Chapter 6
COMING UP SHORT
Making the Most of Weakness
In extreme situations—when the stakes are exceptionally high, when the environment is precarious, and when the hurdles are extraordinarily tough—the way you deal with the weak link on your team often means the difference between success and failure.
In business, you will sometimes have to work with people who aren’t nearly as good as you are—those who can’t perform as well or match your skills. Weak colleagues are not hard to identify. I don’t want to be cruel here, but let’s face it: there’s always that one person who seems to show up on every team—you know, the person everyone else secretly wishes would quit, transfer to another division, or get trapped under something heavy. These people, to put it bluntly, are liabilities in terms of the job you are trying to do. They lag behind, drag everybody else down, and hinder progress. If only they could perform at a higher level, or be smarter, or work more efficiently—or, even better, just go away—the entire team would be so much more productive. And happier!
And although it may be painful to even imagine this, there could even be a time when, in fact, you might be the one who can’t cut it—when you are the person everyone else wishes would just go away, even if you are trying your hardest.
Most people confronted with a weakness in a team member or in themselves will insist on trying to overcome it. But that’s a flawed approach, at least when it comes to improving human performance. Why? Because the harsh reality is this: there’s a fairly strong chance that a weakness can never be overcome. I’m not talking about attitude, which is something people generally can change. I’m talking about physical limitations like height or speed, and mental skills like mathematical ability or the way our brains process information. There are aspects about each of us that are almost impossible to improve upon, and that won’t change no matter how many self-help books we read or how many self-help gurus we see.
Yes, it’s true that some of our abilities will improve with work experience, mentoring, and training, but the dirty little secret we are scared to admit—especially to ourselves or to an employer—is that there are a handful of things at which we will always suck.
But there is hope. You can excel despite your limitations, because even if you cannot overcome a weakness like height or size or lousy analytical or sales skills, you can always compensate for it. This is what you should focus on, especially as you face extreme challenges of any sort.
Compensating for a weakness is about leveraging hidden attributes in innovative ways that can move you, other people, and your whole team forward. Look at all of the incredibly successful entrepreneurs, executives, scientists, athletes, and artists who have learning or other types of disabilities. As kids, many of them got the message that they would never amount to anything because of their poor performance in school. John Chambers, diagnosed with dyslexia at age nine, went on to become the CEO of Cisco, a $40 billion networking company. Billionaire businessman Richard Branson also suffered from dyslexia, yet his tenacity, creativity, and ability to connect with others made up for his disability; he went on to found the travel, entertainment, and lifestyle conglomerate Virgin Group. Famed General Electric CEO Jack Welch never let his lifelong stammer get in the way of his career.
Leadership involves compensating for your own weakness and helping other people do the same for themselves. Good leaders know it’s their responsibility to help every team member become productive, so that everyone on the team benefits. I experienced this firsthand during a historic trip across Antarctica a few years ago. I was part of a five-person international team of polar adventurers that set out to ski a six-hundred-mile remote route from the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf in west Antarctica to the South Pole.
Obviously, the South Pole is a lot different from your typical work environment—even with your air-conditioning on full blast. But it’s similar in that the workplace can be incredibly intense. Your job, your client, your promotion, your account, your reputation, your company’s quarterly performance, and your employees’ own well-being are on the line every single day. But you do not have to allow weakness, your own or someone else’s, to add to the stress or threaten success. The events that unfolded for me in Antarctica provided real insight into how great leaders can effectively handle a weak link—and how the weak link can handle herself—in any environment.
The route that my team took in 2007–2008 is referred to as the Messner Route, because legendary Italian explorer Reinhold Messner was the first to complete it nearly twenty years earlier.
By the time we launched our expedition a couple of Norwegian teams had followed in Messner’s tracks (um, no, not his actual ski tracks…), but no one from North America had ever made an attempt. The Messner Route is considered more challenging than the traditional route taken by most South Pole expeditions, because it has a significant amount of crevasse danger. Another thing that makes this kind of ski expedition challenging is that the surface of the ice is laden with sastrugi, which sounds a little like an Italian pastry (which would be awesome; there are no bakeries down there)—but they are actually ridges that have formed on the snow’s surface from snow deposits and wind erosion, sort of like sand dunes but made of ice. Maneuvering over and around the sastrugi on skis can be quite dangerous.
