I met Tom, my ex-colleague, in downtown Boston yesterday and he said, ‘I want to gift you something very symbolic as you move up in your career’. He presented me with the carabiner and said this was the ‘life-saving’ gear of mountaineers and is symbolic for corporate leaders! I could understand pretty little then but upon contemplating, I was zapped with the profound message this simple tool has for organization leaders. For mountaineers, they have been sacred and ‘life-saving’ gears.
Carabiners are used to hold securely the mountaineers while allowing them to navigate through the climbing efficiently while it passes freely the rope through it. A good quality carabiner with appropriate kN rating (a measure of the force that a kilogram of weight would exert during free falling) will ensure that it can withstand not only your weight but a couple of your friends’ as well!
In the context of organizational leadership, it has three profound messages, I reckoned later.
It’s lonely at the top!
As a leader, you allow free exchanges of ideas and feedback within the organization that you lead similar to that of carabiner that allows free movement of the rope in various styles of knotting. As one moves up the corporate leader, he is akin to the mountaineer who is climbing up and is often alone at the top. They say, it’s lonely at the top- so true! This makes organizational leaders all the more vulnerable being immune to the feedback (often in the form of murmurs through ground-up). After all, who will call out, ‘The king has no clothes!’ ; It takes the innocence of a child and the courage of a fearless. Modern organizations curb these virtues and create clones and cronies. As a leader, are you allowing yourself to be surrounded with the ‘child-like’ mind of your employees who can brutally show up you the mirror. Like a carbiner, are you allowing free-exchanges of ideas, feedback and at times the brutal truth and critique?
Withstand the environmental forces!
A carbiner can successfully carry your dynamic load in addition to a couple of your friends’. Likewise, an organizational leader carries with him the well-being of each and all employees. Ironically, we find the managers and leaders passing the buck on to more gullible and unsuspecting employees. The stands taken by the managers and leaders are often compromised under various environmental pulls and pushes to suit their own interests at the cost of those of employees. Employees are downsized even when the CEO compensation sky-rocket! A true leader looks into the mirror when things go wrong and looks out of the window when things are running smooth to accord the dues to his employees. A carabiner keeps the leader grounded to this reality.
Self-renewal is the basic hygiene at the top!
A carabiner takes various knotting styles that suit to the need of the mountaineers yet it preserves its effectiveness and efficiency. A leader truly rediscovers himself in the face of the changes in the organization, industry and the environment. For a leader, the test lies in self-renewal! Are you ‘preserving’ yourself and the organization’s resources or ‘recreating’ them? ‘Creative-destruction’ is what separates a leader from the manager who is engaged in stability and predictiveness. In contrast, a visionary leader recreates the ‘game’ and ushers in new changes.
As I was contemplating these lessons from the carabiner that was gifted to me, I thanked Tom for his insightful and ‘symbolic’ gift. They often say in mountaineering that the ‘peak’ is a great leveler that creates ‘equals’ of all mountaineers…but I learnt profound lessons in leadership from a carabiner today!
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