for pursuing that mission that kept changing, in response to budget and resource issues and political pressures?

They didn’t seem to agree.  But finally someone clarified the dilemma and the group agreed: We’ve lost sight of our mission, he said.  We’re not doing what we exist to do anymore.  We’re just reacting to the push and pull of an unhappy public and politicians under pressure to espouse inflexible party lines.

I had told them earlier about my recent experience with the hoarded white board markers and door stops.  I meant it as comic relief but they didn’t even crack a smile.  It’s simply their reality right now, and there’s nothing funny about it.

There’s nothing funny about our government agencies losing sight of their mission, either.  I’ve seen private sector organizations lose their mission and it’s hard to get it back.  Employees lose their passion for the work.  Managers lose their perspective about how to lead effectively.  Everyone bounces from crisis to crisis and it’s hard to remember why we’re here except that we need a paycheck.  Nothing good can come of this.  We need to quit bashing the government and figure out how to restore it to its mission, and that requires having intelligent dialogue rather than mouthing mindless partisan cliches.

I was facilitating a class for a group in interns in a defense-related federal agency this week, and when I arrived to set up the meeting room I couldn’t find a dry-erase marker anywhere in the room.  Finally my contact arrived from the training department and pulled a package of markers out of her pocket.  “Keep a close eye on these,” she said.  “We can’t buy any more right now, and we don’t know how long it will be.”

I promised to guard the markers with my life, and then asked about a door stop for the meeting room’s heavy hallway door.  She pulled a rubber door stop out of her pocket and admitted that she was forced to hoard those too.

The atmosphere in the public sector is tense right now, and it’s not just about door stops and markers.  It’s about jobs.  When we talk about cutting back government and focusing on job growth in the private sector, I think we often miss the point that cutting back government is about putting more people out of work.  And as a former human resource director from the private sector, I disagree that the private sector stimulates job growth better than the government.  Private sector jobs may pay better overall, but especially with small, start-up companies they are often jobs with rotten or no benefits packages and a very uncertain future.  Government jobs typically are stable, pay competitively, offer solid training and development opportunities, and have great benefits packages.

Newsweek columnist Paul Begala had an article a few weeks ago called I {heart} government: Why now is the time to defend big government , in which he laments the ludicrous nature of Rick Perry cutting funding for volunteer firefighters while wildfires rage throughout the state of Texas.

My best friend came to visit last weekend and she reminded me that we never write our goals anymore.  This is something we used to do at the end of every year; we’d sit down and write three to five goals each for the year, a mixture of personal and professional goals, and usually there would be one or two shared “adventure” goals, like “we’re going to climb such-and-such mountain.”  In fact, I remember one year we wrote our goals on New Year’s Day in the lobby of the Dik Dik hotel in Tanzania, just after coming down from the summit of Kilimanjaro.

We don’t do it anymore.  Pam said something a few years ago about how we never accomplished all our goals and maybe there were too many of them.  Is that why we quit doing it?  I can’t remember.

We had a moment of energy this weekend when Pam said, “If I have a goal this year, it has to have something to do with finding a new passion.  Something new to be truly engaged with.”  And that’s what I’ve been thinking too; it’s what I was talking about when I wrote Single white female seeking a new tribe recently.  Pam reminded me that it doesn’t start with finding the tribe; it starts with finding the thing the tribe is passionate about, and making it your passion.  Then the tribe grows around the engagement in whatever that thing is.

So Pam threw out an idea she was thinking about, to explore the world of yoga at a retreat in western Massachusetts she’d been looking at.  I had been thinking, similarly, about going to a fit woman retreat in Vermont.  I think the thing we’re both looking for is a place to network with other women and get inspired by new ideas.  Our friend Claudia was with us and she was interested too, so we looked at Pam’s yoga retreat and we looked at my fitness retreat and the bottom line is that we couldn’t find a weekend or a week that would work for all of us to go.

That’s the trouble with finding a new thing to be passionate about.  If you’re not really passionate about anything yet, but you’re just looking to try new things, you end up not putting in the necessary effort to make it happen, to make it fit in a busy schedule.

Maybe we’ll try again next year.

I got some shocking news last week: my brother, who has been my partner in New England Crane School for the past year, is taking off for greener pastures and leaving the business behind.

My first thought was—good lord, we’ve worked our tails off for a year and now it all goes down the drain.  All the potential clients we have lined up for this winter, who wanted to wait until the slower construction season to start working on their crane operator’s licenses, will be disappointed and have to find other providers.  Of which there are very few in New England.

My second thought was, why can’t I continue the business on my own?  Just because I’m not a subject matter expert in crane operations doesn’t mean I can’t still run the business.  I think I’ve learned enough about it over the past year.  I just have to find and hire and good trainer, someone who really knows his stuff.

And with that thought I’m off and running.  We have a potential candidate already and he’s coming to interview in a couple weeks.  The phone is still ringing and we’re starting to put our winter class schedule together.  To my colleagues who look at me funny when I say I run a crane school I respond: What better business could I be in right now?  The construction industry needs better safety standards for crane operations.  Crane operators need understanding providers who will help them get through the written testing rather than seeing it as a nasty little ‘gotcha’ process designed to knock the most experienced operators out of the game.  I’m proud of the work we do and proud to be able to continue it.  New challenges?  Bring ‘em on!

I love it when this happens.  I had another video teleconference session to facilitate this past week, and where is the conference room I’m working from?  In the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  Perfect.

So I left two days early, took my dog with me, and rented a little cabin on a river with a fireplace.  Here’s the view from my screened-in porch over the river:

Here’s my dog, Jave, enjoying the view from the top of Mount Flume:

Here’s Jave not enjoying the steep, rocky hike up.  I had to lift him up on some of the ledges.

After two days of hiking my training session began, and I felt refreshed and full of energy for the session.  While I was hiking I had lots of time to think about the material I was facilitating and make decisions about my approach.  It has never made much sense to me when people complain about work crossing over into their personal lives and vice versa, and about how they need to compartmentalize.  I respect whatever people need to do to make their lives work, but for me, I need things to intersect.  I need to sit on a mountain top and get creative ideas about work.  (And yes, sure, sometimes I’m in the middle of work and I get distracted by wishing I was back on that mountain top.)  My life is made of whole cloth, so it doesn’t work to split it up into a neatly labeled filing cabinet.

And while we’re on the subject, yes, I’m one of those annoying people who takes cell phone calls from the trail.  The alternative is that I don’t get to go on the hike on a weekday, so why not?  Here’s what I want to say to the folks who complain about technology and harken back to the “good old days” when you were cut off from work-related communications during vacations.  Technology is a great thing in that it gives us more freedom.  You can turn that phone off or leave it your car if you want, but I choose not to, and that’s the point—I have a choice.  In the days before we were so connected, we didn’t have those kinds of choices.