The trip required more than just physical strength and an in-depth knowledge of crevasse-rescue techniques. The harsh Antarctic environment throws some serious psychological challenges at even the most experienced adventurers. First, there is very little visual stimulation. By that I mean there is essentially nothing to focus your eyes on. Out on the ice, the world appears white in every direction, with no surface features (other than the sastrugi) and no delineation between earth and sky. You look around and sometimes you really can’t tell where the ground stops and the sky starts. This may sound like a kind of interesting novelty, and it is at first, but after a while it gets old—in a scarily disorienting way. And when I say this goes on all day, I mean all day, since you never really know when it’s nighttime unless you look at your watch. The days mesh together thanks to twenty-four hours of sunlight, which makes sleeping another challenge. Then add the fact that Antarctica is the coldest, windiest place on earth, and it’s clear you’re definitely in one of the most extreme (and extremely bizarre) environments on the planet.
When I was researching the trip, I came across a paper published in 2007 in which Lawrence Palinkas, an anthropologist from the University of Southern California, defined a condition known as “polar madness.” He described how people who spend extended periods of time in polar regions are at risk of, well, pretty much completely losing their minds because of the lack of visual stimulation combined with sleep deprivation and physical and mental exhaustion. Palinkas’s paper cited examples of polar expeditions that ended in disaster, including a scientific mission in the 1880s that led to suicide and cannibalism. Only six of the twenty-five men in the group survived. (Note to self: seek teammates who are vegetarians.)
As for my polar jaunt, it pretty much looked like this: We were going to the coldest, windiest place on earth to attempt what is considered to be one of the harshest expeditions known to man. We would be covering six hundred miles of challenging terrain on skis while each hauling 150 pounds of our own gear and supplies in sleds that were harnessed to our waists. Our team of five would be pushing our bodies to their limits as our physical and mental conditions deteriorated over the course of the journey… and all the while we’d be hoping that that none of our teammates would develop polar madness and mistake an ice axe for one of those back scratchers that you get from the Sharper Image catalog.
An environment as extreme as Antarctica requires a unique set of skills because everyone’s health and well-being are on the line, yet urgent medical care is not readily accessible. It can take days or even weeks to evacuate someone off the ice. That’s why success isn’t just about getting to the South Pole; it’s about surviving the trip and coming back with all of one’s fingers and toes intact. Not to mention one’s mind.
Unfortunately, unlike each of my past corporate jobs, this gig didn’t include a new-hire orientation to prepare me for my role on this team. I had no employee manual to walk me through the process. I was expected to show up, meet my teammates for the first time, and hit the cold Antarctic ground running (well, skiing). I was on my own to prepare.
I knew one of my greatest challenges would be my size. I was pretty sure I’d be much smaller than everyone else on the team, because I typically am. I am short and have a small frame, and there is no way around that. I’m not so short that I would ever have my own reality show, but short to the point where each of my teammates would probably have fifty to a hundred pounds on me. Size (and the sheer brute strength that goes along with it, which comes in handy when you’re hauling a heavy sled across the ice) was definitely my biggest shortcoming (sorry), so I made sure I trained extra-hard during the three months that led up to the trip.
The best way to train for a polar expedition is to practice what you’ll be doing every day, which is skiing in subzero temperatures while dragging a mammoth sled across the ice. This is tough to set up in San Francisco. The next best thing is to simulate the activity. So I used a long rope to tie a car tire to a harness that I wore around my waist, and then I dragged the tire along the sand of a nearby beach to mimic the motion of dragging a heavy sled.
Several times a week for three months I trudged through the sand on Ocean Beach, dragging that tire behind me. Every step took an incredible amount of effort. I was struggling and grunting the entire time, but eventually I got used to dragging that tire, so I then added another one. Passersby definitely gave me some weird looks, most likely because the garbage that littered the beach would accumulate in the tires as I trudged across the coastline, so I amassed quite a collection of trash and debris. I must have looked like a homeless person who was using the tires to transport my earthly belongings. I say this because people kept coming up to me and offering me money.
Pulling those tires for miles and miles was hard. And it was also ridiculously boring—which was ideal training for the monotony I would face in Antarctica. I did get stronger, eventually working my way up to dragging three tires behind me. By the end of my training period, I had collected enough random remnants from the beach to make a lovely collage out of dead birds, beer bottles, syringes, and condom wrappers. I was ready to mount my own art show. I was also as ready as I could possibly be to hit the ice.
On November 27, 2007, the journey began. The expedition launched from Punta Arenas, Chile, the southernmost large city in the world. There, I met my four teammates. The team leader was Eric Philips, an Australian who has had more experience on the ice than Wayne Gretzky. We all hailed from different countries but had exchanged a few e-mails prior to the start of the trip, so we knew one another’s names, but that was about it.
We spent the first three days sorting gear and organizing food supplies, which would account for the majority of the weight in our sleds. We needed to consume a minimum of 5,000 to 6,000 calories per day (based on the energy required to put in a full day of skiing while dragging a heavy sled in subzero temperatures). In order to meet our caloric intake goals we packed a lot of sticks of butter; butter is high in calories as well as fat, which we needed to keep us warm.
So how much butter did we bring? Glad you asked. Each of us packed an entire stick of butter for every day of the trip. Or at least that was what was recommended. I ended up packing less than that, because I was certain I couldn’t down an entire stick every day. I could easily do it if I had a fresh sourdough baguette to go with it, but that wasn’t happening. Eating plain butter is every bit as disgusting as it sounds, but you can’t afford to run out of energy during a trip like this, so you choke it down. Otherwise, when you’re too low on energy you risk hypothermia and frostbite. You burn hundreds of calories just trying to stay warm, so eating something every hour is pretty much mandatory.
A typical daily menu looks something like this: For breakfast, two packs of instant oatmeal with high-fat powdered milk, butter, and sugar. Lunch is comprised of instant noodles, a massive chocolate bar, chunks of salami, pieces of cheese, dried fruit, nuts, biscuits, a granola bar, and more butter (which you just try to get down any way you can—usually straight into your mouth with a spoon). A typical dinner would be freeze-dried meals supplemented with (surprise!) butter. Dessert? More chocolate, sugar, and butter. Then there were the between-meal snacks, which were bits of food from your lunch bag. Despite the huge amount of food we were consuming, each of us would come back from this trip having lost a significant amount of weight. Don’t hate us, Oprah!
On December 4, after a day of weather delays, we took off on an Ilyushin 76, a plane designed in the Soviet Union for military use. About the size of a Boeing 767, it has four engines and can carry 88,000 pounds more than three thousand miles in less than six hours. The Ilyushin earns bragging rights for its ability to take off and land on short, crude runways. It’s an ideal plane for this kind of trip, since the natural blue-ice runways in Antarctica make landings tricky.
Once we reached Antarctica, we boarded a smaller, ski-equipped Twin Otter plane for a one-and-a-half-hour flight to the Ronne Ice Shelf. The Ronne Ice Shelf is the western part of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, the second largest ice shelf in the world, spanning an area of 163,000 square miles just east of the Antarctic Peninsula. When the Twin Otter landed, we hopped out, unloaded all of our gear, and then watched as the plane flew out of sight, leaving us to fend for ourselves for the better part of the next two months. No turning back now. We decided to set up our tents and get a good night’s sleep, knowing that the next six weeks would take a lot out of us.
We dubbed ourselves Team CAN DU—a play on the first letters that represented our citizenship: George Szwender was Canadian, Eric Philips was Australian, Merete Spilling Gjertsen was Norwegian, Bernice Notenboom was Dutch, and of course I was a citizen of the USA. This was George’s idea, and I liked it. We all did. The name CAN DU evoked feelings of empowerment and determination. (We initially wanted to come up with a team name that would honor Reinhold Messner, since he’d pioneered our route, but the only idea we could come up with was “South Pole Expedition Route de Messner,” which made for a rather unfortunate acronym.)
The next morning it was showtime. We strapped on our skis, kitted up, harnessed our sleds to our waists, and started on our journey. We covered more than twelve miles the first day, so we were really pleased we had such a strong start. But I was feeling it—even after day one. Every muscle in my body ached, especially my upper back and hip flexors. The way my body felt, the thirteen miles we covered on day two might as well have been thirteen hundred miles.
Dragging my sled across the snow and ice every day, and maneuvering around the sastrugi, was tougher than I’d imagined, thanks in part to the knee-deep snow. Our sleds were made of fiberglass with a gel-coat finish, and they felt even heavier in high snow. A sled that weighs more than the person pulling it wins the power struggle every time, and mine had a mind of its own. It was not always interested in following my ski tracks, and I took a few good falls that first week, bruising my wrist on day four, bruising my kneecaps on day five, and twisting my ankle on day six. Day seven was an injury-free day (hallelujah). I had a few blisters on my right foot, but my red toenail polish held up brilliantly, so I had that going for me, which was nice.
I was definitely feeling pretty banged up, but nothing that a few over-the-counter painkillers couldn’t mask. But I kept my pains to myself, because no one wants to hear complaints when everyone is putting in eighty-hour workweeks, and I was sure other people were hurting, too. When there is a job to do and the team is counting on every member to pull his or her weight (in my case, this was literally true, and then some…), pushing through exhaustion and discomfort is the only feasible option.
We had to do our best to stick to a daily routine in order to make it to the South Pole without running out of food and supplies. Wake up at 6:00 a.m. Fire up the stoves to melt ice so we could fill water bottles and eat breakfast. Take down the tents, pack our sleds, and hit the ice by 8:30 a.m. We skied for nine hours each day with four short food and water breaks. We usually stopped skiing around 5:30 p.m., because at the end of each day we needed time and energy to set up camp and get settled in for the night. There’s still plenty of work to do once you’re done skiing.
Setting up tents was no small task, because each tent had to be protected from the elements. So after a full day of skiing we spent an hour digging up snow and forming ice bricks with a snow shovel to put around the outside of the tents. This ensured the tents wouldn’t be destroyed by the winds. If we lost one tent it wouldn’t end the trip; we’d still have two left. But it would make the rest of the trip even more insanely uncomfortable. Once the tents were secured, it was back to melting ice for hot drinks and our freeze-dried meals. We aimed to be asleep by 10:00 p.m. each night.
After a few weeks of sticking to this routine, we realized we were not covering enough ground. At the rate we were going, we would not make it to the South Pole before running out of food and supplies, so we had to change the schedule a bit. We added an extra hour to the day—up at 5:00 a.m., and then hit the ice by 6:30 a.m.—which allowed us (or forced us) to spend two more hours skiing.
Day after day after day we endured temperatures that reached fifty degrees below zero and crazy strong winds that knocked me off balance a few times. My hands got so stone-cold some days during our rest breaks that it took me roughly thirty minutes to warm them back up to the point where I could use them (thank goodness for disposable hand warmers). Again, I kept these woes to myself. On an expedition like this, the elements really take a toll on your body, and it’s not just the cold. Antarctica has twenty-four hours of daylight during its summer (December through February), and the sun reflects off the snow, making UV exposure a constant concern. I wore goggles (they protect your skin better than glacier glasses, which just protect your eyes) and a neoprene ski mask every day to cover my face—and even then I still didn’t leave my tent in the mornings without slathering on sunscreen with SPF 70.
A couple of members of my team did not cover their faces for the first week and developed chilblains, which are ulcers that develop on the skin as a result of exposure to the extreme cold. They looked like they had just finished an ultimate fighting match: red, swollen faces covered in blisters that oozed pus and blood. Sometimes they would wake up throughout the night in pain from the blisters. Even eating and drinking became a challenge, as touching anything to their lips caused them to wince in pain. So while my skin remained intact, it was, unfortunately, the only part of me that was holding up well.
Even though we each had our own aches and pains, I was by far the slowest and physically weakest member of our team. How could this be? I had trained my *ss off hauling tires along the beach for weeks. But you know what will always trump training? The laws of physics. No matter how hard I tried every day, I could not keep up with my teammates, who were bigger and taller and, hell, stronger than I was or ever will be. Even the next smallest person dwarfed me in size and had fifty pounds on me. George, our Canadian teammate, was six foot four and 230 pounds (a full foot taller and more than twice my weight), so basically the law of physics dictated that no matter how much I trained for this expedition, George was going to be able to haul that mother of a sled faster and more efficiently than I could. I was just too small and my short legs could not span the same distance versus my taller teammates. My Norwegian teammate, Merete, kept trying to make me feel better by telling me that she was only able to ski so quickly because she had been born with skis on her feet (damn those Norwegians!). I told her that for the sake of her mother, I hoped she had been delivered via C-section.
I felt so awful about my inability to keep up that I wished I could fall into a hole and die (but then I stopped wishing for that, because the chances of that happening were actually pretty decent given there was a significant amount of crevasse danger along our route).
Any of you type A overachievers wondering what it’s like to be the slowest, weakest, most pathetic member of a team? All of you Harvard Business School grads who are shaking your heads “no,” listen up: It feels absolutely horrible. Especially when there is no way to camouflage the fact that you are definitely the worst performer in the group. And it feels even more miserable when you know you are hurting the team’s chances of success.
I was so self-conscious about my lack of speed that this occupied my every thought. I was sure that the rest of the team was unhappy with me because of my slower pace, but if they were, they certainly didn’t show it. They were always patient; they’d stop for breaks and wait for me to catch up. But every time I saw them waiting up ahead for me, I would burn myself out trying to catch up as quickly as I could. And then by the time I skied up to them and caught my breath, it was time to take off again.
Falling a few minutes behind the group on a mountaineering expedition is not a huge deal, but it is a very big deal on a polar expedition, where it takes only a few minutes for people on skis to travel quite far. Under normal circumstances, waiting around for someone is simply an annoyance akin to holding the elevator door open for a straggling colleague when you’re racing to get out of the office so you get to happy hour before the $6 pitchers of beer double in price. But in Antarctica, waiting around even for a few minutes is indeed a huge concern, because moving is really the only way to stay warm. If people have to stand around, they get really cold. But slowing the pace down significantly to accommodate my speed (or lack thereof) could have jeopardized our chances of getting to the South Pole before we ran out of food and supplies. We had to cover a certain number of miles every day in order to stay on schedule.
The thought of holding up my teammates caused me to double down on my own frustration. Every time I caught up to them I apologized profusely. “I am so sorry, so sorry, guys—keep going keep going, you really don’t have to wait for me. I’m fine. Just go.” They smiled and insisted it was no problem, but I figured they would tire of this drill fairly quickly. I also convinced myself that everyone on my team was wishing I were not a part of their expedition. I was beginning to wish the same thing, because the truth was that I would not get any better at dragging that sled. My body simply would not let me. But I also knew I wasn’t going to quit, because my psyche would not let me—and because quitting is just not an option when you are in the middle of Antarctica. There’s literally nowhere to go! It’s not like you can head into the ski lodge and get a cup of hot cocoa or catch the shuttle bus back to the parking lot so you can get your car. I continued to struggle, day in and day out.
About five days into the trip, I was cooking my dinner in my tent, feeling pretty depressed about my inability to perform at the same level as my teammates. I secretly wished I would have a trip-ending injury that would alleviate them of the burden of having me as part of Team CAN DU. While we were still a long way from the South Pole, which is the actual bottom of the world, I felt like I had already reached my personal low point. Suddenly, I overheard Eric, our team leader, and George, the twice-my-size teammate, quietly talking in the nearby tent they shared. It was as if a coworker had accidentally butt-dialed me while he was talking to our boss. I was fairly sure I was about to hear them rip into my performance. I don’t remember the exact conversation word for word, but I will never ever forget the gist:
“Alison is really struggling with the weight of her sled.” To my relief, Eric genuinely seemed concerned.
Then George piped in. “Yeah, she is. I feel bad for her because she is trying so hard to keep up, but she’s so much smaller than everyone else.”
“We should try to help her out somehow. Maybe we could offload some of the weight in her sled.”
“Great idea, Eric. Let’s do it.”
I was completely shocked by this conversation. I’d convinced myself that my teammates wanted to get rid of me because I was the weakest person on the team. But instead, these two men were secretly strategizing on how to help me. I was especially surprised at their proposed solution, because offloading weight from my sled onto other people’s would make their loads even heavier—assuming they did not intend to toss my food supply and clothing into a crevasse.
The next morning, Eric and George emerged from their tent, stretched their arms, and exchanged the usual “good mornings” with the rest of us. Of course they had no idea that I had been privy to their conversation the previous night. Then they began their charade. “Hey, George, help me out with something,” said Eric. “I want to make sure that everyone’s sleds are about equal weight so I know that we’re all hauling about the same amount of gear and supplies. Grab the end of that sled, will ya, mate?”
He nodded for George to help him, and the two of them began the process of picking up each team member’s sled so that they could judge whether the group’s gear had been evenly distributed based on how heavy each sled felt. I watched as George and Eric each grabbed an end of Merete’s sled. “This one feels about right.” They dropped it back down onto the ice. Then they grabbed Bernice’s sled. “This one feels pretty good, too.” They also picked up each of the sleds they had been hauling. “These feel like they are about what they should be,” and they gently laid the sleds back down.
Then they walked to my sled. Each grabbed an end and began to lift it. After raising it just a few inches off the ground, their faces winced and contorted as if this effort of lifting were causing them excruciating pain. Almost on cue, they simultaneously dropped my sled like it was a grand piano. It hit the ice with a thud, and Eric clutched his back as if he had really hurt himself. “What the hell is in this sled?”
George continued the theatrics: “I don’t know, but it’s waaaay too heavy. What on earth is in here?”
Eric, still acting as if he had pulled something in his back or slipped a disc, looked over at me. “Ali, I don’t know what you’ve got in your sled, but it’s much heavier than the others. You’re carrying more than anyone else on this team. This is crazy! You should let us take some weight out in order to make things a little more even. There’s no reason why you should be carrying so much more than the rest of us.”
I stood there, speechless. Sure, their acting was pretty bad, but I was beyond moved by what these men were trying to do. I had never witnessed such a display of teamwork during an expedition. Not only were they willing to carry some of my weight—which would in turn increase their own sleds’ weight and make their work on the ice tougher—but the way they handled the situation blew me away. Consider the tack they could have taken:
“Hey, Alison, we’re all getting tired of waiting for you, so we’re going to lighten your load so that you can move faster even though it means more work for us.” Publicly pointing out something that was already obvious to me and the team would have only made me feel worse, not to mention humiliated. Imagine how crappy you would feel if the head of HR posted your lame performance review on the front of the fridge in the break room. Even if Eric and George had approached me privately and said the same thing, I would have felt more self-conscious every minute of every day for the rest of the trip. George and Eric knew I already felt bad about my pace, and they understood that cratering my morale, versus boosting it, would not do anyone any favors in the middle of Antarctica. They demonstrated amazing leadership not only by helping me compensate for my weakness by reducing the weight of my sled, but also by how they went about it. By taking my emotional well-being into account, they made it clear that they cared about me as a teammate and wanted me to succeed. I’ll never forget it.
I went along with their plot. I was beyond grateful to them for the way they handled the situation. They unloaded some of my food bags and fuel canisters and packed them into their own sleds. When we hit the ice again, not only was my sled less heavy but my heart was as well.
I immediately began to think of how I could return the favor—even though I was not supposed to know that they had done me a favor. I wanted to ensure that Eric and George never regretted their decision. I came up with a perfect idea: a way to use my height to help, not hinder.
As I described, one of the important but exhausting jobs that must get done every night is securing each tent by making ice blocks, or snow bricks, and then stacking them along the perimeter of each tent to protect the tent from potential damage caused by the elements. Shoveling snow and ice was the last thing anyone wanted to do at the end of a fifteen-hour day spent skiing, but it was an important part of our routine that could not be avoided.
I’d previously noticed that it was somewhat awkward for George to shovel snow because he was so tall. To effectively use the twenty-four-inch snow shovel required a lot of effort to make contact with the ground, and bending down over and over again was an uncomfortable endeavor. But because I was so short and closer to the ground, I could use the shovel more easily than the taller guys, since I didn’t have to strain my back in order to bend over. A lightbulb went on in my head.
That evening, I grabbed a shovel and walked over to George and Eric as they were pitching their tent. “Hey, guys, may I shovel the snow around your tent?” They looked at me like I was from another planet. “Yeah,” I continued. “I really want to shovel the snow to hold down your tent.”
George looked puzzled. “You do?” he asked.
“Yes!” I almost begged. “Because I love to shovel snow. Love it love it. Love. It! See,” I went on, improvising, “I grew up in Phoenix. Yeah, in Phoenix. And, well, I never ever got to shovel snow growing up, so now I really love to do it and I rarely get an opportunity to shovel like this, so it’s really a huge treat for me to be able to shovel snow and I try to do it as much as I can whenever I have the chance.”
George looked at me as if I were losing my mind. Polar madness, he surely thought. So I just grabbed the shovel and got to work, silently, efficiently, as if it were part of my normal routine.
Every time I had an opportunity to shovel snow for Eric and George, I did. There was not one single minute during the entire rest of the trip that I was not aware that my teammates were pulling more than their fair share of weight in order to help me out. Me, the weak link, the smallest, slowest team member, the most worthless when it came to hauling weight. I was aware that my increased speed also helped the team, but because of Eric and George’s commitment to my physical and emotional well-being, I was determined to find other ways to become an invaluable member of the team. I would never overcome the fact that I could not pull the same amount of weight as my larger teammates, but I felt I could—and should—contribute in other ways.
Leaders aren’t the only people on a team responsible for strengthening the weak link. The team member with the problem must also take responsibility for his or her progress. If that’s you, face your shortcoming instead of whining about it, hiding it, blaming circumstances, or bitching about it to others. Accept that you might just really suck at certain things or at certain times. Once you acknowledge it, then look for unexpected, untraditional ways to effectively contribute. Sometimes only you know what your strengths are, so you must constantly and consciously think about areas where you can add value.
My solution was not rocket science. I simply observed my teammates and identified a way to assist them that played to my strengths. Being short offers more advantages than just airline seat comfort, and I made my size an asset in the circumstances.
On January 12, 2008, our team arrived at the lowest point on earth, the geographic South Pole. We spent two days camped outside the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and then bid good-bye to that big white monster of a continent and flew back to civilization. During our first real meal in nearly two months (where we ordered steak, red wine, and actually had bread with our butter) we celebrated our journey and reminisced about our favorite moments and most vivid memories of the experience. Eric mentioned that one of the things that he would never forget was how much I liked to shovel snow and added that he had never met anyone who enjoyed making snow barriers as much as I did.
At that point I had to confess. “I frickin’ hate shoveling snow! Are you kidding me? The only reason I pretended to like shoveling snow was because you pretended that my sled weighed too much in order to have an excuse to take a bunch of weight out of it.”
The look on Eric’s face revealed that he was honestly surprised that I knew all about his and George’s shenanigans. Apparently, I was a much better actor than either of them. I continued, “I overheard you guys talking in your tent, and I knew exactly what you were doing.”
Eric laughed and smiled. “You heard that?”
I nodded and smiled back. What I heard that night was so much more than a plan being hatched. I heard what compassionate human beings sound like. I heard what a committed teammate sounds like. And I heard what a true leader sounds like.